Work in Progress

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with great food and family!  My sister, Susan, hosted our Thanksgiving dinner at her family's house and the food was awesome as always.  Each of us brought something to add to the feast.  Most importantly, it was a chance to reconnect and see what everyone was working on.  I should probably get going on my holiday shopping today but the thought of getting caught up in tons of traffic and over-crowded stores just doesn't get me excited.  So...I am here...in my studio working on a variety of creative ideas.

This is my Garden Party-2 Thermofax screen set printed with white acrylic onto a dark moss colored cotton fabric.  The flowers have been painted with watercolor and I decided to play a little with stencilling around the images to blend the mini canvas into the background fabric a little better.  Using white and metallic gold acrylic paints, I layered different small designs around the image.

Here I have been experimenting with backgrounds for this set.  I dug out a really pretty light tangerine colored fabric that I had in my stash that picked up on the gold paint and the center parts of the flowers.  The fabric has a little green threads running through it and ties together well with the dark moss.  Now I am experimenting with placement to create a raw-edged collage on a larger canvas.  I want to add some hand-stitching to these as well.

Here is the large screen from my Tulip Trio screens.  I had printed this screen using ecru acrylic paint onto a tea-dyed muslin.  The off-white effect of the paint was interesting when I came in with the watercolors on the flowers as it had a warmer, softer blending effect, different from the bright white I used on most of the prints.  Here, I have screen-printed and stenciled the background then attached small pieces using French knots and running stitches. The colors look a lot better than what you see here as I didn't have the right light when I took the photo.  It is a warm and inviting piece that would look great on top of some antique lace or in a distressed wood frame.

Here are my original prints of Garden Party-1 on the yellow-green cotton fabric using white acrylic paint.  I created a mask and screen-printed stripes with a blend of yellow, orange, pink and white acrylic paints.  I love this effect because I slightly mix the colors together before printing with them and I love the blending effects!  I stitched each of the four pieces to white fabric and added French knots to the stamens for added texture.

There was a whole lot of creative juice flowing yesterday and my nieces shared a couple of their own journal pages.  This is an awesome page by Melanie!  I am in love with this page!!

Here, my niece, Erika, drew her rendition of a clay mask that Melanie had previously made.  I think she hit it right on!!

Here is one of Erika's journal pages showing contrasts to good and bad girls!   Very intuitive!!  Obviously the interpretation of Bad Girls being associated with Rock & Roll has not changed.  I think we, I mean they, are unfairly judged!!! LOL Great job Erika!!