Playing With Fabric

This week I have been busy cooking and creating. And spending money I shouldn't be spending. I don't have any recipes to share from last nights dinner as I made breakfast instead. I don't cook breakfast in the morning, never have. I am not a morning person. If the kids want a hot breakfast, well that is what microwaves and Fathers are for. I just can't stand the smells that early in the day. So I cook breakfast at dinner time at least a couple of times a month.

In and around all that cooking I have been playing with my fabric. Still itching to get outside and start dyeing more colors, but I am sure I have at least a month yet before that can happen. So I am trying to make due with what I have and start creating anyway. The piece I am working on now is a dragon against a sunset landscape. It is finally starting to come together into something recognizable, but the process is rather slow. And there is so much more to do. I have been working on it mostly as a practice piece. I don't know if I would ever want to sell it, but I suppose for the right money anything is possible. The point has been to experiment with different ideas and techniques and tools. I think it looks pretty cool so far, but I am not sure if I want to show you all a picture or not before it is done. As I said there is still a lot of detail work left to be done, its just the basic foundation for the most part right now.

I also started working on a silhouettes series that I think I will actually frame and try to sell when they are finished. I have a couple of trees that I have cut out, but they are also a long ways from being done. These are ones I am really looking forward to working on too, but I am still waiting on some better tools to be delivered which will hopefully give me a little better control for the intricate cutting I want to do. Years ago I used to make these beautiful, intricate snowflake designs. I never did anything with them except give them away, but I am hoping to reproduce a similar style of design in fabric now, and maybe make some money from them. I am using my own hand dyed fabrics for both the foreground and the background and I think I may do some detailing with some iridescent colors to highlight the designs further.

As I have mentioned before I always have a million ideas floating around in my head waiting to be executed. I usually work on several projects at one time if only to get a record of an idea before it floats away. Unlike some artists who can draw a sketch of an idea to save it for later, I can't draw worth a shit. When I go to cut fabric I usually do not draw out anything, I just start cutting and layering until get the shapes I want. I have tried drawing a rough sketch first, but it takes me longer to draw a simple sketch than it does to cut out hundreds of pieces. And then it still doesn't even look anything like what I envisioned! So I just gave up on that idea. If I really think I need a pattern for something I will trace it out of something else to get the basic outline.

That is something else I have thousands of hours of practice at, tracing! I remember having special coloring books as a very little girl with sheets of tracing paper inserted between the coloring pages. And if they didn't already have the tracing paper in the book, I would steal it from my mom. I even bought a new light box that finally arrived this week. It is much bigger and better than any I have had before, and it sure as heck beats using the window! So I have been printing out animal photographs to work with too. I would like to do a series of at least “semi” realistic wildlife in fabric as well. I am seeing lions and tigers and frogs, oh my! All spinning through the back of my head waiting for their chance to be created. Then of course there are all the landscapes, and the portraits, and the foliage and flowers, and, and and ... My goodness it better warm up soon! I need to get to dyeing so I can get to work!