Something Fun

Every so often I like to spend a week or two doing something artistically different.  Maybe with fabric or maybe not.  At these times, I typically pick up a good art book and spend time reading it and working through some of the exercises.  This time, it was Cas  Holmes’ book, Stitch Stories.

If you’re not familiar with her work, she does lots of layered collages, with sheer fabrics, hand stitching, paper, and more.  Her pieces have a lovely fragile look to them.  Which made me want to try something similar. I decided to make some small collages.

This is where I started.  A friend taught our small group of art quilters how to use Inktense pencils and aloe gel.  She went above and beyond, preparing each of us an appliqued sampler to work on.  Mine had 3 pears, which I colored.

You can also see my little color swatch, above, onto which I was recording different colors.

This had been sitting on my work table for several months and I didn’t know what to do with it.  So, I decided I would cut it up and use it as the base for several collages.  Fun already!

Following Cas’ example of using vintage linens and papers, I gathered my materials.

Do you see that cream crochet above?  It’s part of a table cloth, crocheted by my great grandmother.  Thankfully, I have a very practical aunt, who loves art.  When she came across this stained table cloth, she offered it to me, making it clear that I COULD CUT IT UP and use it in my art!  How progressive is that?

Here’s my first collage, early on.  As you can see, I quickly deviated from a yellow and neutral palette and added green.

And here it is, with the second pear drawn on.  I didn’t draw in the third one, since I wanted each collage to have a different number or arrangement of pears.  The drawn outline will be stitched in black.

I’m excited about these collages!  I’ll show you more in the next post.

Ellen Lindner