Virginia A. Spiegel

Did I mention I moved my studio down the hall? Here is the old studio with moving in progress. What a mess!  But I did see fabric that had been MIA for years. The joy of painting all your own fabric is that each piece is fabric is like an old friend; I’m always happy to see them again.

Why did I move? A view of the backyard (trees, trees, trees), closer to my paper studio, and a door I can close and leave closed. I miss the great lighting and the space, but don’t miss being a thoroughfare. 

 

The new studio ready to go. It’s a little tight once I set up my ironing board with the big padded board on top, but, hey, it has a closet!

As you can probably tell from the dresser and table, I’m a big fan of Ikea. The Ikea wire baskets with tops are for all the stuff I’m currently thinking about or working on.  The serious fabric storage (not shown) is in sturdy wire baskets in towers from the home improvement store.

If you read The Garbage Day Project blog, you know my niece, Jenny, visited last week.

We came straight from our family’s American Cancer Society Relay For Life in Minnesota where she donated seven 10″ ponytails for Locks of Love.

Jen started coming to visit for a week in the summer when she was 13 and now she is 20. A perfect age as we are as happy sitting on the deck reading or drinking mochas while playing backgammon at the local coffee shop as doing art projects. But it wouldn’t be Fun Week without art projects.

To warm up, we made our butterflies for the Butterfly Project for the Holocaust Museum Houston. You know how I love collaborative projects and this noteworthy project is seeking 1.5 million handmade butterflies to remember the children who perished in the Holocaust.

Then we turned our attention to fabric paper. We followed the directions by Beryl Taylor is Issue 1 of Cloth Paper Scissors magazine. (You can also read my article, Lutradur: The Miracle Material with my Portage art book in the same issue).

Here’s my paper collage on fabric in progress

And Jen’s.

But after we added the tissue paper, we were both bummed as it does mute the colors considerably. We also used a lot of materials from a book and that paper was probably too thick. So we ended up with two very stiff sheets of fabric paper which I will probably use in the future in collage. But Jenny’s goal was pillows for her futon. Hmmm.

Technology saves the day! Jen sent me photos from her computer, I Photoshopped them to size and printed them on fabric.

She peeled them off the full-sheet labels, fused Mistyfuse to the back, trimmed, and then fused them to some of my hand-dyes.

Mission complete. Two personalized pillow covers for when she goes back to school.

Fun Week is always fun and I am energized to return to my studio with a spirit of playfulness and experimentation.

You will notice comments are allowed once again. New technology for screening spam is supposed to help. I’m giving it a try. It has been awhile since I reported on what’s up in the studio, so let’s jump right in.

This is how far the series (more than 30 small artworks) for a possible Quilt National entry reached and then I was done. I think, with my summer schedule, that a QN entry won’t be happening this year. The collages in this Third Thoughts series were interesting, but they never developed the cohesiveness or, perhaps, the inner compulsion, that I require in any long-term series.

I have found several small pieces that I might want to expand into their own series. Although I can’t say more at this moment, you will be seeing more of these unique artworks in a interesting venue. If you missed what this series is all about, here is a blog post about them.

So what have I been working on? Something that still hold sway over my creative life - the Boundary Waters series. I finished Boundary Waters #31 and then …

Boundary Waters #32 (Fault Lines) - Detail of work-in-progress

started a nice big piece - Boundary Waters #32. This piece is related to the two Boundary Waters cliff pieces, but it much more abstract (and colorful). It is about the great fault lines in the rocks that caused the impressive cliff faces and jagged shorelines of the Boundary Waters lakes. Just finishing touches remain.

Shrine of the Planting Moon
Collection of Jane Davila

Fibre&Stitch’s third issue has just been released and includes my article, From Studio Journal to Art Quilt. This article focuses on the way I researched my Moon Shrine series, sketched out ideas and developed a series. Fibre&Stitch is an innovative online zine. Each issue is HUGE; this latest issue has 70 pages of mixed-media projects. Sharon B. of the comprehensive textile blog “in a minute ago” has an annotated summary of this issue here.

My studio journals are a continuing record and treasure house from the time I first stepped into my studio full time ten years ago. They, and my Boundary Waters’ journals, are the only ones I have kept consistently, although I have tried and failed with many formats.

Here are two page from my current studio journal:

You can see I USE the journals - trying out my materials, thinking, doodling, working.

Still working away on what I hope will be a new series with seventeen small pieces done. Since I can’t show finished pieces at the moment, I thought I would share some of the materials I have out and about which I am thinking.

The funny part about this is that I could walk on over to Studio B (newly transformed) and paint away. But, no, I have to paint on my ironing surface on top of my good Teflon pressing cloth using the top of my distilled gallon of water. The hardest part of these new works is translating words cut from magazines into something decent looking. I am mainly using two pieces of Stitch-N-Tear laminated together with Misty Fuse and then tracing the words. The print is a linocut.

Raw materials - painted and screenprinted fabric.

Next step: water soluble wax crayons, colored pencil, ink, and graphite.

I am still quite interested as each piece is a challenge and I am finding a theme running through the artwork that I hadn’t expected. My working title for the series reflecting this theme is from one of the source collages, “Like You Give A Damn.” Hey, I do.