Ice Flowers Finished

Posted on February 28, 2014 by ruthlane under free motion machine stitching, journals

I received my order of stretcher bars this week and framed my ice flowers piece. I am deciding if it should be called Ice Flowers, Ice Flower Riot or Ice Flower Stampede. What do you think?

I had never put stretcher bars together before but it was pretty simple. I ordered extra support bars since the piece is so long and narrow. The supports help keep it square.

Once I got the stretcher bars together, I put them on the back of the piece and began stapling from the centers outward.

The corners were a bit tricky but I finally got them folded nicely.

Here it is. This is a terrible photo but we’re having a blizzard here so I couldn’t take it outside. I’ll have to get some better photos later. I decided against the leaf sprigs. I also had a suggestion to add a more prominent flower as a center of interest. I did try a few but didn’t like them so I just left it as it is.

I have shown this piece before but I really didn’t like the leaves. I had previously made really long leaves that looked like tulip leaves. So I tore them off and cut them up and now I think it looks more like rose leaves. I just need to glue them down now.

I have still been working in my circles sketchbook. This is one of the pages that I have done with markers. The background was a breakdown screen print from our mammoth screen printing session. Hope you have a good weekend and thanks for stopping by!

Exhausted…

Posted on February 22, 2014 by ruthlane under wet felting, yurt

Normally on Fridays, I spend all day doing fiber art of some variety and then post about what I did in the evening. But yesterday, that wasn’t the case. We had nearly a foot of snow here on Thursday and hubby’s “back is out” so he couldn’t do the usually plowing. So I ended up spending 3 1/2 hours on Friday morning (after having a lovely mammogram), shoveling and snow blowing. It was “great” fun. Then somehow, I had signed us up to participate in the “Mini Maker Faire” at the community college on Saturday to set up the yurt and demonstrate felting. So I spent the rest of Friday, getting all the yurt felt rolled up and packed as well as other felted items for demo. The we packed up all this stuff – 1 pick up truck and 2 SUV’s filled to the brim – and taking it over to the college Friday evening.

Here is a bad photo of the pile of stuff we brought in. You can see hubby in the background in a sort of bent over position. I didn’t let him lift anything and he got a little grumpy.

Here’s a better photo of some of the stuff we brought. This is about half of it.

Here’s the yurt being set up with the ladder in the middle holding the center piece where the roof poles fit in.

Here is Paula helping to fit the poles in. She was very brave and climbed up on the ladder.

Here it is before we started adding the felt covering. I was planning on taking lots more photos but then the people started pouring into the faire. We got the yurt covered and then we started doing felting in a bag demos. I think we probably had 80-100 kids felt a “flower” in a bag. We had an assembly line going and just kept felting and felting and felting. Everyone loved the yurt and I can’t believe how many people don’t even know what wool is. Most often we heard “where does wool come from?” – I tell them a sheep and they looked at me like I had two heads. One lady was very disgruntled because “just think how many sheep were killed to make this yurt”. Paula explained that no sheep were killed, they were just sheared to harvest the wool. The lady didn’t believe her. But we did teach tons of people how to felt and showed them a variety of projects that can be made from felt. The faire lasted 5 hours and I would estimate 400-500 people came through in that time. Then we had to take the yurt down, pack it all back up and haul it home. Thanks Paula for all your help – I really appreciated it. Next time I mention that I think it would be a good idea to do this again, shoot me.

Leaf Sprigs or Not?

Posted on February 16, 2014 by ruthlane under free motion machine stitching

I stitched the ice dyed flower piece to the background, got all the flowers stitched down and now I have to decide if I want to add the leaf sprigs or not.

Here is the entire piece with the added leaf sprigs and an extra cheesecloth flower on the left edge.

Here it is without the leaf sprigs (I left the flower).

Here’s a closer view with the extra leaves.

And without. What do you think? Should I use the leaf sprigs or not? I can’t decide.

I did add a little bit of stitching out into the border of additional leaves.

So there are leaves going over the border of the red into the green. So do you think I need to add the leaves? What’s your vote? Do you have any good ideas for a name for the piece? I keep calling it ice flowers but not sure that’s really a good name.

Felting Session

Posted on February 14, 2014 by ruthlane under wet felting

I was busy today making samples for a felting class and working on the 1st quarter challenge making a piece inspired by Jackson Pollock.

The felting class will be for high school students at an “art retreat” and I’m going to teach them to make a cell phone case. The theme is “Intergalactic Disco Carnival”. So I thought a “cosmic cell phone case” would be the perfect class. This photo is a little dark but you get the idea.

I also made this one with cheesecloth on one side. This is some of the cheesecloth that I recently dyed. I sent pieces to Zed, Ann and Lyn and they are going to play with it to. I just used a tiny piece – I have lots more to try.

And I did finish my 1st quarter challenge piece but you’ll have to wait to see the final photo. I’ll post about it on the Felting and Fiber Studio site next week. This is the pile of pre-felt that I used to make it. I also worked on my ice flower piece but didn’t have any photos because it got to dark. I’ve gotten all the flowers and leaves sewn down. Now I need to sew it on to the background fabric and attach the “twiggy bits”. I haven’t ordered the stretcher bars yet. Got to get that done.

Experimental Screen Printing Session

Posted on February 7, 2014 by ruthlane under surface design

My local group met today (minus two people) and had a mammoth screen printing session with the screens I had prepared last week.

I did take a few photos of scraping the paper off the paper lamination screens. After the screen has dried, you soak it in water and then scrape all the paper off. That leaves the matte medium in the organza and you use this to screen on thickened dye.

Here is the largest paper lamination screen I made. It kind of reminds me of cracking paint on an old wall.

I also made some masks for the deconstructed screens. I cut out the designs with a craft knife.

You can see the ginkgo leaf cut outs that remained after I cut out the leaf screen.

I was so busy helping to screen that I didn’t get any in process photos. This is one of the deconstructed screens printed on a silk scarf. I will try to get better photos of these when they’ve been washed. I took a bunch of photos but very few turned out well. We used thickened Procion dye. Sometimes we just used clear print paste (thickened) to break down the dye already dried in the screens and other times we used thickened dyes through the screen.

The green piece with squiggly lines was printed with the rice baby cereal screen. It gave very interesting prints.

This was another of the deconstructed screen prints.

Here is one printed with the paper lamination screen. I really like the organic look you can get with this screen.

This is a silk scarf printed with the paper lamination screen.

Here’s a square printed with a deconstructed screen.

Here is cotton fabric printed with one of the rice baby cereal screens. It should fit well into my current circles theme. I will take more photos of the fabric after it’s been washed and ironed. Hopefully, I can get some better photos. The screen printing was fun and all the screens worked great. Everyone was pleased with the outcome.

I did get my background fabric dyed for my ice flower piece. It is dark green. The colors are a bit off in the photo.

I also made a vine with organza leaves which I plan to put along one edge. The flower isn’t sewn on but I was trying it out to see if I liked it. I really like the sheer leaves and I’ll be adding those over the entire piece. Now I have to decide how to attach the red/pink piece of fabric to the background fabric. I will probably zigzag stitch it down and perhaps couch a piece of green yarn around the entire edge.

Ruth Lane Art

Experimenting with Arts Endless Possibilities

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