separate pages

I placed copies of the photos we placed on the blog also on the separate artist pages. Check it out. They look great!

Faces of Jazz

Faces of Jazz

The Jazz Singer

New paintings -I've been painting but not posting!!! This one is

Jazz  Musicians

I've been experimenting with deconstructed (breakdown) screen printing with mixed results this year. The piece above called "Birch & Moons" was a good surprise.  One day I had extra dye so I printed on a scrap piece of torn and soda-ash soaked cotton canvas.  I had placed deli paper under the screen during the preparation phase and liked the looks.  I placed the dried deli paper over the center of the printed canvas and went "aha" -- a birch forest! Later I hand-beaded my version of birch trees and cut moon shapes from remaining deli paper scraps.  Today I covered and painted a piece of gator board 8" x 15" and glued on the fabric.  I think I'm done.

Last week I tried mono printing with thickened dye.  I spread the dye on a thin plastic cutting mat, laid fabric over the dye, then used a brayer.  The dye moved and morphed on the plastic, creating interesting bubbles and swirls.  I cut a few poppy pod outlines from cardboard and laid some on the dye before adding the fabric.  Had enough "OK" pieces to stitch together.  I free-motion stitched poppy pods over the printed outlines, machine quilted a random grid, and finished with piped binding. The piece which is about 10" x 12" truly is straight and square, but I have difficulty telling my camera that fact.

WEEDS - theme of Irene MacWilliam

Weeds are useful

In the past few weeks I have been making fabric to the weed theme, sun prints, lino cuts, printing, painting etc various weed leaves and text .

I had a vision in my head but it did not look correct when I laid out the various bits. I cut them up and laid them down as a background and printed the text on some of the small squares. It looked lovely but I wished to represent some of the weeds so I free motion stitched in a dandelion, daisy, corn poppy and a nettle. It looked messy and the drawing did not show up enough. I free motion zig-zagged over the drawn weeds. Now everything is just one big muddle, fine if you are prepared to peer and pick out the elements; however it looks dirty, not fresh and wonderful.

The back of it looks not bad so I decided to leave it exposed just for my own interest and perhaps for use when teaching.

I think all my background pieces were too strongly coloured or maybe I needed to leave some areas blank for my drawing.

I am determined to find my way to my vision of showing the value of weeds through textiles. Much thinking needed. Just as I am writing this text a new approach has come into my mind. We will see.