Cell Baby

I guess you could call my dyeing experiments recess, so it's time to get back to class. Rather than continue to fixate on the background buildings in my current quilt, I went back to making people which is much more entertaining. My friend Arleta suggested I put young kids into the quilt, so here's what I did today. I also worked on a dentist's office and a floral shop -- hopefully tomorrow I'll have enough done to photograph.

More Dyeing

Oh my, this is addictive! I've been ripping up fabric from my collection and dyeing it in different colors, and even gone a little crazy and ordered more black and whites to dye.

Here's what I started with, and then used different pots of yellows, oranges, and reds to dip into to create different color blends. I'm trying to do it by eyeball, since I'm not a write-it-down-and-stick-to-it person.

One thing I hadn't anticipated is the result to printed fabrics that usually look whitish and ugly on the back. Over-dyeing this fabric has created a really nice look on the back.

Dyed and Gone to Heaven

I haven't dyed anything in a long time, but have been thinking about it. I use lots of commercially printed fabric and love tone-on-tone patterns, so have been wanting to try to make my own by over-dyeing pre-printed fabrics. But the warehouse has been too cold, AND Russ bought me a stainless steel sink at an auction for a sushi bar that went out of business last fall. So of course so I've been waiting for him to hook it up.

Now the new sink is installed, so I got down to business last night. IT'S WONDERFUL! I love the three deep bowls because I can do a different step in each section.

I used Melody's Lazy Dyer technique, thank you Melody! I guess I'm super lazy because I skipped one step. The only problem with the method is waiting until the next day to see your results.

I started with oranges and reds because I want to use some for my current project. These are my first attempts that I just ironed, and the others are in the dryer. But the real reason I started this project is because I have some black and white fabrics that I want to over-dye with black for PaMdora's hair.

I'll have to check after it's dry, but I think I went over-board on the black and have lost the original pattern, so I'm reading with interest Melody's current post about dyeing blacks. Maybe I need to tone down my black with another color or shorten the dye time, or both?

Sewing with Company

It's time to send my quilt off to Visions for final approval and photography for the book. But when I finally got around to packing it up, I suddenly realized that the one selected was the second cartoon quilt I made, and I wasn't happy with the binding or the hanging sleeve. So I had to redo all that before shipping.

This little Chinese boy is a ceramic planter that has followed me around forever although I've often tried to get rid of it, until I thought to make him into a needle cushion. Now he keeps me company when I do hand-sewing. I wonder what's in his bowl - not watermelon seeds, in case you're wondering. That's just the back of the quilt.

Those Dang Dangos

Here's a drawing I did today instead of getting my quilt ready for Visions as I should. I like getting accepted to shows, but hate having to actually ship the work. Back to the drawing though, it's almost finished except I want to put Ree and Jun in a doorway looking into the room before I send it to them.

If you can't read the small writing, PaMdora is eating from a box of "Dango - Yummy Japanese Dumpling" (a title worthy of one of my favorite bands Shonen Knife) and the big Dangos are looming over her in distress, a bit Kabuki-ish except for the guy on the end who is just sort of post-modern confused.

Emmie asked for more Kaneko studio photos, so here's an example of details of his surfaces. Is it any wonder I'm drawn to his work like a bee to nectar?!

Kaneko is a master of surface design!

This head is quite a bit taller than me -- silent and powerful.

And here's some really big Dangos. Watch out Russ -- I think one moved!

Nice studio motto, don't you think?

Madama Butterfly Premiere

We met Jun Kaneko in January (read my post here) and so have only recently become aware what an inspiring artist this man is, and yet so quiet and good-humored. His wife Ree started The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and now manages Jun's career; she's a fountain of enthusiasm.

Kaneko came to the United States from Japan as a teenager, knowing no English, to study painting and now has work in collections and public installations all over the world.

With an incredible work ethic -- room after room in his huge studio are over-flowing with work in various stages of completion, the finished pieces are lined up with little tags naming the gallery, museum, or collector for which they are intended. These large works are made of clay and most are taller than me. They can take over two years to fully dry before they can be fired. Named by Kanedo "dangos" (which means dumpling in Japanese), they look yummy, but just one could give you a stomach ache since some weigh over 2 tons!

Jun also works in painting, drawing, glass, metal, enamel, and now opera. The opera was gorgeous, the costumes were uniquely Kaneko with brightly colored fabrics, many of them silk-screened at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia with Kaneko's hand-painted polka-dots. All the props such as umbrellas and rickshaw were Kaneko sculpture, and the backdrops were huge moving video panels on which were projected animated paintings Kaneko paintings - Living Paintings I called them because they were constantly and subtly changing along with the story and music of the opera. Someday you may have an opportunity to see this as the set and costumes will travel to other opera companies over the next 15 years.

