Fiber / mixed media – Page 4 – Deidre Adams

A brief interruption…

Wall Sketch #1, photo transfer and watercolor on artist-made paper. 9×9 inches (matted to 15×15). ©2009 Deidre Adams.

I have a couple more France posts I want to do, but I’m back in school now, already behind, and I’ve had two more short road trips since my last post. I can’t believe how fast time is screaming by.

But I wanted to post these images while the topic is still fresh. Translations Gallery is going to be featuring some smaller works by their gallery artists, so I brought these in last week. These are mixed-media works on paper, matted and backed, and inserted into Clearbags. I will also have some full-size watercolors to post as soon as I get them to the gallery.

Landmarks #1, photo transfer and watercolor on paper. 8×10 inches (matted to 11×14). ©2009 Deidre Adams.

Landmarks #2, photo transfer and watercolor on paper. 9×9 inches (matted to 15×15). ©2009 Deidre Adams.

Landmarks #3, photo transfer and watercolor on paper. 8×10 inches (matted to 11×14). ©2009 Deidre Adams.

Wall Sketch #2, photo transfer, clear gesso, watercolor, and gouache on paper. 7×7 inches (matted to 13×13). ©2009 Deidre Adams.

Wall Sketch #3, photo transfer, acrylic gel medium, and watercolor on artist-made paper. 8×10 inches (matted to 11×14). ©2009 Deidre Adams.

September 1st, 2009|Fiber / mixed media, Painting|6 Comments

Ritz-Carlton commision finished

Iterations #2, 30 x 66 inches, ©2009 Deidre Adams

I finished this piece about a month ago, just before I left for Ohio (see images of the work in progress here and here). The commission was to make a copy of a work that had sold previously. The difference was that I needed to make the orange more red to coordinate with a swatch of fabric from some furniture that will be in the lobby area where the work will be hung. The swatch also has a kind of shiny copper look to it, so I put some metallic copper paint into the new one as well. I’m posting the original here again because it’s fun to see the comparison.

Iterations #1: Aquamarine, 30 x 66 inches, ©2006 Deidre Adams

While I was working on the color in the new piece, I was looking at an image of the old one on my computer screen in the studio and trying to make judgments based on that, but now that I see the photos together, I’m really surprised at how different the second one turned out. I knew the spaces between the stones were bigger and I had consciously decided that I wanted the negative spaces to be darker in this one, but the colors are more different than I expected, with a lot more contrast. I guess for me, making an exact copy turned out to be more difficult than I would have thought.

I delivered the piece just before I left town, and Judy and Kate from Translations both said they liked it better than the original, so that set my mind at ease. I hope the Ritz-Carlton likes it too.

Now, for another twist on this story. Translations moved into a new gallery space in the heart of Denver’s LoDo area last month. It’s a beautiful new space and the location offers much greater visibility and traffic potential than their old one. (They got a good write up in the Denver Post, which I meant to talk about here on my blog, but never got a response from the Post as to whether I could have permission to repost the photo, so I forgot about it.) A new customer came into the gallery and saw the work which was going to the Ritz-Carlton, which includes this piece:

Horizon IV, 24 x 24, ©2006 Deidre Adams

She loved this one, and so now I have another commission to recreate an existing piece — except she doesn’t like yellow too much and wants me to make it more red.

Is it true that something becomes more desirable when it’s unobtainable? (Like that guy I broke up with once in my younger years but then wanted him back as soon as I found out he had a new girlfriend and was going to take her to the Bob Seger concert? Wow, dating myself here!)

June 15th, 2009|Fiber / mixed media|7 Comments

Hello, old friend…

Today I took the dust cover off of my beloved Juki DDL-8700-7 for the first time in months. I haven’t done any sewing since the beginning of the semester back in January. I’ve been very busy with my studio classes in printmaking, watermedia, and painting, as well as a class for my general studies science requirement called Ecology for Non-Majors and a multi-cultural requirement class called Art & Cultural Heritage. In addition to this, I have several freelance design projects going on, but I really find it boring when people go on ad nauseum about how busy they are, so enough said about that.

