Then, Then, and Now

1st half: 1950’s Singer.

2nd half: Riccar and eventually a second-hand Viking.

3rd half: Riccar, second-hand Viking, Brother Nouvelle 1500s, 1950’s Singer, Singer Model 15 — treadle machine made in 1896, same year my grandmother was born.

 

It’s Complicated — The Relationship Between Outside Parameters, the Mind’s Eye, and Materials — part 3, Walnut Wood

The colours in a walnut grove on US 52 were so beautiful — dun, and olive, and fawn tones in the walnut grove; blue sky; crimson  scrub maple — that I just had to stop and take some photos.  As I was walking back and forth and snapping away on the south-bound verge of US 52, a big, red pick-up pulled a U-turn from the northbound lanes onto the median.  A cowboy looking fellow got out and walked towards me.  I briefly wondered if he were the owner of the walnut grove and planning to argue with me about photographing it.  Nope, he was just a nice guy who was concerned that my car had broken down.  I thanked him and he doffed his cowboy hat and got back in his truck and pulled away.  In addition to the colours, what caught my attention was the way the grid of walnut trees shifted as I walked up and down (this is a phenomenon I’ve seen many times driving past the rows of corn or stubble here in flat farmland), and how the blazing rogue scrub maple impertinently insisted on being the center of things no matter how the grid shifted .

I mean, really, it's a pretty enough, but pretty boring, photo.

So I had my pictures, I loved the colours but the pix themselves were, well, kinda blah.   They certainly didn’t convey the movement and drama I experienced in person and that my mind’s eye wanted to recreate.

So I played around with it in Photoshop, and cropped, and made new images and tweaked the colour a little, and paced, and imagined being a smoker and smoking, and went downstairs to find the right frame — and thus know the size — for this piece, and printed out some greyscale fast draft images and blocked it out.

When I had some idea of where the piece was going I printed several of the selected images onto the silk habotai.  I refined my lay-out and started looking for background fabric.  I found the perfect dupionni silk, but I had only 2/3 of yard of it…  So I became stingy and made life difficult, and carefully cut strips to be placed where I need “background”, instead of just cutting a full-sized piece.  Fiddly, but sometime when I want that exact silk again, I’ll be glad I took the trouble.

Once I put it all together I contemplated the stitching options.  I made up a sample to try stitches on.  I found the perfect crimson silk buttonhole twist in my collection of vintage Belding Corticelli threads given to me years ago by a client.

I loaded the sewing machine bobbin with the stuff.  First I tried some tight free-motion loop-de-loop stitches, stitching from the back.  Nope!  Then I noticed how the buttonhole twist was being drawn up and my lightbulb went on.  What I wanted for this was a whip-stitch!   In free-motion machine-stitching parlance a whip-stitch is when you tighten the top tension and loosen the bobbin tension enough so that instead of getting a nice balanced stitch where the join of the two threads is hidden in the fabric (which is what you want in a seam), the bobbin thread gets pulled to the surface and shows, perhaps even loops.

whip stitch with feed-dogs up

whip-stitch with feed-dogs down

The feed-dogs are the little teeth that come up from the bottom of the sewing machine and push the fabric along from front to back.  If you drop them so they don’t engage the fabric you can control which direction the fabric moves — back, forth, sideways, in circles.

It was great, except…  The top thread kept breaking.  And jamming.  And breaking.  I walked away for a bit, paced, and came back and tried a different sewing machine.  This was the answer!

Burning Bush in Walnut Wood

Burning Bush in Walnut Wood -- detail

Burning Bush in Walnut Wood -- detail

And tomorrow I’ll probably have to introduce you to my sewing machines and explain why I keep them all around!

 

It’s Complicated — The Relationship Between Outside Parameters, the Mind’s Eye, and Materials — Part 2

A writer friend [ http://reallivewriter.blogspot.com/ ] had asked me whether one of my Flotsam & Jetsam pieces would be displayed… http://ietextiles0manninghamilton.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/death-mask-for-an-owl/#comments and now the answer is “yes”.

The little Flotsam&Jetsom owl begged to become part of the piece I was making with inkjet on silk prints of the dead owl photo.  We negotiated, and came to an agreement; after all, the owl was in good proportion to the size of the piece, and the colours went well together (parameters and limitations),  I found some beautiful gold silk dupionni salvaged from a thrift store skirt.  That became the background for the mosaic of prints on silk, and I added silk yarns from it to the tassels on the owl.  One tassel is attached with a lark’s-head knot to one of the wistaria twigs and one is knotted as part of the headdress.  I draped a third set of yarns on the owl’s right arm, not yet knotted, for use in the next world.

