To Cut or Not To Cut...That is the Question.

Fabric, hand stamped, then painting in all the white spaces

Before I became a weaver, I dabbled with the idea of becoming a textile designer. At least, on a more home-made front, I contemplated designing hand-dyed fabrics for others to purchase for their own use and pleasure.  I spent hours printing, stamping, and hand-painting yardage, only to realize the fabric became too precious to me. I could not, would not cut into it.  At this point, I was still practicing the technique. I was no where near good enough to sell hand-stamped cloth, so I figured it might be best if I found a new area of study within Fiber Arts, which led me to weaving.

Above fabric, completed, and lining handwoven bag

On the rare occassion I could overcome the need to save every two to four yard swath of hand-dyed fabric, I cut it up and re-sewed them into a liner for a bag, or maybe a custom shower curtain. So it was no surprise to me that I resisted with all of my being cutting into my screen printed cloth.  Naturally, I chose the fabric I liked the least, and paired it with a panel that was always meant to be cut out. It felt better that way.  And of course, this meant I now had a major challenge. How to make these two elements work together, since I pulled them out of my stash, not because I thought "YES! THIS WILL BE AWESOME!" but because I went "WHEW! If I screw this up, my heart won't hurt."

Collaborative with Sheila Shuman.

I am a moderate planner, as far as my working style goes. I usually plot and plan things to a certain point, and then I allow serendipity to take a part in the creation of one of my pieces.  In other words, I allow unplanned things to happen and even change my direction totally in a piece, even if I'm half way through making something.   In the beginning of screen printing week, I had no plan other than "what happens if..."  By the middle of the week, I began drawing some mild inspiration from my doodles. I doodle eyes in the margins of my papers all the time. I doodle cartoonish human outlines.  For some strange reason, I thought it was a good idea to combine the two.

The result of stencil and stamps on silk screen

Meanwhile, we were supposed to be practicing pulling stamps into our screen (I used an eye) and freezer paper stencils (I made a human form).  When we arrived at the quilting portion of the course, I stood and studied this panel which was a bizarre combination of eyes and marionette-like figure, and wondered, what on earth am I going to do with this? Then it occurred to me. This is inspired by doodling. We're supposed to use the stitching as we would a drawn line. Hmm. What if I doodled over top of the man?




I took some heat and bond, and ironed it onto the back of a piece of light blue fabric.  I then cut out the same stencil shapes of the figure on the screen printed panel.  Finally I ironed those onto a piece of yellow fabric, and proceeded to draw lines using a sharpie marker.  This was my test.  Placing batting and a backing under the mock-quilt-top, I began to experiment. I tested my free-motion foot. I experimented with the regular presser foot to make lines. And then I decided how I was going to create my 'sketch.'  After a bit, I was rather pleased with the results, so I figured it was safe to begin plotting out my quilt.




I decided the panel would be attached to the background as an applique. But how would I make it look integrated?  Once I pinned the panel to the background, and pinned that to the wall. I stepped back. Interesting. The panel almost disappears because there's too much going on in the background fabric. So I decided to see what it would look like with a small strip of color edging one side of the panel.  All I had on hand at the moment was a little bit of pink.  Crazy enough, the pink actually worked! So I kept it.  I love it when stuff like that happens.

Letting the quilt tell me where to stitch

Attaching the applique to the background with basting stitches, I then added my batting and backing.  Where to start? The center of course.  I noticed the background had subtle oval shapes hidden amongst all the chaos.  I decided I'd turn these into more eyes.  The rest of the stitching would just happen as I went along, changing colored threads on a whim.   I chose a purple thread to do my 'sketching' of the figure.  However, it wasn't turning out as I thought it should.

"Well, you know, a sketched line has thick parts and thin parts depending on how you hold a pen or pencil and what angle the tip is at when you make that line," Barbara said to me, as I was mulling over how to fix it.
"You know, I think that's exactly what I'm missing," I said.  I sat down and began going over some of my lines until I had thick areas tapering into thin areas. The more I worked, the more I liked what I was seeing. However, it was costing me a lot of precious time.  True to myself, I chose to be over-ambitious with my project.