The night before the premiere, the Kaneko's hosted a party with sushi created by Jun's chef friend a chef from LA who created 2000 pieces of sushi served on Kaneko platters surrounded by Kaneko paintings. The day after there was a brunch and tour of a new museum for creativity that the Kanekos are building inside a historic building across from the Bemis in downtown Omaha.

Probably what made the weekend most surreal was running into some friends from WAY back. I met a friend from my high school who is now a gallery owner in Phoenix representing Kaneko, can you believe it? (I'm not mentioning names to keep him under the Google radar, but here's the art gallery.) No way would I have thought ANYONE who came from my little hometown would be a dealer of contemporary sculpture! And to top that, Russ ran into his roommate from the Kansas City Art Institute who he hasn't seen for eighteen years and who now owns a gallery in Aspen. What a crazy small world it is!

I've had a hard time editing down my photos from the trip, but have to end on this miscellaneous note. Ree has the best vintage dish collection I have ever seen (this is just a small part.) And she uses it all for the parties, which makes them even better. What an inspiration, I'd better hit the flea markets!

Dismantled Car

Tomorrow morning we leave to see the premier of this famous opera with sets and costumes designed by this artist and other special exhibits of his work. I'm so excited about the trip, but had hoped to be further along on this piece before we left town. Maybe the break will do me good though -- I think I need to get away from these orange buildings that are driving me nuts.

When I started the drawing for this quilt, I thought my buildings looked too blocky, so I drove around downtown doing a little lazy girl research by taking photos of buildings from my car. It was Sunday, so there weren't too many people honking at me for stopping in the middle of the street to snap a photo. Now I'm wondering if I've given the buildings too much personality, because they're taking so long to make.

Hopefully when I get home, I'll finish this up so I can start the quilting. I have new idea for this, so am anxious to see if it works. Until then, maybe we'll see some great art and get some good photos on our trip. I'm ready to be inspired!

“To make each decision during the creative activity of art making is such a mysterious act. It is impossible to even define each creative move or the decisions that take place in the art making process”– Jun Kaneko

The Fabric Shuffle

Aaaargh! I was thinking that I should have said during my interview that my favorite part of the process was cutting out characters and seeing them come alive. But aarrrgh! That's also the most frustrating part -- when it doesn't go right. Today I played the fabric shuffle, swapping out orange and red fabrics to make background buildings and nothing seemed to work.

The Robert Genn letter this week was about "Economy of Means." At first I thought it didn't apply because it was about painting, then I realized it's exactly what I'm trying for. Trying to work fast and efficiently and not make time-consuming mistakes. The second cartoon quilt I did took six months because I kept cutting the same things over and over.

Then I became more efficient, but sometimes it's still a struggle. When to stop shuffling fabric and commit? I guess I have to rely on intuition mostly. And then if it still doesn't work out, it's time to go shopping, ha! Which I did, inspite of tornado sirens, and found some more orangey-reds, so maybe tomorrow will be better.

So you don't have to share in my frustration, here's a couple of photos from Friday, when cutting went very well and fast. I'm loving the crazy fabrics I found for PaMdora's car and purse.

Illustration Friday: Insect

I still haven't caught up on everything since the tv taping. But I couldn't resist doing this drawing for Illustration Friday called "Those Pesky Men". You can click on it for a bigger version.

In case you're wondering, it's not inspired by any kind of emotional stress, and I'm not a man-hater. This just popped in my head once when I saw an old advertisement from Real Kill Bug Spray. I went to an auction once and hit the jackpot. I bought two big boxes of mystery papers for around $15 and when I got them home, found what looked to the old files of a Home Economics teacher. It looked like she had retired in in the 50's or early 60's, boxed everything up and never looked at it again.

There were all kinds of posters, brochures and booklets that companies had sent her about things like chocolate, four-square meals, polishing silverware, how to properly freeze food, and how to kill bugs in your house. They are really fun to read and have lots of awesome graphics, so good I'm almost afraid to post a scan of the bug spray lady because it's better than my drawing -- but I figure you'll enjoy it, so here it is.

In my drawing, I used names of old boyfriends and one old enemy just for fun. Roger cracks me up because you usually hear about spider-women, not men. What kind of insects would the men (or women) in your life be?

A Day with Wisconsin PBS

It was a gray rainy Saturday when the PBS crew from Wisconsin came to interview me and videotape my studio for an art quilt documentary. However, in my windowless studio, it's always colorful and bright! Since I forgot to take photos, I drew this illustration to show you what the day was like.

Very exciting, but in spite of my pre-event jitters, it went pretty well. No trees or animals were harmed. Nothing blew up or caught on fire. I actually made something for the camera, and it turned out okay -- this little guy:

I would have been more nervous, had I known the truth. We were taping in HDTV! So shows every whisker and every pore. But it was only afterwards that I learned this, and Frank the camera man knew how to pacify a proud parent, he said, "But your quilts will look wonderful!"

