Monday, May 21, 2012

ATC Turquoise

This trade is by far my favorite! The unique interpretations of this color really blew my mind. Apparently we all enjoyed this color! Check out the others at Arts In The Cards blog. You won't be disappointed!


My turquoise interpretation was of the stone. Have you ever looked closely at the stone? Lots of levels of blues and greens with some brown and black. Using a hand painted fabric of a turquoise water and beach, I added a flour paste resist over the top. I wanted to get the crack like look of the stone. Was this overkill? Probably but it was fun to play. After the resist dried completely, I cracked it into big cracks and some fine ones. Then painted into the cracks with brown dye paint. Once that dried, I had to peel off all the resist. Good thing I made it really thick. It was much easier to pick off but still a lot of work. Once done, I fused the fabric to pellon backing and free motioned stitched over the cracks in a black thread. It looked really flat until I went back in with paint. I painted a light blue green color up to the edges of all the cracks. Then a painted in a slightly darker blue in spots which gave the cards more dimension! Loved it! The final part was to paint a silver edge around each cards and stitch it down. I wanted silver to mimic silver and turquoise jewelry. No single shots this time but if you click on the picture, you can see more of it closeup.

Monday, May 7, 2012

Prayer Flag

Our ATC Revisioned group has posted our next challenge which was to create a prayer flag for spring. Go here to see the rest of the groups finished pieces http://artsinthecardsrevisioned.blogspot.com/Arts In the Cards Revisioned

I always struggle with these types of projects because I hate putting such personal pieces out for the world to see. It's as if you are opening up your heart for all the world to see! I loved the piece until I finished adding the border. It just wasn't the right color I think. I auditioned a bunch of colors and this one was the only one that seemed to kind of work. It just seems too pink for me. But the universe knows what is in my heart and will overlook my bad color choice I believe! LOL



 I started with a piece of white cotton fabric and thought I had cut the size correctly. Apparently not as I will explain shortly. The colors were added with the watercolor crayons drawn on and then blended with water. After it was dry, I wrote words or thoughts onto the background using a dye pen. This whole process was done intuitively. I just went with whatever thought I had on creating and didn't question it. The overwhelming desire to quilt this in rows was too powerful to ignore so that is what I did. I have been wanting to try this out and found myself very pleased with the results.




It has been gray and dreary for well over a week now so my colors are just as dull as the weather. I always believe that thoughts are like prayers and they fly about the universe. So I created free form birds out of fine netting. Thoughts can be positive or negative and sometimes we just down pay attention to where we hold our attention so I made dark and light birds to remind myself to try and think positive thoughts! When I trimmed my piece to size, some areas did not have fabric! So to compensate, I had to make my border much larger than I wanted. Combine that with the color choice and I was suddenly very unhappy.



I tried to offset some of the "pinkiness" with some ribbons and fibers. It kind of reminded me of dream catchers. I added some green beads to represent seeds or my thoughts growing in reality. For now I am done and ready to send it out to the world but I may leave it up on my design wall and think about it some more. A flash of inspiration may strike and I will be able to fix what I imagine to be wrong or I will leave it and spring board off in a new direction.