So as usual, I spent extra time in the studio, trying to get as much finished as I could.  Unfortunately, I didn't complete my quilt by the end of the week. But that's O.K.  Now I have something to work on at home in the evenings, much to my delight.  My sewing machine fits in a corner of my kitchen, so it's not as if it's in the way or anything. Well, the husband might disagree with that statement, but I told him at least it's not a floor loom or a spinning wheel. He just mumbled something and shook his head as he walked away from the pile I made in front of the corner hutch.    Besides, I have to finish it so I can be sure to post a picture of the completed quilt when I'm done, regardless of how it turns out. :)  After all, what's one more pile of fiber arts supplies? Right?

work in progress

 ~melanie

It's Sew (not) Easy!

During the first week of my course, the annual Kutztown Folk Festival was occurring across the street where one could browse stand after stand of handmade items and food, most created using very time-tested  traditional techniques.  Before we could begin making an art quilt, Barbara Schulman instructed us to walk across the street to the Quilt Barn and check out the more traditional expression of the art of quilt making.

quilting fabrics

For me, it was as if I had stepped backward in time. I spent most of my teen-labor years working in a Mennonite run quilt shop called Hayloft Fabrics which overlooks Martin's Country Market in Morgantown, PA.    At one time I knew how much yardage of 45" cloth it would take to back a queen sized quilt, how much was needed to make the binding, what 1/4 of $3.79 equaled,  along with other various quilt trivia. All lost over the last twenty years as my limited fiber attention span flitted from this to that.

One side of the Quilt Barn.

The Quilt barn brought back some of those memories as I looked at Lone Stars, Log Cabins, Flying Geese, among others.  While some were hand quilted, and others machine stitched, seeing them all on display in one large area created a visually stimulating assortment of colors and fabrics.  Nostalgia filled my lungs as I took a deep breath and sighed. Wasn't it only yesterday I was a kid wielding scissors, and straightening bolts of fabric? 





The following day, we cleaned up the room, eradicating all traces of screen printing.  After which, we had to set up our sewing machines and work spaces.  Now, it was time to get down to business.

The studio

Making patches

  First, Barbara demonstrated how to piece a simple patchwork block.  For those of you who quilt, this might not be a huge dealio. For me, it was a revelation. I don't know why I never learned to sew strips and then cut those down with a rotary cutter.  Then to re-piece them as rows of squares, seemed pure genius!  Not only that, it had never occurred to me to even try something like this. Quilting, despite my misbegotten youth, has always been some what mysterious to me. I reveled in having the mystery unraveling before my very eyes.

Machine stitched applique

Next came applique, a technique that allows a quilter to attach fabric shapes to the front of their quilt. When I worked at the shop, I vaguely remember learning to attach the appliques to the quilt top using tiny hand stitches, while turning under the 1/8-1/4" seam as I worked my way around the edge of the shape.  In this class, I learned a really clever trick using light interfacing to turn the edges under.  Yes, indeed,  it was one revelation after another for this fiber artist. 

I used to live by this stuff to make custom patches for my jeans.

Last, we learned about products such as Heat and Bond,  a product that allows a anyone to attach fabric to fabric, much like a patch one would buy to fix a hole in a pair of jeans.  The product is ironed on to the back of the material, after which, the sewer can cut out any shape imaginable. Peel off the paper backing, and then iron the shape onto another piece of cloth. It's that easy.  Finally, it was time to put all these methods into action and play!  I put two pieces of material together and just began running my machine stitches all over the front, trying to get the feel of my machine.


Now, I have two confessions to make: one, I am a partially self-taught seamstress.  Rebekah (my mother) taught me the basics, and taught me well. But for whatever reason, probably my overflowing over-commited teenager schedule, we never moved beyond those basics.   So, the rest of my sewing knowledge has come from me doing whatever worked, and most of the time, it's probably been the wrong way to work. Confession Number Two:  I've owned my machine for twenty years, at least, and I learned how to operate it better in one week of classes than I ever did in all the years I've owned it.  I'm almost embarrassed to admit it.  What did I learn? Well, for one, I found out my feed dogs can be dropped.

