Spray Paint on Fabric and Blue Glue Resist

This week we had the second meeting of the art discussion group that I recently organized. We met at a member's beautiful home and had a wonderful time visiting, sharing and doing an interesting fabric project. The project involved spraying spray paint onto water in a tub and then laying a piece of fabric over it to pick up the paint. We used many different paints including metallics. The results were varied and definitely interesting. Sometimes the paint kind of bubbled up and didn't adhere to the fabric and then tended to flake off. On other pieces the paint was thinner and seems to be pretty well adhered to the fabric. One suggestion was to overlay black netting to help contain the paint, although there might still be some flaking. The colors and patterns were wonderful. The movement of the water causes wonderful swirls and motion in the pattern of paint. This is an easy project and with some very usable results.

A recent project for my textile arts class was to use Elmer's Blue Gel glue to draw on fabric creating a resist. Let it dry and then use thinned fabric paints to paint between the lines however you wish. Let that dry and then heat set it using a press cloth to protect your iron and pressing surface. Then let it soak and occasionally agitate it in warm/hot water to dissolve the water soluble glue (I had to kind of rub and run hot water over it to get the residue off completely). The pieces I created came out really beautiful and I have already finished (quilted) two pieces which I really like. I don't have pictures at this time, but will post them soon---check back!

Please check out www.saqa.com and view the auction quilts that will up for sale starting September 10. This is a reverse auction so they start at a high price and it goes down each day, with a low of $75 on the last day. There are some beautiful pieces by extremely and talented, and some well-known, fiber artists. My donation never did show up and appears to have been eaten by the U.S. mail service. It was a lovely little piece so I am rather sad to not have it included in the auction to help raise money for this organization. This group works to promote fiber art as an art form throughout the world through it's continuous exhibitions and publications and any other means of promotion. I have sent off my piece entitled "In A Heartbeat" to travel with the Fibrations exhibition starting September 11 in Cody, Wyoming at the Yellowstone Quilt Fest. I am honored to be included.

Belated Quilt Show Pictures

Earlier this summer I had promised some pictures from our quilt show at the end of June and I finally remembered and got some of them formatted to show here. These are all from the Art Quilt and Landscape/Pictorial Quilt categories at the Bitterroot Quilter's Guild show. We had a wonderful display of art quilts in both categories and I was impressed with the quality and variety of these pieces. I was honored to received the first place ribbon in the Art Quilts and 3rd in the Landscape/Pictorial category. I apologize for the quality of the pictures as my digital camera isn't the best, but you can get an idea of the wonderful display we had. Enjoy!



Great Blue Heron piece is done by Mickey Frissell, my mom.



Geisha is hand appliqued onto the background by Jaime Grant. Color in my picture does not do it justice---it is a beautiful background and wonderful workmanship as is the norm for Jaime!

Summer vs Studio

I don't know how many other quilters are gardeners, but I suspect that many are as we all have an affinity for color, and many of us are inspired by nature. It is difficult to balance studio time and time to maintain and enjoy gardens, yard, and the great outdoors. Throw in a six-year old and you've got a real limited amount of time for working on quilts! I have the additional problem of having my sewing room on the northwest corner of the house where it gets a very hot afternoon sun on two sides and becomes rather warm until the sun goes down. All this to say that I have done little or no fiber art creating in the last couple of weeks. Gardens full of weeds forced me to give them attention and now at least the vegie gardens look very tidy---but as you gardeners will know, that won't last long!!

We've been lucky enough to have thunderstorms with rain in recent days (that ought help those weed out!). What a blessing here in Montana where it is usually quite hot and dry in August. I am enjoying the cooler air and not having to water the gardens as frequently. There have been some forest fires in the area and the evening skies with the smoke makes for some very inspiring sunsets. In case you haven't experienced this phenomenon where you live, the skies turn very red near the sun and shades of pink all the away around and to the east. Not sure if the full moon will be visible tonight with the overcast skies, but if it clears a bit, it might be beautiful sight in the red tinted skies of the evening. Can you imagine it……???

What I have done in my studio in recent days is supervise my young son in making a small quilted wall hanging he wants to enter into the Ravalli County Fair this year. He has decided on two rail fence and two log cabin blocks and is working on pressing fabric and cutting the strips out. We should be ready to sew and this year I'm thinking of letting him try to do that by himself instead of sitting on my lap. He has very good coordination if I can just keep him focused and paying close attention to what he is doing. Six year olds tend to be easily distracted!

Still no sign of my 12"x12" SAQA auction donation quilt. It is sad to know that it is gone and not know that at least someone is enjoying it on their wall somewhere. I regret that I didn't send it in earlier so that maybe I would have had time to create another one to donate by the deadline. Next time I will definitely use UPS where I can track my package.

This weekend we picked over 7 quarts of huckleberries in one morning. I made a pie, but froze most of them. My son contributes very little to what actually comes home in the buckets, but he sure enjoys eating them. I hurried home so that I could get to our local bead shop, The Beaded Pony, to see what the bead traders had for sale. They had five tables of strings of various kinds of beads and I bought more than I should have. I got a couple of beautiful strands of stones and some shell beads. They had much more that I would have been happy to take home, but you gotta stop somewhere!

Tomorrow I will be helping to judge the Stevensville Creamery Picnic Kiddie Parade. Not quite sure what that means, but they need some help and I'm sure it will be fun. The Creamery Picnic is a yearly festival and is usually a very fun event. They have a larger parade on Saturday and then lots of activities going on in the park and downtown. I'm hoping to stop at the local library for their book sale where I usually pick up some good stuff for a bargain.