Posted by: Mary @ 8:32 am
Connie of Dirty Footprints Studio has invited everyone to participate in the 30 Journals 30 Days project today, July 31. Every day for the month of July she has interviewed a different art journaler and posted it to her blog. Today is our turn to share our enthusiasm for this creative mode of expression.
How has Art Journaling impacted, changed, or enhanced your life? Art journaling has allowed me to be more spontaneous and free in expression. It has given me the opportunity to try new things and in a format that I love - books. It is very nice to have a record of my work in one place where I can flip through the pages. A very important aspect of art journaling is that it allows me to combine different media in one vehicle - painting, drawing, writing, photography, collage. It has also been a more portable and easy way to bring my art with me wherever I go - even if that’s just out on the front porch or relaxing on the couch. Art Journaling lets you work just about anywhere.
What are a few of your favorite Art Journaling materials? It is hard to choose just a few as I love all art supplies. First would be my paint brushes and I keep my watercolor and acrylic brushes in separate small fishing tackle boxes with their respective paints. Next would be papers and ephemera of all different kinds and a good pair of scissors. Mark making materials like pitt pens, gel pens, and colored pencils are important. And I can’t live without mat gel medium, UHU glue, gluestick, an old credit card scraper, and things to add texture like bubble wrap, plastic canvas, and a comb. I really love fiber and related items too - fabric, threads, yarns, beads.
Who are some of your favorite art journalers? This is another challenging question as basically I like everything art journaling that I see, even the things that don’t appeal to me directly. Because it is a means of personal expression, I can accept and understand that the person is taking me inside their world. My point of discovery for this type of artistic expression was Somerset’s Art Journaling magazine in Borders and I read these magazines over and over again, never tiring of the images shared inside. Since then I have discovered an explosion of art journalers online which adds to the sense of community. All that being said, here are a few of my favorites:
Connie, Dirty Footprints Studio
Lynne Perella
Pam Carriker
Teesha Moore
Daisy Yellow
Diana Trout
What kind words of encouragement would you say to an Art Journal newbie? The hardest part is getting started. Treat yourself to an issue of Somerset’s Art Journaling magazine, start clicking around art journalers’ blogs and YouTube videos, and get inspired. Gather together some supplies and a sturdy art journal that work for you. When you are ready, start with one page and don’t worry about finishing it. Then start another page. Go back and forth and work on your pages. Do what pleases you and won’t worry about making the pages “perfect”. Letting go will come with time. Remember that you are doing this for yourself… this is for you. Later you can choose what to share with others.
Where can we contact you… give us some link LOVE!
My blog is at maryart.macilvain.com
My web site is at www.macilvain.com
Short Bio
My grandfather gave me my first camera when I was 8 years old and I have long enjoyed capturing that special moment on film. I learned to sew on my mother’s old Singer sewing machine at the age of 11. Quilting and sewing have been a passion for many years because of my love for fabric and all things fiber. Watercolor painting and drawing is something that I do when inspiration comes. Recently I have been getting into scrapbooking, book arts, collage, and mixed media. I absolutely love books and read quite a bit and also enjoy trying new things.
I live in a small town in the northeast or New England part of the United States. My son and daughter are both in college and we have a mischievous cat named Tangerine who was adopted from the Humane Society animal shelter. My career world has touched many areas including computer science, research, web design, graphic design, administrative, marketing, and volunteering. The best part of all has been the people I’ve met along the way.
Enjoy in the doing and be happy in following your own path to express yourself creatively.
Mary
Posted by: Mary @ 9:46 pm
This past weekend I finished a quilt that forms a Shafts of Light Diptych with a quilt created ten years ago, in the year 2000. The original quilt was done as a challenge for the Greater Hartford Quilt Guild retreat that year. The challenge was to interpret the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, Voices of the Night/Prelude, in the form of a quilted object. This theme manifested itself to me as a visualization of abstract beams of light penetrating through the forest. I drew my design on an 18″x24″ newsprint pad (I probably sketched thumbnails first but don’t remember after 10 years) and when satisfied with the angles and layout made a paper pattern using drawing paper. The design or layout of the second quilt is a mirror image of the first quilt but with different fabric choices. It is a rare occasion for me to make a second version of anything as all my work is one of a kind.
The fabrics in both cases were chosen intuitively which is how I usually work. The only plan I did have before choosing colors was the placement of darks, mediums, and lights. Value changes have more of an impact than color because it is differences in value or shading that give a piece contrast and definition. I tend to buy fat quarters (18″x22″ or half a yard cut in half) as that gives me a lot more variety and depth in my pieces. To make a piece like this I drag out all of my fabric and go through it and choose the ones that interest me and that might work until I have a pile of fabric. This is my palette. When I shop for fabric, which isn’t often these days as I have enough on hand, I do that intuitively too, and not with a specific project in mind but with the feeling that I am adding to my palette.
