Living This Creative Life

I have two favorite quotes. The first one is by Emile Zola, "If you asked me what I came into this world to do, I would tell you that I came to live out loud". I don't know who the second one is by, but it goes like this, "If you're not living on the edge then you might as well jump". Both of these sentiments sum up my personal philosophy of this experience we call life on earth. Enjoy!

Sunday, May 12, 2013

  
Art Every Day; Sunday, May 12, 2013

Good Evening and Happy Mother's Day,
Here is today's new piece.  It is made entirely from dye painted batting.  Everything is free form cut with scissors (I inadvertently took all of my rotary cutting tools to my new studio). I began by cutting the gray batting sections to place on the two opposing corners.  Then I topped the gray sections with little flourishes in two more colors.  Next, I cut the stems, leaves and flowers. I laid everything out to make sure I liked the layout then removed everything so that I could stipple the background.  Then I put the corner pieces back in place and quilted them.  Next, I repositioned the stems and stitched them down along both edges.  Next I stitched on the long narrow leaves, right up the center only.  Then I added the lower flowers by stitching down the centers only.  I stitched on the upper flowers using a sloppy, swirly stitch to make them look like lilacs.  The smaller leaves are stitched up the center with veins added to make them curl up a bit.
I love how the batting responds to stitch, it curls up along the edges and shows the slightly lighter color of the backside.  It is of course quite a bit thicker than fabric so there is a whole bunch of physical depth too. It was a fun little experiment.
Till tomorrow,
Heather

1 comment:

me said...

I just love how the batting takes the dye unevenly and has all these wonderful variations in it! It's always beautiful and automatically adds light and dimension to a piece.

This has the nice bang-to-wimper flow you like, from bottom left to top right, with the visual weight drawing our eye up and across.

The stitching in the red nicely pushes the red to the background, allowing the other colors to float on top of it. Because of how you stitched the stems as opposed to the flowers, they take on a more real look- the stems more sturdy and the petals more frail and loose, you can almost see them fluttering in the breeze.

This is well balanced and interesting in color from far away as well, and makes you want to move closer to see the detail.