Inside Don Kauffman's Sewing Machines

I get my machine maintenanced and repaired at Don Kauffman's Sewing Machines in Temple, PA.   On one of my many "how on earth do I work my machine" visits during the Art Quilting portion of the course, I asked if I could buy a free-motion presser foot for the machine.
"Do your feed dogs drop?"
"I don't think so," I said.
"Well, is it a free-arm machine?" he asked
"Um, I don't think so, " I repeated.
"Can you take something off or drop something down on your machine to help you sew pant legs?" He asked.
"Oh HEY! I CAN do that!" I said.
"That's a free-arm machine," he said, patiently.

I probably turned twenty shades of crimson. So this is the second thing I learned: what exactly is a free armed machine.  I had never known. Now I do, and I feel smarter armed with this information.

feed dogs

"So if you have a free-arm machine, you most likely have a lever or a switch in the back that will drop your feed dogs," he told me.

I could hardly wait to get back to class. I HAD to see if my feed dogs dropped. Lo and Behold, with great rejoicing and angelic music ringing through my head, I found the switch and dropped my feed dogs.  I did a poor imitation of the butter churn, and might have danced a little off-rhythym jig.  Just maybe.

 Why did this excite me so much? Because I was no longer constrained to straight lines, corners, and gentle curves.  The feed dogs are the metal 'tracks' on the bottom of the machine that feeds the cloth through while the needle jumps up and down. They keep the stitches even, and the fabric moving.  Why would I want to drop the feed dogs? Because if I want to do any kind of free-form stitching, it's necessary to take away the mechanism that controls the movement of the material. I want to control the fabric.

free-motion foot

So I attached my new free-motion foot and stuck a sample quilt block I was using for practice under the foot and went crazy. I mean really really crazy.  WOWZERS! I mean, this was super-duper-looper exciting!   Literally. I could make loops.  Lots and lots of loops.  I gained a greater appreciation for people who make amazing free-form stitched quilts.  It's not nearly as easy as one would think to make the stitches even. After all, there are no feed dogs to push the quilt through at regular intervals. I mostly made scribble-y messes with my stitches. OH, but it was fun, as in, insanely gleeful, mad-scientist-fun.


Now came the hardest part of the course. What, of my lovely hand-made fabrics was I willing to cut into? Oh the heart-wrenching decisions. How could I willingly hack into one of my precious pieces of printed cloth?  But that's another post for another day...

~melanie

The Week My Brain Blew-Up

...or maybe "Melanie Takes a Class" would perhaps be a better title.

It started out innocently enough. Barbara Schulman, my fiber-arts professor from Kutztown University, stopped into our Gallery on the last day of Size Matters.  "How's retirement?" I asked.

"Well, I'm not quite retired yet." she replied. "I have one more class to teach, a summer institute..."  She began to describe the class: one week of screen-printing taught by Wendy Osterweil, and another week of quilting from our homemade fabrics taught by Barbara.

As I listened, my eyes goggled, I'm sure of it.  I might have even drooled just a little, but Barbara was kind enough to not point that out.  Instead she offered to see if I could somehow squeeze into the class for non-credit.  Two weeks of non-stop fiberlicious-yummy-goodness?!?   Two. Whole. Weeks. To myself. With no interruptions??  I practically spontaneously combusted on the spot from my excitement.  Of course, this was the week before the class was to begin, and of course, by the time I found out I was allowed admittance, I had two days to gather all my supplies before going away for the annual Fourth of July Family Holiday Weekend.  But really, was I complaining? Ok, maybe for just a nanosecond when I trudged in and out of the heat from store to store. However that was quickly dispelled by my over-abundant enthusiasm.  Such a small sacrifice for so much fiberlicious-yummy-goodness was totally worth it.