Tassels

After I was satisfied with the arrangement of the prints and had them spray-basted in place, I began the machine stitching.  The purposes of this were two-fold — one, the stitching holds everthing together.  Sure I could use a glue stick, but…  I’m a fiber artist and simply gluing or fusing fabric together seems simplistic and boring to me.  Two, the stitching adds subtle line and texture to give depth to the whole composition.

Once the stitching was done I pressed the whole thing gently and then did the fiddly bit of attaching the Flotsam&Jetsom owl.  Essentially I hand-sewed it on with embroidery floss:

embroidery floss ties attaching Owl to backing

The parameters and limits, my mind’s eye, and the materials pushed and pulled at the process; the parts became a whole: Death Mask for an Owl

From an angle, so you can see the 3-D-ness of it

 

It’s Complicated — The Relationship Between Outside Parameters, the Mind’s Eye, and Materials

All artists get the question “Where do you get your ideas????” over and over again.  In my experience the answer is, “It varies.“  Sometimes a client requests a certain theme, or particular colours.  Sometimes an object will cry out to become, to be transformed.  Sometimes I will see something, either in the present physical world, or in my imagination, that I feel compelled to translate into a piece of art.  But no matter what the genesis of the idea is, three constants govern the creative process — the parameters imposed by client, artist, and or world; how the mind’s eye envisions the final piece to be; and the way the materials used shape the process as one works.  The more successful the synergy among these constants, the better the work.

In January 2010 (a year designation I am still adjusting to) I created two pieces.  They were related by technique and goal.  I was first and foremost making art, but  I was also dabbling in a new technique that possibly has really exciting ramifications.  I believe that creativity is often fuel-injected by imposed parameters, and I was making pieces to address the requirements of the NICHES exhibit:  “Mixed Media:  Submissions must be inspired by our Midwestern Natural Landscape; Submission must be able to fit in the front door of TAF [Tippecanoe Arts Federation, housed in the historic Wells Building,  the Public Library for Lafayette, from 1927 to 1989 http://www.tcpl.lib.in.us/history ]; Any and all media are welcome.”

And finally, I wanted a couple of pieces made on the smallish scale possible with my home office type double-back-flip 8 1/2 inch wide inkjet printer to present as supporting documentation for my grant request for funds to buy a larger-format, straight-paper-path printer that can more easily handle non-traditional substrates (printing surface, in this case, fabric).

I decided to start with two of the photos I took in the fall:

Dead Owl

Walnut Wood

I cropped various parts of of the photos, and printed images on 8mm habotai silk.  In addition to the NICHES requirements, I had the limitation of not being able to make prints larger than legal size paper, 8.5 x 14

Samples of inkjet printing on silk

The tall picture of the trees on the right is approximately 13″ long.

close-up of samples

I then fooled around with the composition of the two different pieces — you can see some of that process going on here:  http://ietextiles0manninghamilton.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/beginning-to-compose-in-textile-art/ .  For economy of both time and expense, I imposed the further  limitation of using frames I already had on hand, one 16″x 20″ and one 18″”x 14″.

Then the pacing began — look at composition, imagine being a smoker and smoking, rearrange, think about stitching, pace some more…  poke through fabric stash to find background material… imagine being a smoker and smoking…  spray-baste background material and start finalising composition…

Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

Grant and Art Show Applications DONE!!!!

Detail of original photo for Walnut Wood

[You can see the original photo at http://ietextiles0manninghamilton.wordpress.com/2009/11/15/332/]

Yesterday I completed the relatively complicated application to fund an Individual Artist’s Project Grant from the Indiana Arts commission.*   I thought that having completed that, it would be easy-peasy to upload some of the same images and send them off to the NICHES Land Trust to be juried for their show.  Nooooooo…..  Why the hell would two different entities want their digital “slide” submissions formatted the same way?????

As I said in my grant application, “I am finding it somewhat ironic that formatting the artistic documentation for this project has been such a struggle, since one of the two main goals for the project is to make such documentation for future grant and exhibit applications, client presentations, and other marketing events much easier.”

The art world will make many, many people happy when it finally agrees on a standard format!

*http://www.in.gov/arts/2620.htm

 

Beginning to Compose in Textile Art

Now that I can coax the printer through the process, I have printed enough owl imagery that I can really work on the first piece I plan to submit to the  NICHES art exhibit: http://www.nicheslandtrust.org/NICHES_Land_Trust/Welcome.html

I am using various of the owl inkjet to compose a mosaic that will be the background for mounting the Death Mask for an Owl flotsam and jetsam piece.  I’m excited, and I think I can pull this rabbit out of its hat in time.

