Do You Ever See Art Quilts Honored On Television?

     There are lots of television shows that honor paintings and sculpture, but it is rare to see art quilts even mentioned, so it was a delight when I was watching the Sunday Morning Show on CBS September 4 when they featured quilt artist Susan Madden as an artist in residence in Mesa Verde National Park. Video and Article If the video doesn't play for you, you can try to scroll down to find the link on its page and click on it. Some times it played for me and sometimes it didn't. At the end of the vignettes on The Sunday Morning Show, they always show a sun created by an artist. I sent them an image of a quilted sun I made several years ago and they showed mine several times. It was a thrill to see it on National TV.

zendoodled sun

     It is for sale on my website. It is one of my early quilts that I did when I taught a workshop on how to to do zendoodling and painting on fabric for my art group. It would be a nice artwork to hang in a child's bedroom. And it led to me writing an article for Quilting Arts Magazine in their June/July 2012 Issue. It's nice to see that art quilts are expanding off the pages of magazines and onto the screens of television. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please leave a comment on their posts so that the artists know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

Creating an object for the Background

Hello Everyone,
Please leave comments for me. It's much more fun to blog if I know people care about reading my blog.
I hope you are all having a wonderful artful day. I spent the morning trying to figure out how to make my Epson scanner work with the new OSX system I downloaded from Apple. A nice young man from Epson walked me through it and now it's fine again. But I digress...

In a previous post I showed you the background fabrics I'll be working with for this quilt on prayer flags. I thought my next step would be to quilt it, but luckily I thought it out more before I began sewing. I realized I want the quilting to go over an object that will be placed onto the background. So I had to paint the object onto fabric first. Remember I wanted an ethereal look, so I experimented with different fabrics.
Here is my end result.

Sun/Moon/Orb

And here is my experiment which involved a bit of serendipity (I love when that happens).
I placed white cotton muslin on my plastic sheet to protect the table. Then I put a piece of voile (a thin fabric on top. Then I put a piece of chiffon (even thinner) on top of that.
I used teal and russet textile paints from Jacquard, white acrylic paint, and yellow ochre Golden Fluid Acrylic paint, and GAC from Golden. I used those brands and types because that is what I already had and I must be frugal these days.

I just started painting on top of the chiffon (the topmost layer) and added water when needed. When I liked the way it looked I separated the layers and let them dry. Here are those results:

the painted muslin

the painted chiffon

the painted voile

I tried using different combinations of these three, but there was too much orange to go well with the background. And then I glanced over at a piece of muslin that I had been using as a wipe rag for awhile to clean my brushes. It had just the right amount of all the colors I wanted. Perfect colors.

the painted wipe rag cut into a sphere

 So I put the painted chiffon on top of it and that is how I got the orb I needed for the sky. So now I can quilt.                                            Please leave comments. My stats are showing there are readers of my blog, but I'm getting lonely here. :)