Making leaf prints, and other good news.

The printmaking season is winding down here. I enjoy the immediacy of working with natural materials, and I took advantage of this mild autumn to make a few more leaf prints while I could.

I got all excited about catalpa trees in 2008, and made some wonderful cyanotype and heliographic prints. Then I got sidetracked by something more urgent, or some kind of deadline, and set them aside. 

I was walking a woodsy trail recently and a catalpa leaf literally fell from a tree and onto me, so I took it as a sign and gathered a few more.  They are satisfyingly big leaves.
  I used my large Gelli plate and made both direct and “ghost” prints.  I got a bit exuberant with the colors.  They are up on the design wall, taunting me to ignore all the other projects in the queue, so we shall see. 

While I was at it, I made some sycamore leaf prints.   They are also a substantial leaf.  I have the beginnings of an idea on how I will use them—I have some new animal skulls that I want to work with, to add to my Flora and Fauna series. 
 
In other news:

My DVD, Surface Design Essentials for the Printed Quilt, is available for a limited time as a printmaking kit.  You receive the DVD, a copy of Quilting Arts Magazine with my how-to article on cyanotype printing, and a pack of treated cotton cyanotype fabric, so you can jump right in and start creating.  Get it while you can at the Interweave Store!  The DVD also has complete and concise instructions on heliographic printing, themofax printing, and collagraphy, so it is a very good deal.  The kit would make a lovely birthday or holiday gift. 

For my friends attending The International Quilt Festival in Houston this week, be sure to look for my “Silk Mill #1” in the Tactile Architecture Exhibit.
And last but not least, I’ve received word that my work will be included in Sandra Sider’s compilation book, 1000 Quilt Inspirations, to be released in February 2015.  I’ve seen lots of other acceptance notices from artists I admire, so I know it’s going to be an excellent volume.  It’s available on preorder from the publisher and from Amazon.

As always, thanks for reading and commenting.

Catalpa Cyanotypes

The cyanotype gods were smiling on me yesterday. I had the time, I had the ideas, and the weather was perfect for it, hot and sunny and calm. I made a lot of prints for use in the catalpa quilt, using transparencies I prepared from digital pictures. Above you can see two of them printing--they are under glass, and you can see the reflection of my arms as I take the picture in the upper left.



Here's the resultant prints, after they been rinsed out, dried and pressed:



The images may look a bit abstract here, but I know where I am going with them--they will read differently in the context of the complete quilt top. They are nice and crisp, and the color is just good and rich. These are on a cotton sateen that I had custom treated by Blueprints on Fabric. I love her stock fabrics and use them often, but she also does a wonderful job of custom treating, and the hand and slight texture of the sateen is just what I wanted to convey the substance of the tree branches here.

More Catalpa Prints

The weather is spectacular, clear and dry and sunny, and I took advantage of it to make a couple of quick heliograhic prints. I'm using catalpa leaves I gathered some time ago. I don't usually use dried leaves, but when I gathered them conditions were not conducive, so it had to wait.



These are on silk twill, which has a bit more body than silk charmeuse, but still wicks the paint around in wonderful ways, and has a lovely sheen.

It's Not a Linear Process

Two years ago I received as a gift, from someone who knows me well, some catalpa leaves that were wonderfully weather beaten and tattered. I made some prints that I was all excited about, and hung them up on the design wall. Then I got distracted by other projects that were currently underway, and deadlines that had to be met, and so on and so forth.

I thought about the catalpa prints from time to time, and painted some fabrics in similar colorways that could prove useful, but that was as far as it went.

Yesterday I found myself in a park outside of my usual rounds, looked up, and realized that I was standing under an enormous old catalpa. I took a lots of pictures, from all possible angles, and some of them turned out very well.

So now I am all excited again. I'm thinking about ways to combine the prints and the pictures, and what kind of orientation to use, and how I want the piece to flow. One day soon I hope to carve out the time to completely immerse in the intensive work of putting the top together. Then there will probably be a break, short or long, while I assimilate what I've done and contemplate how to do the stitching. That will be followed by the grunt work of wrangling it under the machine for the quilting, adding the binding, and possibly the many meditative hours of beading.

Next there's the photography and photo editing, adding it to the website, and other documentation. I'll enter it into shows, hope it gets accepted somewhere, and keep track of shipping schedules.

I enjoy every part of the process, with the possible exception of the binding, but it's not a linear one. The physical work progresses in certain steps, but they are not always orderly. And the really important part, the conceptualization, can be encouraged but not forced.

So I am often at a loss when I am asked about a piece "how long did that take"? I am thrilled when someone cares enough about my work to talk with me about it, so I try my best to answer. Sometimes it's just an icebreaker of a question, a way to start a dialogue, and I can talk about the process and what's involved, and we go from there.

Other times there is genuine and understandable curiosity about the actual number of hours involved. I've read that some quilters actually keep a time sheet, but I am not one of them. Where would I start? The hike I took to discover the plants? The photography and editing? The time spend making prints? The years invested in collecting fabrics and working on technical skills? How could I possibly quantify the time spent corralling inspiration and wrestling design principles to the ground? So my standard answer in this scenario is, "this piece took several hundred hours", which is surely true!