Candied Fabrics » Botanical Sketch

Inspiration: Skinny LaMinx

Candy — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:22:40 +0000

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to write about the inspiration I get from the work of Heather Moore, a.k.a. Skinny LaMinx! She’s an illustrator and designer living in Cape Town, South Africa. She has a very distinctive style to her screenprinted fabric, and she sells yardage, as well as cushion covers, teatowels and all sorts of lovely stuff from her Etsy shop.

What I truly love is her way of mixing the positive and negative space in her designs. This is something really unique to screen printing, but you can my interpretation of this in my Botanical Sketches, be they found on my going green journals, freshly picked baby outfits, or my series of small art quilts. Although I love her color palette, the thing that rocks my world is her paper cuts:

Seriously, how much do these totally rock? It’s just her hands, some paper, and an exacto knife. Truly, deeply, completely amazing.

I’ve been meaning to write about how much her art inspires me for too too long, and for this I am sorry. But there is a silver lining – she’s having a Pocket Money sale right NOW! She want to get together some extra moolah for her upcoming trip to the States, so if you’re hankering for something beautiful from her – now’s the time! Me – well, I’ve got some seriously inspirational tea towels that are way too nice to use in MY kitchen (the boys and hubby don’t get the concept of “the pretty towels”), so I’m pondering the best way to use them.

Thank you Heather for amazing me with what you can create with your hands! You are truly inspirational!

Inspiration: Skinny LaMinx is a post from: Candied Fabrics

Botanical Sketches Commission Quilt Complete!

Candy — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:39:49 +0000

I’ve been showing you my work on a quilt commissioned by a man for his wife, who works in a windowless office (Her last name is Larsen, and she works in Larsen Hall – crazy coincidence!). The idea and construction craziness is described here, my color choices and design process blogged here, and yesterday I showed you some close ups of the individual quilts! Here is the final result:

“Larsen Window” (20″ x 24″)

To remind you, my original thoughts about this piece broke down into 4 main points:

Window = grid
Outside -> Flowers -> Botanical Sketches
Incorporate “Lillian’s Fabric” (the forest green with the blue veins)
Choice, trying out different options – make the sketches moveable

To make these moveable, I fused small bits of fusible veclro to the back of the quilts and the fabric mounted around stretcher bars.

To encourage moving, I made 2 extra (which can be stored on the back with more velcro, or displayed elsewhere).

I finished this on Sunday, and Steve came by Monday to pick it up (which explains the slightly lopsided pix – I didn’t have time to take a close look at the pictures until it was out of my hands). He gave it to Lillian the next day, and heard from him on Wednesday:

Lillian loves it. Great job! Complete and utter surprise. It is now hanging in our bedroom until she moves into her new office [which is also windowless]. Lillian has already arranged some of the panes to suit.

I am so thankful that this worked so well. I’ve been wanting to figure out another way to display some of these sketches and haven’t had time to focus on it. I’m so grateful that I had triple motivation to make the germ of an idea turn into reality. Thanks Steve & Lillian!

One of my long term goals since the inception of Candied Fabrics 2 and a half years ago has been to have people be so inspired by my work that they ask me to create an art quilt just for them – and I’ve had the honor to complete not 1 but 2 in this month! Here’s hoping this is the start of an awesome trend in this new decade of ours!

And, as always, thanks for dropping by, reading my blather and sending awesome comments my way – they really buoy me up when I get down. It’s great to know I’m connecting with a few souls out there because of the me I pour on cloth and then cut up and rearrange for my visual enjoyment!

Botanical Sketches Commission Quilt Complete! is a post from: Candied Fabrics

Botanical Sketches for Commission Quilt Completed

Candy — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:39:51 +0000

This week, I’ve been taking you through my process of creating a window of my botanical sketches for a customer whose wife has a windowless office. I explain the idea and construction craziness here, and show you my color choices and design process here. Time for some glamour close ups! These are all 6″ x 8″, I layer my background fabric on top a layer of batting, then a layer of stiff fusible interfacing called Peltex for stiffness. I start with an idea of what flower I want to sketch in my mind, lower my feed dogs and GO! No marking ahead of time. I’ve got a couple of videos of this here, the ones labelled free motion machine sketching.






Here’s an extra Daisy – I actually made this one 1st to practice:

Friday – the big reveal, how I put it all together!

Botanical Sketches for Commission Quilt Completed is a post from: Candied Fabrics

Construction on the Botanical Quilt Continues

Candy — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 02:29:14 +0000

After all the rigmarole I went through to figure out how I was going to attach the smaller botanical quilts to the larger background - the actual art was a breeze The difference between making several single botanical sketches:

and one group that are meant to be displayed together, is that I wanted to have no repeats, of either sketches or color combinations. I also wanted to have a nice distribution of shapes – not too many vertical long skinnies, for example. So I set myself some rules:

8 different sketches
3 squarish shapes, three verticals and 2 horizontals
8 different colors, one background & one shape/color
No reverse combinations (which I usually love to do). This means if I put gold on the plum background, I can’t put plum on the gold background.