Portable Print table

Monday arrived, and Wendy displayed a variety of her fabrics and a few of her quilts. Wiping the saliva off my chin, I couldn't wait to get started.  She began by explaining how she makes her portable print tables. Lightweight and extremely easy to make, my mind went "WHOA" which began the 5000 revolutions per minute that didn't let up until, well...at the writing of this post, I'm still in class, so I haven't stopped thinking once. I might have even pulled a brain-muscle. And I'm fairly certain there has been smoke puffing out of my ears for the last six days.

prepping the screen

 From the print table to the pinning of the fabric, we were now ready to get rolling with our printmaking.  I assumed this would be a very tradition kind of screen printing, and was I ever wrong.  Wendy demonstrated how to pull textures onto our screen using dye which acted as the resist or barrier, for the first couple of prints. But after two or three passes of the squeegee on the screen, the dye on the screen would mix with the dye pressed through the mesh and magic would happen.  I mean, MAGIC. Pure, unadulterated, no-tricks-up-my-sleeve, magic.  My heart pounded nearly out of my chest with excitement.  It had been way too long since I last took a class. 

My screen, prepped for printing. I used an old weaving as the main texture.

The first print through the above screen.

Dyes

Sitting in the middle of the workspace, we had a table full of dyes in plastic containers. The whole rainbow was at our finger tips, and it only needed our creativity to unleash it onto our cloths.  We mixed, and experimented, tweaking this, adjusting that, like mad-scientists standing over our creations.   When we were finished with our colors, they'd be returned to the middle table to either be used, or transformed into yet another hue. Between the multitude of textured objects and the varied and sundry colors, the printing process continued and sustained itself throughout the week with infinite combinations and permutations, each maintaining its own unique unrepeatable existence.

On the second day, we were shown how to pull the carving from a stamp onto our screens, allowing us more direct imagery than we had the day before.   Using this technique, we were able to print positive and negative images which would begin to mutate with each print.   Like an addict, I was hooked.  I raced to the mega-monster-craft store to find some rubber stamp material to make my own carved blocks. 

Wendy demonstrated using her own blocks.

The block "stamp" images on the screen

We learned how to make a stencil using freezer wrap on the third day. Between the textures, the stamps, and the stencils, the mind boggled over the insane amount possibilities. All week, I found sleep elusive as I turned over one idea to another, tomorrow I'm going to work with this color.  I wonder if I did this, what would happen? Could this work? I can't wait to try that...

one of my fabrics, in progress.

 And yet, I struggled with the serendipity of the printing each and every day.  I wanted to understand what was going to happen so I could predict what my next move would be.  Gee, I guess that's why it's called "Free Form Screenprinting."  I couldn't let go of my need to anticipate what was going to end up on my cloth.   While there was a level of predictability to the experience, I found that I was completely unable to respond to what was happening and make adjustments as I went along.  But with each pass of my squeegee, and each fabric I printed, I felt I gained more and more successes. Not necessarily in the aesthetic sense, but in the ability to just roll with the printing. And as I re-invented my artistic self throughout the week, I found I enjoyed the results of my screen printing more and more.  It no longer became a matter of "This cloth is Good" or "This cloth is Bad" because I began to see the value in the parts and pieces as well as the whole.  

I used a scrap of handwoven material to experiment on

One of my favorite cloths I printed

 

Hanging our fabrics for the end of the week 'response' time.

While the sand slipped through the proverbial hour glass on the fourth day, my mood transformed into a desperate need to finish "JUST ONE MORE" printed cloth.  I had to keep reminding myself that just because Wendy was returning to her studio, it did not mean I would never ever ever  print another piece of fabric. In fact, I have great plans to make a print table, buy some the materials to make more screens, and set myself up once our 'wet studio' is finished at 'some things looming.'  But before that can happen, I have to do the scary part: cutting into "my precious," one-of-a-kind-can-never-be-duplicated fabrics for the second half of the class: Art Quilts.

The class' fabrics, hanging out to dry

...to be continued, next week...