Bridesmaid

"Demo at Scottsdale 2017 3" --- Sold

I feel I am getting too loose now. This is my 3rd demo I did at the Scottsdale Artist School. I am still exploring my high key painting approaches, and I hope someday I can achieve the goal I want.

Where are these people coming from?

My art book club that never reads books had the assignment to do daily art for 30 days.  I didn't want to choose a project that was too similar to the cutting-and-pasting that I'm doing for all of 2017, and I flashed on this little papier mache person that I made on a play day last summer.  She never got put away and has been hanging around my sewing machine table for months.

I liked the way I had constructed her by making an armature of rolled-up stuff, then wrapping the pasted paper around the armature.  And thought I could do the same thing minus the pasted paper.  Voila, a bunch of little people made (mostly) from rolled fabric and wrapped up with yarn, thread or cord.

The rule was to use material that was lying around, a task that has gotten much easier since I've been cleaning my studio and divesting a lot of my fabrics.  Bits that were too small to give away often became daily people; they got wrapped and tied in whatever cording or thread happened to be out on the table from other projects.

After I made the 30 people for my book club meeting, I was surprised to find myself making another one the next day, and several more have followed.  Apparently they want to keep coming.

I'm delighted and astonished at how these people have sprung from my unconscious.  I've never worked much in 3-D, and certainly not to make figures.  Some of my artist pals have noted a similarity to the Adam and Eve figures that I drew for several weeks last year.  I don't know why I didn't stop after book club show-and-tell, or what this project is telling me about myself.

I guess I'm going to be making lots more of these guys and have started to think about how I'm going to display them.  I want them to all be standing around in a crowd, maybe watching something happen or posing for a huge group photo.  I'll need some kind of support for each one, because most are not rigid enough to stand up by themselves.  Not sure how this is going to work out but clearly I'm being compelled to keep making.

March!

Time to change your desktop calendar.

Click on the image below and download from there.

Enjoy!

 

Mending again -- a new way

A few weeks ago I was unhappy to see a bunch of moth holes on my husband's favorite sweater vest, which he's had for decades.  Yes, it had pills on it, but it was still warm and comfy, 100 percent wool, and did I mention that it's his favorite?

Ordinarily I mend holes in sweaters with a bit of ultrasuede, sometimes a plain old square in the same color, sometimes a fancy heart or star in high contrast.  But I didn't think six or seven ultrasuede appliques would look very chic.  Then I got a brainstorm, to felt the holes together.  It might not work, but what did I have to lose?

My friend Alyce lent me her felting needle and threw in some gray roving, which was a shade darker than the sweater.

I decided to start with the smallest and most unobtrusive hole, one in the back near the side seam, frequently concealed by the wearer's arm.  I pulled the fabric together to close up the hole, laid roving over the back, and felted just a little from back to front.  The felting needles pushed the fibers almost a half inch up past the surface of the sweater.

Then I flipped the sweater over and felted from front to back, making those wafting fibers lie down and meld into the knitted surface.

The first hole I mended didn't look exactly right; even though I pushed the edges of the hole together, there was still a gap, and the darker roving showed through.  So I went on a search and found some variegated novelty yarn that seemed to have wool parts that were exactly the right shade.

the blob right above the 5 on the cutting mat was the right color

I had to unwind the two-ply yarn, separate out a blob of the right gray, then cut off just a bit -- perhaps the size of two grains of rice -- and put it into the moth hole.  Then I laid the roving over the back and felted as before.

This worked great -- the correct gray filled the hole and got felted into a smooth surface, while the roving gave stability on the back side.

Here's what the finished mend looks like.  The needle points to the mended place, which would be hard to find unless you were really searching, and will never be noticed by anybody other than me.

If you have a wool sweater with moth holes, I highly recommend this method.  It took me perhaps a half hour to mend six or seven holes, including yarn-search time.  The only hard part is finding the exact shade of wool to fill in the gap.  But many sweaters come with an extra button and a little length of matching wool, which would be plenty to mend several smaller holes or one substantial one.