These two quilts are paper pieced which is a method where the pieces of fabric are pinned or held to the wrong side of the paper pattern sections and then you flip it over and sew on the lines on the top of the paper with the fabric underneath the paper. I love to design my own paper piecing patterns and have a collection of those. The only tricky part is that everything is reversed or mirror imaged which can lead to some interesting mistakes. You can find good information about paper piecing on the Carol Doak web site if you are interested. Both pieces are free motion machine quilted and the first quilt (on the right) has beads sewn onto the surface which was done after the quilting was completed. I learned to free motion quilt in several workshops a long while ago and I have taught free motion quilting. There are some excellent books out now that describe the process and the best advice I can give you is to loosely hand baste (so the pins don’t get in the way) a small whole cloth sampler (18″x18″ to 24″x24″) using cotton batting the first time (it doesn’t slip around), drop your feed dogs, put your free motion foot on your sewing machine, relax, and just doodle and play with it until you feel comfortable doing it on a real quilt.
Here is the photo memory wall quilt that I gave my daughter Marianne for Christmas. It was started in a workshop at the quilt retreat and finished at home. Printed Treasures inkjet printable fabric sheets are washable and colorfast and were used to print these photos with excellent results. A few years ago I made a photo bed quilt for her brother Joe with computer and monitor blocks that I had designed. Screen shots of video game scenes were printed using a different brand of inkjet printable fabric sheets and the colors washed out when I washed the quilt. It was very upsetting to have this happen but now I am going to redo the screen shots for his quilt with Printed Treasures brand fabric sheets and applique the retangles down over the washed out scenes.
The valances got finished tonight and now I have pictures of the finished quilt as well as the valances. This gives me a real sense of accomplishment to be finishing things. It also motivates me to continue on with self directed creative work. I am starting to get ideas about designing new quilts for the walls and need to put some sketches down on paper. Some of my best thinking occurs while driving and I have been doing a lot of that lately. Pages of loosely drawn thumbnail sketches are a great way to sort out and compare a lot of different ideas. Usually I use either a sketchbook or computer paper. If the design lends itself to the computer I still sketch on paper first. The touch of hand to paper with pen or pencil activates a different part of your brain and thought process than hand to mouse. Working in a variety of ways keeps your work fresh and your wellspring of creativity overflowing. This is my 50th blog post.
My fall leaves quilt is heading into the home stretch. Last night I finished thread painting the leaves into the colored band border. All that is left to do is the meandering line quilting in the last white border and then the binding. My quilt should be done before winter sets in so that it can go on my bed. This quilt was started 6 years ago and has been to quilting retreats and been a long time in the making. Here are some photos showing how I take over the dining room table to work on the machine quilting. I have a Bernina 1090 which was purchased at a Super Bowl Sunday sale 15 years ago and it still runs great. It is like wrestling an alligator to roll the quilt to get the center portions between the free motion foot and the right side of the machine, bit it can be done. I did not want to send this quilt out for professional machine quilting because I wanted the work to be totally mine. The machine quilting gloves have small rubber bumps on the palms and fingers which provide good traction and flow for moving the work under the needle as it goes up and down.
This quilt was inspired by Mexican Eye of God yarn weavings. It was designed in Adobe Illustrator and foundation pieced on paper patterns. It is 18 inches square and hangs on the wall in my upstairs hallway.
This week’s theme at Three Muses is Up, Up, and Away. It just so happens that I have already created a Hot Air Balloon quilt that is perfect for this challenge. The hot air balloon pattern came from the PC Piecers web site and my hot air balloon blocks came from a block swap with other quilters on the Internet. The quilt is my own design with the hot air balloons arranged in a random pattern in the sky. The quilt measures 30″ wide x 16″ high and hangs in my kitchen on the long wall over my kitchen table.
The dust has settled from graduation and the college quilts have all been washed and aired on the clothesline. My journal quilts project has finally begun, with the theme journey. You can see inspirational journal quilt exhibits at quiltart.com, an internet mailing list for contemporary art quilters. Journal quilts are usually the size of a regular notebook, and can express many different things. My quotation book started out as a journal page last year and ended up being trimmed down for a book cover. Here are my first two journal quilt beginnings sewn down to a muslin base. Next they will be machine quilted onto peltex and perhaps embellished after that. I have a tendency to plan things out and am working in an intuitive manner here as that can be quite freeing and leads to interesting design solutions.
My folder full of sketches for journal quilts was found buried in a pile and that will be a great starting point for a renewed interest in quilting. I haven’t been able to sew or work on any quilts since the hand injury last September and need to start slow. Life in general has not been conducive to quiltmaking for a number of years but things are starting to settle out.
The piece I was working on last summer was my rainbow leaves quilt for my bed which has been a long while in the making. I designed three different foundation pieced leaves as well as a random appearing layout over a grid using Adobe Illustrator. I am wrestling the alligator and doing free motion machine quilting myself using Sulky rayon thread along with Valdani hand-dyed variegated thread in the border. In the strip colored border I am thread painting various freeform leaves interconnected by vines. In the white background areas I am creating a meandering puzzle pattern. The leaves themselves are left unquilted so that they will appear slightly raised from the surface.
My local quilt guild hosted a quilted postcard mail swap last year and I decided to keep two additional postcards for myself. I layered the front and back fabric pieces with Pellon peltex from Joann etc to make the postcards stiff enough to go through the postal mail. Then I free motion machine quilted or needle painted a free form thread design onto the surface of whole cloth Bali batik fabric from Indonesia and satin stitched around the edges using Sulky rayon thread. The green postcard has three rows of embroidery thread couched down to the surface.