For the documentary, they have been interviewing quilt artists in the Chicago area (Melody and others) and will be doing more taping at the Art Quilts at the Sedgwick show in April. I really enjoyed working with everyone. They were very laid-back and made me comfortable throughout the day. The only real discomfort was that I couldn't work in the studio without music playing, and for me that's pretty hard to endure.

I can't even remember what Laurie (the producer) asked me during my sit-down interview, but the next day I woke up thinking about all the things I SHOULD have said. The documentary will be broadcast on PBS stations sometime in March 2007, so I have lots of time to forget the things I said that I SHOULDN'T have said.

Being a visual person, I wish I could see all the extras that Frank taped - like his wide pans of my studio and my fabric shelves. Watching him walk around the studio with his camera, I was glad I had cleaned up my inspiration boards.

I have one inspiration board hanging in my quilting area and another in my dye/embellishment, and these boards are the same that I use for my design wall. In answer to Gerrie's question, these are made of 4'x8' sheets of blue insulation board that I got at Lowe's. (one side painted white so the blue and the writing doesn't show)

We framed them with wood strips and wrapped them in flannel, then stapled the flannel to the back of the wood frame. (Also put some wood cross members in back for a little more stability.) I like them because they are big, but light, so I can easily carry them to another room for our Uncommon Threads meetings. Because the flannel is tacky, fabric sticks to it, or if I'm putting up lots of fabric, I can pin right into the boards.

I actually worked at cleaning and organizing my studio for over a month, because of the documentary and to make room for my new Inspira quilting frame. You can see by the photos that I love to collect all sort of stuff - especially magazines and graphics from the 50's and 60's, so my studio does tend to get out of control sometimes.

But now that it's really clean, I'll try to take some more photos. Last year when I first set up my website, I spent a lot of time cleaning and taking photos. But in the end, I guess it was worth it - the PBS producer contacted me after seeing my studio on my website.

The other thing that keeps popping into my head is a quote I read in Fiber Arts magazine last year (sorry, I can't remember the artist though). She was being interviewed about creativity in mid-life, and she said she had been trying to justify keeping the lease on a large studio that was rather expensive. She said something like "never under-estimate the power that seeing your own work displayed on the walls of a studio has on your development as an artist." I believe this is true - I don't think I would be where I am now without the studio that I am so lucky to have.

Taxi, Scooter, and Towers

I had a lot of fun today cutting out buildings, the taxi and scooter. It's nice when things start taking shape. The buildings are gaining detail, and I'm trying to make them a little darker to match the sky and push them into the background. You can see I move around the quilt, not completely finishing one area. This is a habit from my painting background: always work the whole canvas. The colors in the background effect the foreground and vice versa.

I've experimented a little with cutting a few windows and part of a tower. When I block in color with big pieces of fabric, it sometimes misleads the eye. The towers will be thin lines, but as I hoped, the bright yellow color against the red will give them prominence in the composition. I'm pretty sure the purple on the scooter is too dark, but I'll try to adjust that later when I have more of the objects in place.

And just in case there's not enough going on, I started another quilt. Maybe a case of too much green tea and carmel corn (not at the same time though.) It's also because now I have another design board in my studio, so I have room to lay out another project. I'm interested to see if I can work on two quilts at once. It seems like I often lose momentum between projects, so I'm wondering if overlapping projects will prevent that down time.

Besides, both these quilts are bigger than any I've done before. Maybe getting that Viking machine and Inspire frame has gone to my head. When the drawings came out of the printer, I was a little intimidated. They were even bigger than I expected! But the Yankee Doodle quilt will probably be easier to quilt, so I'd like to start with that one first.

I've had the idea to do a red, white and blue quilt for a while, so I've been collecting fabrics that have stars and stripes. Whoever thought up the colors for our flag was clever -- it's a handsome combination. I think if I use too much starry fabric, it could become cliche, so I'll have keep trying to push past that.

How to Procrastinate

When I read Lisa's blog, I felt like a real slug. I've found that it's not healthy for me to make extensive to-do lists. I get indigestion. I have more vague lists. Like I MUST START ANOTHER QUILT so there's something to videotape this weekend. Instead I've cleaned my studio, bought more fabric, washed and ironed it, organized my fabrics, hung some quilts, cleaned my office...

Anything to to avoid finishing the drawing so I can print the pattern and start the quilt. I agonized over the colors for this one and finally settled on this red and orange scheme, with some little dolups of green and purple. This time I'm not showing the whole drawing because then there are no surprises, right?

p.s. I just tried to spell-check this post with Blogger, and guess what came up as unknown? BLOG.