Ypsilanti Dilettante: Projects Moving Forward

In my last post I mentioned that I really enjoyed my three-day weekend of workshops last week. In previous years, I have come home from that weekend with several projects half started. This year, I took a techniques class called Spontaneous Screenprinting. It was taught by Debra Gash, a truly dedicated teacher who puts in many hours of preparation prior to each class. I walked out of the class with color on just four pieces of fabric but a head stuffed with a great deal of information for future projects. Here are some pictures.

The upper picture is fabric paint pushed through a lacy fabric. The lower picture uses thickened dyes and a piece of linoleum pressed onto the same tableau as that used for the next print:

In other words, I made the blue prints, then put a bunch of yellow dye onto a piece of linoleum and pressed it onto the same pieces of foam, etc. I really want to turn those four blue/green screens into a wallhanging, and I'll probably incorporate those three yellow polygons as well.

Before I digressed into pictures, I was going to tell you that my Saturday class, "Design for Me," was also taught by Debra Gash. There were six students, and the seven of us sat around a table and worked through various exercises together looking at lines, shapes, symmetry, colors, values, tones, etc. We looked at what we like, what we don't like, what we'd like to work on. Our homework for the class had been very interesting in that we were supposed to find pictures of quilts we love, quilts we loathe, and quilts we've made. We sat together as a class at lunch and had some wonderful conversation. By the end of the day, when we started pulling out our groups of pictures, we had established a great deal of trust, and we'd learned each other's preferences so well that if we'd had to, I think we could each have picked out the makers of the various quilts. Two of the classmates are good friends of mine, one classmate talked about how I had given her a pep talk a couple of years ago, and I do plan to follow up with yet another classmate who I think will become a friend. You might check in on Ginia's blog in the next few days for other reflections on this class.

The third day of workshops had actual projects involved. I finished the basic project in the fabric collage postcards class and mentioned this last week. In the afternoon class, I got this far on the tablerunner:

See that cool bias strip doing curlicues in the middle of the piece? Deb Grifka showed us a couple of neato shortcuts for that. Her model tablerunner had some basic shapes appliqued to the runner, but I'm not inspired by stars and triangles, so here is what I did this afternoon:

Yeah, what can I say? I'm a hearts and flowers and butterflies kind of gal. I had a flower stamp and a heart stamp that I used all over, and then I filled out the runner with fused-on shapes that I cut free form. (If you cut two hearts freeform and cut them kind of short and then you put the pointy ends together, you get butterflies. I know. Every eight-year-old girl knows this, but I had forgotten.)

The sewing room redo continues apace. This weekend I made new curtains for it and got my rulers up on the wall. I arranged them so that the rulers I use most often are in the handiest position.

The cats have been exploring the space, and I want to apologize for not getting the picture that presented itself just 10 seconds earlier than this one; all I could see of the Brat Cat was her increasingly wide rear end, but I couldn't grab the camera in time. Here she is on the new fabric hutch.