Reworked

Sometimes when you are not satisfied with what you have created, it can be worth to pick it up and rework it. Originally this was a journal quilt using felt and metal. The background was black fabric, but the total composition was not really to my liking. But what exactly was wrong, was difficult to pin point. So I decided to do something drastic :-). I removed the background and painted a canvas with a pink metallic. The flash of the picture does not really give a good color idea, but the color of the left bottom is the most accurate. On this canvas I stitched the woven top. And I have to say it looks much better now. In the picture you cannot see much difference between the felt and the canvas - especially at the top -, but the color contrast is more like it is in the lower area of the canvas. Now at least I can hang this instead of hiding it in a pile :-). If you are interested in it, it is available for sale through Galleriba - see right bar.

Compositions

As I mentioned in my previous blog post I was not happy with the result of the blue composition. The shapes were not as defined as I wanted them to be. I have some textured felt in my stash and this I used for the shapes. Okay, it is not what I wanted to de - make the negative space the focus - but the way it is now, I like it much more :-). And it gives me a reason to make another Composition.

Compositions

Making Compositions is becoming a serious addiction LOL. Here are my latest ones:

For the yellow/green one I crunched a commercial batik when it was wet. Placed it like that on my ironing board and pressed it with the hot iron. Normally you iron to get the wrinkles out of fabric, this time I wanted them. When the fabric was dry, I ironed bondaweb under it, cut into the shapes I wanted. Cut out these shapes and fused them to the quilted background. Last step was to stitch them to the quilt. I am happy with how the final result is.
With the blue one I am not happy. This one was supposed to focus on texture as well. I zapped a piece of blue lutrador, cut out the shapes and quilted this onto the light blue background. Because of the zapping the shapes of the circles and lines is not well defined so I added stitchlines to put more emphasis on the shapes. Still not looking good. The zapped effect gives a bit of a textured effect, but the quilt is as flat as a pancake. But I have an idea which can change it. Stay tuned for the next blog post. Hopefully I can create the textured effect I am thinking of :-)/

Cubism wine is finished

And here is the finished result of Cubism. I called it Cubism Wine. As you can see because of the squaring up, I lost part of the wine glass stems at the top and the left of the quilt. That is a point of attention I have to keep in mind for whenever in the future I use narrow objects close to the edges.

If you want to see how you can make a Cubism drawing, check out this link. It looks so easy, but no doubt is more difficult in reality: http://www.ehow.com/video_8040264_draw-cubism-art.html

Cubism

Cubism was the subject of the latest lesson of Pamela Allen's class. And although the Cubism paintings look so simple, making a Cubism composition is very hard to do. At least it is for me :-).

The first picture shows my starting position. Well starting position is the proper word, because a lot had to be done to it to make it Cubism style.

 First of all, it was too empty. More repitition was needed and the composition was too flat. I started with cutting the top into pieces. Oh boy, that is scary. The first cut was through the wine glass from top right to bottom left. I moved one part a bit higher than the other one and it looked already much better. Sorry, but I forgot to take a picture of that. The second cut was from top left to halfway bottom right. I used some of the cut of fabric and added some more green. Also I added more wine glasses and more grapes. And I changed some of the colors of the word wine. After these changes the composition looked much better:

 But it needed some more definition for which I added a piece of black fabric at the left. This really showed of the glasses much better. With this composition I am happy. I have started quilting it and will show the results later on.

Compositions

Making these compositions is addictive :-). Here are my two latest additions:

Both of them are different than the black/white ones I showed earlier. Not only are they in color, but I changed the size of the big circle and some of the shapes are now overlapping. In stead of commercial fabrics this time I used hand dyed/painted only. The background of the top one is a confetti / ice cubed dyed piece of which I was not really happy with, but in combination with the very dark red fabric it comes out well. I do not remember anymore how the fabrics for the second one were made as I picked these out of my stash. Again size of these quilts is 12"x12".

Compositions

Working in series can get very addictive :-). Not only did I start a series with trees, but as you can see from the pictures here, also one on abstracts:

As they are the first of a series, I have called them Composition 1 (black background) and Composition 2 (white background). Size is 12"x12". And as I recently joined Galleriba, they are for sale. Maybe an - early - idea for the coming December month?