Work in progress – Page 2 – Deidre Adams

Ritz-Carlton commission

The commission I’m working on is for the new Ritz-Carlton in Lake Tahoe, set to open later this year. This was a very good contract for Translations Gallery, including several pieces by multiple gallery artists. In addition to the commission piece, they also bought this piece:

Horizon IV, 24 x 24, ©2006 Deidre Adams

And this piece:

Horizon XI, 34 x 34 inches, ©2008 Deidre Adams

Progress on the new version of Iterations is coming along nicely. Quilting and blocking the panels separately made things ridiculously fast. No endless scrunching and turning and readjusting. Then all I had to do was square up the adjoining edges and join them to one another.

To put the panels together, I just set them side by side and stitched them together with a closely spaced zigzag stitch. This required getting the trusty Bernina back out, since the Juki does not do anything but straight stitch. Note the use of the very sexy and high-tech masking tape for basting purposes.

After the panels were all attached, here’s what I ended up with:

At this point, I trim off the edges and put on the binding. This is a faced binding which I turn to the back so it doesn’t show. Now all that remains is to do the painting. After the first few layerings, here’s how it currently looks:

Several more layerings of color will be needed to achieve the final depth and richness I’m after. I should be finished by the end of this weekend if all goes according to plan. But other plans for this weekend include writing an 8-10 page paper for Art & Cultural Heritage class, finishing four 22×30 paintings for Watermedia II, doing client corrections on two freelance design projects, and celebrating Mother’s Day and my birthday, both tomorrow!

I’m certainly not trying to say I’m amazing — flat-out crazy for trying to do everything at once would be much closer to the mark. It is very hard to try to do so many things at once and do them all at your very best level of accomplishment. I’ve found myself having to compromise a lot this semester, which I really do hate. I’ve always been (OK, at least since graduating from high school) kind of a sociopath about wanting all As in school. But really, who cares? I’m not some young kid who’s going to be out looking for my first job and has nothing else but a grade-point average to prove my worth. Why can’t I just relax and not stress out about it?

Since I had three studio classes this semester, it really was too much and I just could not devote the amount of time to every assignment that I would have liked. I did make some work that I was pretty happy with, but I wonder how much better I could have done with more time and proper focus? Well, I’ll start posting some of it soon and you can tell me what you think.

I have finals next week, and then on Friday I’m leaving to drive to Ohio, where I will be attending the SAQA Art & Excellence Conference (held in conjunction with the Quilt National Dairy Barn exhibit). I’ll be teaching a 3-day preconference class called Photoshop for Artists. Then I’ll be heading to the Surface Design Association Conference, Off the Grid, in Kansas City. I’ve been wanting to go to the SDA conference for years, and this was the first time it seemed that everything was in place for me to do it. I’m really looking forward to immersing myself in this textile-focused world for a few days. Should be a lot of fun!

May 9th, 2009|Work in progress|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.

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

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

Hand papermaking for fun and profit

Just kidding about that last part — monetary rewards are unlikely here! But I have been very much enjoying my papermaking class. In fact, it’s quite the all-consuming activity, involving many different materials and techniques.

Over the last several weeks, we’ve been making sheets of paper from cotton and abaca fibers which were obtained as “half stuff” (which means the fibers have been partially processed and sold as compressed dried sheets that the artist then needs to process further into usable pulp), as well as raw plant materials and recycled papers.

Here’s a selection of sheet samples:

From left to right, these are abaca, recycled bond paper printed with black inkjet ink (which turned blue when soaked), cattail mixed with abaca, daylily with abaca, green iris with abaca, kozo with bits of recycled cardboard, dried iris, and kozo papers.

There are several ways to process fiber. The preferred method is to own your own Hollander beater, a specialized machine made just for this purpose. Failing that, an ordinary household blender could be used, which works especially well with recycled paper. Plant fibers must first be cooked, and can then be processed either in a Hollander or blender, or by hand beating with some kind of mallet or a baseball bat — marvelous for releasing tension and long-suppressed aggressions.

Prepared fibers are then suspended in a vat of water, where they can then be made into paper with the use of a mold and deckle — two same-sized frames, one with a screen, which are dipped into the pulp to form the sheet.

Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve made two sizes of my own mold and deckle sets, plus acquired most of what I need for my own papermaking studio, which currently consists of outside on my deck. I don’t know how much paper work I’ll continue to do, but I do have some ideas about combining paper and textile processes for something new in the future.

I’ve been trying to develop ideas for my final project in the class. I want to use recycled paper, because the idea of making something out of another used-up thing has a huge appeal for me. I took a bunch of old unsuccessful watercolor paintings and turned these into a pulp by soaking several hours and then processing with the blender. Here’s a sheet made from this:

The chunky look of it is due to the fact that the original paper consisted of different compositions, including some good 100% cotton and some crappy student-grade stuff. The cotton breaks down better than cheap stuff, which stays chunky. The blue comes from the old placemat I pressed the wet sheet with. This is also how I got the ribbed texture.

I also have a huge stack of old maps which were rescued from a recycle bin where my husband works, and I would love to use these somehow. I need to think up some kind of a concept for them which makes sense as a finished piece, though, and that’s the stumbling block. Better get going on some brainstorming in the sketchbook.

July 18th, 2008|Fiber / mixed media, School, Work in progress|6 Comments