Saturday, November 7, 2009

Preview of Rust-Tex Quilt

Yesterday, I took a day off from work and played in my studio. I started working on a quilt for the Rust-tex collection (which is here). Here is a sketch:I'm playing with proportions using a Fibonacci sequence ( 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc.) where each number in the sequence is the sum of the two numbers immediately preceding it. I'm not using all the numbers (wink), just the ones that interest me...
These are the fabrics I'm using. There are hand-dyes (the blue sky and pieced greens), a shibori-dyed brown on the left and the two Rust-Tex pieces on the bottom right.

Rust-Tex is fabric dyed using actual rusted stuff by my friend and fellow MCFA member, Lois Jarvis. There's a much more complete discussion of how she does it on her website (which is here).
So I needed a bird and I chose a crow (or maybe it's a raven) from a copyright-free Dover illustration. I drew it on a piece of black cotton sateen with my beloved Bohin mechanical chalk pencil (thank you, Beth). I backed it with a piece of black fusible non-woven interfacing to stabilize it for the threadwork.
I thread-painted the body and head of the bird with black rayon thread -- I used rayon because it's shiny. I just thread-sketched the feathers of the wings -- I haven't decided if I'm going to use more thread on them.
I painted the eye with black fabric paint, then used raw sienna paint around the black circle (note to self: next time paint first, then thread -- it's too hard to see the black paint with all that shiny black thread). I sketched a circle of orange rayon thread around the eye and used opaque white paint to highlight.
The working title for this piece is "Seasons of Wisconsin" -- I know, that's booooring, but as I said, it's a "working" title.

1 comment:

Beth@IHaveANotion.com said...

It's looking good... can't wait to see it done.