commissioned beginning

This is the preliminary beginning of the piece I am starting for the commissioned piece of the Long Island Pine Barrens.  I am just starting to stitch the main part of the pieces and add small stitched branches.  It is a departure from my typical work, but I had been in a temporary lull so this was the spark of inspiration that has jump started my work again.  Sometimes if you hit a black spot of nothingness you kind of get frightened that the muse of creativity is gone.  Those can be the moments when the lull before the next great moment of a new avenue of opportunity hits.

Hand Dyed Optical llusion

This piece is approximately 6 foot wide by about 7 ft in length.  This particular piece was very challenging.  I started out being able to find the solids , but the marbled pieces needed to be made in just the right tonalities to achieve this three dimensional look.  This took me one year to complete.  I used 100 percent cotton fabrics and dyed the fabrics and used Sea Salt to disperse the dye throughout the cloth to give the marbled look to the cloth.  It tends to be a rather messy operation, so that I did this in the summer when I could get the salt off the dried pieces of cotton when it was drying out in the sun.   This is one of those art quilts that would be considered priceless in light of the time and overall sweat factor that went into completing this piece.  If you turn your head in another direction the pattern will fool your eye and vary from hexagons to cubes.