The studio work has good and bad points. While it does push me to think in new directions and takes me out of my established patterns, it also distracts me from pursuing my own body of work. My mind is full of lots of ideas and concepts for things I want to do, none of them having anything to do with fabric. I’ve been really enjoying the painting and mixed media work I’ve been doing this semester, both in watermedia on paper and acrylic on canvas. So much so that I’ve wondered if I even want to go back to doing my textile work in the near term.

Well, something did come up that kind of forced the issue. Thanks to the very hard work of Kate and Judy at Translations Gallery, I have a commission! That’s the good news. Bad news: it’s due May 18, just a few short weeks away. The client wants another version of a piece I’ve already done, sold to EnCana Corp. last year, but now with a slight variation of the color on the bottom strip.

So last night I got started on the prep work of cutting and ironing the fabric and basting the pieces together with the batting. Then this morning, I got down to the serious business of the quilting. Well, just a few minutes into it and I quickly remembered why I love the textile medium. The magic is still there. This medium has a tactile hands-on aspect that simply is not available in the other media I’ve been working in. I love the feeling of the fabric in my hands, the meditative back-and-forth rhythm of the stitching process, and the zone I get into when I’m working this way. The finished product has a dimension and depth that a painting lacks.

When I made this piece the first time, I was working with my Bernina Artista 180. At that time, I thought it was a pretty good machine, and it is, but I was feeling dissatisfied with it because of the restrictions of the small area of the center open space (I’m too lazy to look up the technical term for this, so if anyone knows offhand, please chime in) and also because I felt like it was too slow — I pretty much had it floored all the time and it still felt like it took forever to quilt something. It has a lot of fancy stitches and an embroidery attachment, which I have used exactly once. While it is a very fancy machine and cost a lot of money, it just was not built to do what I need it to do, which is take a huge pounding putting a gazillion stitches into some rather large pieces.

My first try at remedying the situation was the Grand Quilter from Pfaff. The store I went to is used to selling this machine with a frame and setup stuff that basically turns it into a long-arm quilting machine. I didn’t want all that stuff, I only wanted the machine, so they really weren’t equipped to deal with my questions. I bought it anyway and took the thing home, but within 30 minutes of using it, I knew I wasn’t going to be happy with it. It was very loud and clunky and I returned it the next day.

The next step was to go to industrial. In Denver, that means Ralph’s Industrial Sewing Machine Company. This was a whole new realm for me. Turns out there is an amazing variety of industrial machines out there, including machines built to quilt mattresses, so they also had a hard time understanding what I needed. We went through quilt a few different models, with me testing each one using a sample quilt I had brought with me. I finally settled on this Juki machine because it sews 5,500 stitches per minute, has a large opening and an automatic thread cutter, and it counts down how much thread is left on the bobbin. Cool! It’s heavy and solid and sits in its own table. It is also amazingly smooth and quiet, and it has its own oil pan so I don’t have to oil it. Yay! Another bonus: everything in the industrial machine world, like thread and needles, is SO much cheaper than in the commercial home sewing world.

It was a bit traumatic getting the machine to work in the beginning. Because it was designed for straight-stitch garment sewing and I was doing free-motion quilting, which means yanking the piece in all different directions, I had a lot of thread breakage issues at first. Luckily, the technicians at Ralph’s are very professional, and the guy who came out on three different occasions finally hit on the right combination of presser foot, throat plate, bobbin case, needle, and customized hook assembly so that now it’s smooth sailing, full steam ahead. I can even use rayon thread with very little problem.

I’ve decide that this time, I’m going to work this piece in three separate sections and put them together after the quilting process, because it’s very difficult to keep the lines between the sections straight when each has different amounts of quilting from the others. This time, I finished the quilting on the first section of the piece in just a couple of hours — a huge improvement on the last time.

April 11th, 2009|Fiber / mixed media, Work in progress|6 Comments