The cool thing about this last rule is that it really got my to play around with color combinations, and I LOVE the forest green against the chartreuse (upper left quilt in the picture below)

Tomorrow, I’ll show the completed individual quilts. Yes, I’m dragging this out all week…cut me some slack, I’ve got a day job!

Construction on the Botanical Quilt Continues is a post from: Candied Fabrics

___ is 1% Inspiration, 99% Perspiration

Candy — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:47:41 +0000

The actual quote, attributed to Edison is:

Genius is 1% Inspiration, 99% Perspiration

This weekend I was working on a commission art quilt with a firm deadline (it’s an anniversary gift, and the anniversary is tomorrow). I had a very firm idea in my mind of what the piece would look like. The commissioner (Steve) and I had discussed all this before Christmas: it was to be an arrangement of several botanical sketches to suggest a window…his wife (Lillian) has a windowless office, and he wanted to give her a window.

Lillian works at my University, and she and Steve came by my booth at my very 1st Art for Heaven’s sake show, back in 2007. A quilt hanging in the center of the booth had a really neat backing fabric on it that they were very taken by. Way back in 2007 they had talked about someday having me make a quilt for her office, and as I had another large piece of the backing fabric (a dark forest green with awesome blue & white veins running through it), in my mind it became “Lillian’s Fabric”.

Lillian and Steve like to give gifts, and it turns out that they love to give my hand dyed scarves as gifts, and the gift receivers like getting the scarves, a win win win situation! Several times now Lillian has joyfully played with selected several different scarves, enjoying finding JUST the right color combination for the right person. Of course, she looks fabulous herself in scarves, and can easily twine them around her neck with a certain flair.

So, when Steve approached me about this commission, these were my thoughts:

Window = grid
Outside -> Flowers -> Botanical Sketches
Incorporate “Lillian’s Fabric”
Choice, trying out different options – make the sketches moveable

I shared my idea of a larger background piece with several botanical sketches attached to it in a grid, to suggest a window, the changes outside the window, (and in my mind, Lillian’s joy in considering all sorts of color combinations) with Steve, and he like the idea, so it was a go. He also chose several of the my sketches and let me know Lillian’s favorite flower was a daisy, and left me to the creation! I played around a bit more with the colors, and realized that I wanted to make a total of 8 sketches. The budget and size of her office dictated a 2 x 3 grid only, but I was quickly in love with the idea that she would have two extra sketches to play with, swapping them out and rearranging them whenever she felt like it.

So, Christmas came and went, and then I had to work through the other commission quilt. And then get ready for the Spring semester. And then…figure out how I was going make these sketches movable on a larger background. Velcro – right? I sew through it all the time to attach it to my bags: my thought was to sew the loop (softer) side to the back of the peltex/ batting sandwich, THEN add the front fabric, and create the botanical sketch, stitching through the Velcro when it happened that a part of the flower I was stitching would be over the top of the Velcro. I would then stitch the hook portion to a large piece of fabric and wrap that around some stretcher bars. Problem solved – so I thought! The week flew by (1st week of classes is always exhausting) so I didn’t get to try this out until Friday night.

You probably know by now with all my blah blah blahing about this that it didn’t work! Whenever I stitched over the Velcro several stitches would skip! ARGH! Much Gnashing of teeth! I used self adhesive velcro several years ago to mount these quilts onto a large stretched canvas, painted black:

I spent a long time thinking through other construction methods, but at some point I finally went to JoAnns to see what else there was in the world of Velcro. Lo and behold – there is a new type of velcro that is FUSIBLE! So I took some home and gave them and try – worked like a charm! Now, I wouldn’t use this velcro on a bag that got opened and closed several times a day – but it certainly held up to my tests on the prototype.

Another construction issue to tackle was placing the velcro on the fabric of the background BEFORE the fabric was wrapped and stapled around the stretched canvas and allowing for some wiggle room for placement of the botanicals if the fabric wasn’t stapled exactly in the center. I decided to place the velcro in a bit from each corner – in order to make this placement consistent, so each botanical could be placed in any spot – I quickly made some templates and used them to place the fusible velcro.

The point of this post – so much of what I do is trouble shooting construction details! The creation of the art itself (which you’ll see tomorrow) was a very small portion of the time spent working on this piece. Thus:

Art is 1% Inspiration, 99% Perspiration!

P.S. This weeks assignment on Blogging my Passion is to discuss an obstacle I overcame – how did Tara know I’d have an obstacle to overcome this week? ;-)

p.p.s. I very often have obstacles so I’m sure something else would have presented itself if this assignment were in week 12 !

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___ is 1% Inspiration, 99% Perspiration is a post from: Candied Fabrics