Thursday, August 20, 2009

A stretch to realism - from janet's studio



The Fiber Art Options group meet today, and I had to miss the meeting. It made me sad that I didn't have a chance to visit with the group and share about all of our new work. So here is my August update.

A friend once said that I went to food markets like other people went to museums - it is true. Whenever I go to a new city I have to scope out the food markets, of course in Seattle and all over the US but also in France, Italy, Mexico, Spain, and Japan. Sometimes this makes the people I travel with crazy - why spend a half day looking at lettuce, cheese, and olives, why in deed, but we always have a great time and learn about new foods and customs.

Last week I went to the farmer's market near my house with the camera and took a bunch of photos and brought back a few bags full of avocados, tomatoes, carrots, radishes, mushrooms etc. I love to arrange still life compositions on the wooden cutting boards and bowls that live on my kitchen island - these give me inspiration to chop, saute, and cook - but these images rarely find their way into my fiber art.

The past few months I have been sewing almost exclusively on paper. Most recently, I have been playing around quite a bit with sewn paper collages using handmade papers that I stain with watercolors and dyes. The paper gets torn up, arranged, repainted, and then machine sewn to a heavy paper foundation. Quick and fun to do. I had planned to spend some time in the studio working on collages when I decided to use one of the still life photos from the farmers market as inspiration. Here is the first veggie still life.

Feed back anyone?? (be kind - I don't do art that are supposed to look "like" things as a rule)

Monday, August 17, 2009

Fall classes

Susan and Janet are teaching online classes on Joggles.com in November. For details, click on the red “Classes” button in the sidebar on the right-hand side of this blog, or click here to go directly to that post.


House Rules by Susan Brubaker Knapp


Embellished Travel Journal by Janet A. Lasher
PJ's Latest Orchid Piece

I chose this yellow orchid from my array of orchid photos primarily because I knew I had several yellow and green fabrics in the stash to use in Ruth McDowell style piecing. Here's the photo with pattern lines added (using Quilt Assistant software ... see http://www.cosman.nl/software_en.html).







And here is my progress so far. The piecing is more tedious that I had hoped, so this may be my last piece in this style!

-PJ-