I am really enjoying being home for the month of January and not having a lot of pressing deadlines. So I've just finished dyeing 32 meters of blues, blues/purples, and purples in preparation for upcoming teaching travels. Half of them are soaking in a cold water soak, and the other half has been washed out and is drying on the line in my basement.
The other thing I've been enjoying doing is updating class samples. It is fun to make things using the methods I teach, without any pressure to make something that is show worthy. So in the last couple of days I've turned out two little samples for my "Free-Form Curves" class. I intend to make new samples for all my "free form" classes. Each is a one day class, and I teach all five methods in my week-long "Serendipity Strips & Curves" class at Haliburton School of the Arts.
The two little samples I made were inspired by this photograph I took at Antelope Canyon, Arizona. I was not expecting the pieces to look like this, but rather be an abstraction of what I see there, and I also wanted the colours to be inspired by this photo.
The first piece I turned out looks like this. I wasn't totally happy with the orange ending up to the left and right of the yellow, but I'm not unhappy with the piece. It's just that the result isn't quite what I envisioned.
Such is the nature of free-form piecing. One has to be open to what one gets to a certain extent. In my second piece, I addressed the orange on both ends of the yellow by making the orange more central. I'm happier with this one.
I've also been experimenting with cutting tree bark for tree collages, using my Brother ScanNCut. I learned a lot during that exercise that I am going to share in my next blog post.
Oh, and remember the negative shapes left when I cut out all the circles for my fern quilt? I've fused them to a multi-coloured hand-dyed fabric, and now I'm going to cut it up and play at a design. However, it does make me happy looking at it just the way it is.