I’ve had to let the Death Mask for an Owl roost in the octopus light in my studio so it isn’t murdered by the cat…

Owl roosting out of reach of Cat (no romantic Edward Lear nonsense here)

provisional layout for Death Mask for an Owl finished piece

 

And Some Parts Are Fabulous Fun…

Silk is so nice — it really does rustle, the way you read about in Jane Austen.  It feels wonderful.  And I’VE FIGURED IT OUT.  I can run it through my printer, even though said printer is a perfectly nice HP front loader that does the potentially-jam-inducing double back flip.

So I’ve been working in Photoshop with the pictures I took of the poor dead owl; see http://ietextiles0manninghamilton.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/owl-rip/, cropping, and rotating, and changing sizes.

I have ever so carefully printed them out on natural white silk habotai: http://www.thaisilks.com/product_info.php?cPath=1_2&products_id=16

This involves tearing it into rectangles just smaller than 81/2 x 11, ironing each rectangle with care and taping the leading edge carefully all the way across the top of the paper.  Then I lay one face down in the paper-tray.  After fiddling the images to maximise the use of the page, I set the printer settings for high quality printing (usually I’m a fast and economical girl!), hit “print”, and quickly start bowing and scraping in front of the printer.

The prints are beautiful.  Here are a couple of pix, but it’s hard to capture the sheen and colour and fluidity of the actual print.

You can compare this print on silk with the original digital image (see link above)

wing; inkjet print on silk

 

And one serendipical ’speriment result!

Just for fun I also tried the inkjet transfer process on a piece of semi-sheer textured cotton.  (Breaking the rules!)

In my immodest opinion, it has fabulous possibilities, including being used for lampshades.

lamplight coming through the sample

 

Some Parts Are More Fun Than Others…

I’ve spent time yesterday testing the properties of the two kinds of silk I got from Thai Silks (see http://ietextiles0manninghamilton.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/getting-the-art-back-on-track-or-g-d-of-thunder/).  I’m experimenting with layering them over photographs which I will then stitch on.  Now I need to gird my loins and try to calmly (!) see if I can reasonably expect to be able to send the stuff through my printer or whether it will jam every time.

Here are some of the ’sperimental results:

Four attempts to get the appearence of printing on silk

Clockwise from top left: silk spray-basted onto inkjet print, a bit of stitching; inkjet transfer onto overlapped pieces of silk seen from the back!; silk fused to inkjet print using Heat’n'Bond; ditto, lighter weight silk.

close-up of inkjet transfer onto overlapped silk squares seen from the "back"

The inkjet transfer uses the transfer paper usually used for decorating T-shirts and such, where the shiny transfer is what shows.  The habotai silk is thin enough to see the image through the silk from the back which is an interesting effect.

 

Does Mending Count as Textile Art?

Waste not, want not

I grew up in a household where one of my mother’s mantras (she grew up with the Great Depression and WWII shortages) was “Use it up; wear it out; make it do or go without.”  So by the time I reached my early teens I had learned not only how to make clothes, but mend them, or change a hemline, or buttons. There’s mending,  then there’s mending. Sewing buttons back on,  invisibly patching jeans from the inside, or letting toddlers’ overalls up and down is boring but necessary.

What’s more fun is fixing with a twist. One of the earliest times I did that was in high school.  I grew too tall for my beloved navy blue, double-breasted princess-seamed wool maxi coat.  So I bought some faux fur fabric in a soft grey, and new buttons.  I lengthened the sleeves and over-all length by adding, oh, about three inches of the fur at the cuffs and hem.  I used the fur to face the collar, and changed the buttons.  It looked like a Russian countess’s coat out of Dr.Zhivago.  I was studying Russian at the time and thought it was just perfect.  Four years or so later I realised I had simply anticipated  Yves St. Laurent’s “Russian Look”!

My most recent “fix with a twist” was a red lambswool cardigan whose neck binding had ripped partially off.  I stitched it down, and then to hide the mend I covered it with a ruched charcoal-grey organdy ribbon which continued down  the front edge.  As I was working on it I noticed that, darn it, there were a couple of little moth holes also.  So I used the rest of the ribbon to make rosettes to cover the mended moth holes.   When I wore it to a couple of different holiday parties  several people asked me where I had gotten it…

Revamped cardigan, neck detail

Revamped cardigan, rosette detail