Collabor'actions Art Show

Barkinado Bocoum and Manel Ndoye, "Sans Titre"

This Thursday past, Loman Art House hosted the art opening for their show Collabor'actions.

The show included paintings, a fashion show, several lamps and mosaics.  Many of the works shown were co-efforts with locally well known artists, however also on display were works that were collaborations between students and teachers.  The Loman Art House mission includes teaching art skills and using recycled materials and this was evident in the work displayed.  It will be interesting how the collaborations effect the artists in their future work.

Alexis Peskine in collaboration with students, "Sans Titre", painted nails, paint, wood

Geoff Cressman and Sophie Markl, "Opposites Attract", Mosaic in glass, metal and resin

Loman Pawlitschek, metal and paint

Crowd at the Loman Art House opening, just before the fashion show

Collabor'actions is on display September 26 through October 26.

Starry Night

This week's contest entry is Seven Sisters in Purple Space for the Constellations contest on Spoonflower. The Seven Sisters is another name for the constellation also known as the Pleiades or M45.  I have drawn a stylized set of the stars in the constellation and layered them in different directions.  Please consider voting for me.

Designing for Shoes!

This week's Spoonflower fabric contest is to design a geometric print in a small scale suitable for shoes.  The winners get custom made shoes from Milk and Honey!  This is the mock up I made with my fabric design using one of their shoe templates. It is just to give you an idea of how the design might look, the real deal will not look exactly like this.  Please consider voting for me.

Nostalgia: Brookside Gardens Fabric Design

I spent around ten years living in the Washington DC Metro area.  During that time one of my favorite places to go was Brookside Gardens.  Really, I love the entire extended Wheaton Regional Park.  I have taken many pictures there, including this one of the Japanese Tea House shown below.  When I read about the Spoonflower competition Kuler Spaces I knew that this would probably be the space I chose to explore.  I have been meaning to create some art with this garden as inspiration and this was an opportunity to do something really novel.  The background of the fabric is taken from the woven reeds/sticks that make of the ceiling of the teahouse.  I used the photo below as well as photos of flowers from the garden, turtles from the pond, swallows that I saw flitting around the teahouse and of course the Japanese Maple.
Adobe's Kuler program picks a selection of colors based on a photograph. The Spoonflower contest requires the designer to use only the color palette from their photo in the fabric design. The Kuler program is a fun toy to play with and there is an iPad and a browser based version of the software.   Because there was no other theme this week's contest is one of the most diverse group of entries I have seen.   Please consider voting.

Brookside Gardens

 



The color pallete selected by Kuler from my photograph



Island Jewel: Sewing a Harem Style Jumper

 Almost a year ago I purchased some pretty jewel tone prints with the plan on making something for my daughter.  At the time she would not wear any color other than pink.   Finally, she ready for other colors (although I did have to promise to sew her a pink dress as well.) 
The Process
The Aladdin Pants on the Blooms N Bugs blog were inspirational, however, I used my own process. While in the United States this summer, I purchased a tank top that coordinated with my fabric.  Using a pair of her pants I traced a template for the inseam of the pants but left the outer edge open--about 18 inches out.  I sewed the pants along the template I created so far.  The next step was to pin and baste box pleats around the waist with the exception in the center front, center back and about 4 inches on the sides.  I did not pleat the center front and back to avoid weird pulling in the crotch.  The sides were unpleated so I could adjust the last pleats to the diameter of the waist.  I sewed the sides up and then created the final box pleats on the sides. I trimmed about 4 inches from the bottom of the tank and then sewed the pants on to the bottom edge of the tank. The next step was to gather the bottom edges of each leg and fit them into the homemade binding tape cuff from contrasting fabric. The gathers should be lighter on the inside of the leg and fuller on the toward the outside.  Lastly, I added the contrasting belt. 
My girl seems to be enjoying her new jumper.

A Little Rococco

Its time for another Spoonflower fabric design contest.  The theme this week is fashion fabrics.  This seems like an incredibly open-ended contest and I expect many entries with some very different takes on 'fashion.'  I decided to focus my design on the fashionable hats and hairstyles of 18th Century Europe and really concentrated on France in particular. I limited my palette (color selection) and tried to capture a torn paper look for each of the portraits.

Another fabric design contest is up an running on Connecting Threads, a quilting fabric vendor.  Connecting Threads asked artists to submit designs with no particular theme in mind and artists could submit as many designs as they like.  Five winning artists will then create a collection based on the winning design.  I submitted three designs, the one below, the Moroccan Tiles print from the previous post and Garden Path with Chickens.  My designs are on page 20 under 'All Categories.'

  Thanks for taking the time to vote!

Under African Skies

As you have read in my blog in the past, I am living in Senegal.  The fabric, culture and architecture of African is very inspirational for many of my designs (available as fabric, wallpaper, giftwrap and decals in my Spoonflower shop.)
The African Visage print was inspired by African motifs in wax prints as well as the theme for the Dakar Women's Group art show this year: Visage.

African Faux Lace uses the same background motifs and peanut plant leaves as in African Visage along with netting to create a lace overlay effect over the background.  Included in the second row of African Faux Lace swatches is an example of my lozenge style design, Senegal 1.2 directly inspired by wax prints.

My newest prints coming out Moroccan Tiles and Radiant Spokes have a north African inspiration. This time mainly architectural details.  First picture is of detail of the design and second picture is the view of a quarter yard, like the designs shown above.  These prints will be available soon from my Spoonflower shop.