New Projects!

This past weekend I took part in a new venture being launched by my good friend Judy Gula at Artistic Artifacts. Judy will now be offering a selection of wonderful "artsy- Classic" patterns for creating clothing using hand crafted and embellished fabrics. Judy specializes in hand dyed vintage fabrics and wants to encourage all of us to create marvelous clothes that speak of our passions. She asked a group of us to pick a pattern and create garments that we would wear to unveil her new direction for her business, at an Opening Event. Judy and her Mom put on a wonderful Opening Tea on Sunday last! It was such fun to wear my new shirt and to see all of the incredible garments that others had made!!
I went thru my extrensive stash of fabrics and chose a wonderfully vibrant Red Linen/Rayon blend fabric that I had picked up years ago in Oklahoma. ( I really am Stash Busting!!!!) Just this past June, while at a Quilt Expo, I met the wonderful Proprietress of Batik Tambal, a business that travels the world collecting wonderful Batik panels for use in the sewing arts. You have probably noticed their adds in Quilting Arts magazine amoung others. I bought 6 small panels (they were 50% off!!) knowing that I had to have them but not sure what they would become.

As I love the color combo of red and turquoise, I went for bold and beautiful ,and chose the above panel to bead and embellish to put on the back of my shirt.

Once beaded, it looked like this:

I had another panel with similar colors that pictured two masks. As I knew that I wanted to put some sort of embellishment on the front of the shirt as well, I cut that panel in half and beaded it.
Here is the half panel to be placed on the front.

So at 11:30 am Sunday morning I was still stitching on the last little details!!! The event began at 1pm Sunday afternoon!!!!
I had hoped to have a nice pair of black slacks to go along with the shirt but everyone felt that the shirt went great with Jeans and could also be dressed up with black pants!!! Good thing, as making another garment was just not in the cards for this time!!!!

As I was not at all excited about putting a last minute button hole right on the front of this piece (for fear that I would mess it up) I went with a more creative closure. I used a vintage button (again from my stash) and made a beaded loop using beads in the same color scheme as the batik panels. This small detail has become my favorite part of the whole piece!!!

I did not take as many pictures of all of the other wonderful garments at our show but I do have a few to share. I got swept away in looking at all of the marvelous details and talking with the creators to have time to bother with lots of pictures.. Here are the few that I did take!! .


This is a detail shot of a glorious silk shirt made by my wonderful friend and sewing Mentor. Jean Trammel. Jean is an amazing artist, beader and seamstress extoirdinaire who is an invaluable resource and source of encouragemnet for all of us. She did this wonderful japanese embroidery work on the yolks of this piece! Simply Stunning Work!!!!
this shirt was created by another wonderful artist and new friend Lynda Poole Prioleau. Lynda is an amazing textile artist as well as a phenomenal singing talent, who teaches several classes at Artistic Artifacts. A textile class with Lynda is an incredible treat!!!!

With my fresh experience with clothing design and creation, I plan to forge ahead and make the garment that I spoke of in the previous post. I'll be making use of my collection of hand dyed linens and sunprints!! I hope to have results for you by sometime next week!!!

Art On all and have a great week!!

Perfect Weather For Sunprints!!

Crisp and sunny fall days are perfect for sunprints and Saturday was THE day. I was up and out gathering my weeds , seed pods and ferns quite early. I carefully laid them in a pile in the shade of a tree, near the sunny portion of the yard.

The boys were up and out early as well' as they wanted to get the lawn done quickly. A warning was given about my pile of gatherings and the mowers started to rumble. I came out with my fabric to find the pile mulched and the warnings forgotten- at least the lawn got mowed!!! SIGH!!!

So I gathered again!! As the most successful foliage to use is either in my garden or growing by the roadside, I had no trouble finding more supplies!!!!

Here is the linen( pieces of a large rustic tablecloth- a yard sale find) laid out in the sun with the dye and the foliage bits, drying.

On the cobalt blue piece I used everything from weeds to Hosta Seed Pods to ferns to dill seed heads!


For this oragne piece I used Creeping jenny Groundcover and tiny maple seedling leaves. With such low humidity, everything was dry in about an hour!!
Here are the results!!

Here you can see the hosta seed pod stalk and an umbrell seed head from my Dill Seed crop (near the top). I love the airy versus crisp outlines of the various folliage elements. Or as Ariel Freeman, my watercolor instuctor would say, "All of the wonderful mix of hard and soft edges!"

Here are the sunprints paired with some of the same pieces of table cloth that were dyed in my recent dying workshop at Artistic Artifacts. The blue sunprint will become the back of a shirt, with the orange as a sleeve, and the other colors will be used to fill in the remaining components to create a very colorful linen shirt!!! Can't wait to get started!!! Must be sure to heat set the sunprints before I do anything else!!!!!!

Have a wonderful day!!!