penny-studionotes-2

One of the printing techniques I learned in a workshop with Carol Soderlund last October was "deconstructed screen printing."  It's a way of preparing a silk screen with various textures and thickened dye so that you get multiple prints from the one screen, but the pattern printed changes as the screen "deconstructs." You can also pull through different colors of thickened dye to further vary the prints.  (I've put a few links at the bottom of the post for anyone who would like to learn more about this type of printing.) You can see the fabric as originally printed in this view of the wall with my work during the workshop.  the deconstructed piece is towards the center, right under my name, multiple prints going down a piece of fabric (click on photo to see this better): I think I added another layer of grey and tan dye on parts of the cloth.  Then I cut it all up into 3-1/2" squares and played around with them.  Below is an early arrangement, which I l...

I finished piecing the top of "Regret" back in March, described here , where you can see the whole composition.  It took me a long time to figure out what to do about the quilting.  My working plan was to do straight-line machine stitching, which I felt to be in keeping with the starkness of the image/message.  Here's a small maquette I did, quilted in this fashion. (Figures in the final version are placed slightly differently.) But I couldn't figure out what to do in the black figures, which I thought should be quilted differently from the background.  I was also considering parallel lines going in just one direction through the whole quilt, maybe diagonally.  I had considered hand-quilting, but didn't want the "softness" of look/feel one gets with hand-stitching.  And part of me felt, "I've been working on this quilt long enough.  I want to get it over with, and machine stitching will be so much quicker." Then I took Dorothy Caldwell'...