Explorations: Journeys in Creativity. Documenting my Process.

Explorations: Journeys in Creativity.  Documenting my Process.

I recently learned that my art has been juried into an upcoming exhibit called Explorations: Journeys in Creativity:  The Artist's Studio.   http://www.saqacallforentryexplorations.com/.  To be invited to participate in this one, I had to show samples of my work and favorite techniques. This sample, which  I submitted to the jurors, combines felting and thread painting:

 

 I guess they liked my submissions, particularly this one, because they chose me to make a piece that using the same techniques, felting and thread painting.  24 people were chosen for this honor.

 Each of us who agrees must now create a 30 by 50 inch piece...and document our process as we go along!  In fact, these process photos, taken as I'm constructing my piece, will be part of the exhibit.  All the pieces will hang in the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, MA.  We'll each be given a piece of wall space for the display of these process photos!  There will be two shows of 12 participants each, one in the fall of 2018 and one in early 2019.

This blog post is my first documentation of my process for this exhibit.

My first task will be to choose the image which will inspire this piece.    I focused on landscapes, starting with 28!  Here are a few of them:

After some cogitation, I chose these four:

To help me choose which of them to use for the real deal, I decided to do a scaled-down, preliminary practice version of each one.  Because my final piece has to be 50 inches high by 30 inches across, I created a scaled down version by taking the 8-1/2 x 11 image from my printer, then using a marker to delineate a smaller section of the piece, reducing it to an image of  6 x 10 inches, like this:  

Then I traced this 6 x 10 image onto a piece of tracing paper.  So for example, this piece of tracing paper

was taken to Staples in my high-tech transportation tube

 

 ...and enlarged to become this 12 x 20 pattern:

This scale size image will become a pattern for me to trace onto a piece of raw silk, using a light box, like this:

That's what the pattern looks like, under a piece of raw silk, and placed on a lightbox.  Here I am tracing the image onto the silk:

And this is what happens next:

Can you see that I'm putting wool roving down onto the silk, using a special barbed needle?  That's as far as I've come so far.  But--I'm doing this at the moment at the Georgian Terrace Hotel in Atlanta,where I've come for a family wedding.  I brought the supplies here with me, in case there would be some down time.  And there was.

And you know what else?  I met some other wedding goers Saturday afternoon, a few ladies who were from Alabama. One of them really wanted to see and feel the wool roving. I told her I would bring a piece of it to our next event, which happened to be a festive and well-populated rehearsal dinner, an indoor and outdoor event at a spacious home.  I brought the roving, and this pattern to use it on.  At this dinner, a lively event,  I found a quiet corner with these ladies, who included the groom's aunt and one of his grandmothers, and there, at the dining room table, and I gave these ladies their first experience of the very tactile art of needle felting.