Sunday, July 11, 2010

ocean homes & working art



I already have a beach well underway so I went straight to the water and the cottages but now I'm have second thought about all those red roofs, in fact this may be the only one.

I had to sit a while with the other house quilt and examine the various techniques and sequence of stitches to remember how it went. I may forget about the roofs altogether. I know they are houses.

The blue with hand painted red dots was a dye painting experiment from over a year ago that was "lost" in the studio.  And I've been waiting a long time to use the batik that Terry sent me. It has the most wonderful hand and a pattern woven into that you can see unless you are holding it in your hands.

For a while I've been thinking of fiber art in terms of functional beauty. Like most fiber artists, I started by making blankets and I always seem to find my way back to that starting point - witness the Flings and this will be another in that line, three or more layers of rescued or re-purposed cotton - mostly muslin, no batting and lots of hand simple stitching on a base that was machine constructed for stability and strength.

It's a form of self comfort for me to make "something from nothing" - something beautiful & useful from something else that was cast off and deemed no longer useful. This kind of  making soothes my frugal Yankee spirit both in the doing and the outcome.








I've always admired these and these.

6 comments:

arlee said...

i like the way you use the pieces as they are, with no "straightening" and squaring up of edges--if there's a curve, throw a curve ball

Deb Lacativa said...

the pieces are torn and/or cut (bitten into?) before dyeing.

I really like what happens to the color and texture at the edges of the pieces and try to preserve them once they get incorporated into a unified whole.

jude said...

a fav

doina said...

You can think of the houses as a floorplan, and the whole thing will become a map of a magic site, eventually :)

doina said...

One of my favourites posted this : http://www.alabamachanin.com/journal/map-art
Coincidence or not, I found it after commenting on your own private ocean :) Enjoy!

Angela said...

I like the red roof, but it would bring a lot of fun and whimsy to have a collection of multi coloured roofs I think :)