Fiberart For A Cause: The 100.

I am both honored and excited to be contributing to this wonderful cause again!  Virginia Spiegel has championed this project annually since 2006.  Collectively, these events have raised $240,000.  This year 100 artists have created artwork for sale and we hope to raise at least $10,000 and push the total to $250,000.00.  And this is the best part:  100% of this money goes to the American Cancer Society.  No one contributing gets a "cut" of this money:  every single penny that is raised goes to the organization.   I hope the recipient "falls in love" with this piece.  I have been looking at the Pinterest board dedicated to this project and I am very excited about all the lovely artwork.

And, as much as I wish I didn't have to say it: this is personal.  I lost my niece to cancer almost a year ago to the day.  I have a good friend who is battling pancreatic cancer as I write.  My mother had breast cancer.   I have a friend who awaits test results right now.   Another close friend just fought this battle.  We all know too many people like that.  Some of you may have fought through this.

The auction opens at 10:00 CST on Wednesday, February 4th!  Here is the link.

I am offering this mixed media construction.

It is mounted on a 16x20 stenciled wrapped canvas so it will be very easy to hang.

The piece is made from a variety of cloth and paper which has been hand and machine stitched.

The collage is overlaid onto a piece of hand-made paper, then a piece of canvas.

I will pay the shipping cost for this piece.  All you have to do is be ready to purchase it!

detail 1

detail 2

detail 3

This is the back of the canvas.....

Thanks for stopping by!  I hope you are able to support Fiberart For A Cause! xo Leslie

Cas Holmes Workshop in San Diego

Lucky me!  I had the opportunity to travel to San Diego to participate in a workshop with the amazing Cas Holmes.  Cas is the author of "The Found Object", among others, and is an artist I have admired and respected for years.  I jumped at th chance to study with her.  The other wonderful part was I spent time with my dear friend Jeannie Palmer Moore!
The workshop was held in a wonderful space in Liberty Station.  I was so impressed with the way this decommissioned Naval base was transformed into a vibrant area that has spaces for art-related nonprofits, restaurants and grocers, bars, condos, and I even spotted North Sails, which are the brand of sails I used to have on my former boat.  That was fun to see.
Here are a few images from the workshop:

After a collaborative drawing experience each student was tasked with isolating an area from the 

drawing(s) and simplifying the lines in order to create a stamp.

Stamp-in-progress

Stamp on paper using watered-down acrylic paint

Cas demonstrating a collage technique

Workshop participants look at one of Cas' lovely samples.

A beautifully stitched, embroidered piece made of cloth and paper bits.

A dilute mixture of Methyl Cellulose is used as a temporary way to adhere components in place.

Some elements....

Cas wasn't really put in the stocks.  But she did like her sign!

Here is the hand-embroidered piece I created for Cas' installation called

Tea-Flora Tales. 

Here is another link to see more samples.

I intend to create more and send them to her.  Please join me!

Here are some other samples of donated pieces for Tea Flora Tales.

Here are two of my compositions, not-quite-finished.

So happy to have had the opportunity to study with Cas!

Artist Play Date in SoCal with Jamie Fingal

Greetings!  Last weekend I flew to Orange County CA to attend a family wedding.  I extended my stay in order to get some work done with my friend and partner in crime, Jamie Fingal.  We do a great deal together:  teach, curate, and more, but we rarely afford ourselves the opportunity to simply play.  In fact, I'm not sure we have ever taken an afternoon and created something that was not intended for a workshop or some other project.  So, it felt really luxurious and fun to take the afternoon before I headed to the airport and simply make art.
The Sketchbook Challenge theme this month is "Collage" which is right up my alley.  I do a great deal of collage work in both paper and cloth (and, as in this case, the combination of both).  If you are stopping by after visiting the SBC blog you know I have a post up over there with one of my collaged pages.  Here is the second of three that were partially created while at Jamie's studio.

Here is the ephemera from my trip that will be used for the base layers of my collages.

In addition, I used some newsprint from the day's local paper and some scrap paper from Jamie's studio.

I scratched over the surface with some opaque white paint to "mess" it up a bit.

Using the Fingal Flower & Leaf stencil I pushed some bronze & black paint onto the surface.

In addition I used an old letter stencil from an office supply store to add some texture 

to the collage surface.

Here are the three collages I was working with.

Here is an aerial view of our work table with Jamie working at it.

After the surface dried I worked back into it with a Pentel Gel Roller pen.

I moved across the surface and selected some shapes that I wanted to accentuate.

I wrote a few thoughts over the collage surface...

When I returned home I decided to die-cut some fused silk organza that I had stashed in my 

fabric shelf.  Prior to cutting the dress shape I pre-fused the organza with Mistyfuse.

I accentuated the fused shape within the dress with the Pentel Fabric pen.

After fusing to the collage surface I outlined the dress shape so it became more visible in the collage.

I cut the collage into an 8x8 inch square in order for it to fit into my sketchbook.

This page will face the page I created for my SBC post.  It provides a lovely memory of the wedding weekend in California.  Thanks for stopping by!  

Mixed & Stitched

The article is in this (current!) issue of Quilting Arts magazine!

I love layering, be it with dye or paint on cloth and/or paper, or collaged elements.  One day in the studio I was fooling around with a collage of paper and cloth, and wondered what it would be like to add some stitched organza over the surface.  My hope was that the organza would "disappear" into the collage below, allowing the stitches to have the appearance of "floating" over the surface.  It worked!

This little experiment is showcased in my newest article for Quilting Arts, as is a step-by-step procedure for mounting work onto a pre-stretched canvas.  I hope you will check it out!  This issue is just-now hitting newsstands, and subscribers should be receiving it now.  

Here is page one of the 5-page article.

I would love to hear back from you after you have read the article!  Thanks for stopping by.

"Joy"-a mixed media collage for "ONE"

Each week I have showcased a collage each week leading up to the ONE (One Cause, One Wednesday, One Hundred Collages) event.
Here is the fifth, and final, collage for the event. Each collage utilizes all or part of a "mail art" card, along with elements of fiber.  These pieces are mounted on 8.5 x 11 watercolor paper.

This event takes place ONE day only:  Wednesday, February 16th!

Please mark your calendars and join us for the excitement.

One hundred percent of the funds raised will be donated to the American Cancer Society.

"It's All Good"-a mixed media collage for "ONE"

Each week I plan to showcase one collage each week leading up to the ONE (One Cause, One Wednesday, One Hundred Collages) event.
Here is the fourth of my five collages. Each collage utilizes all or part of a "mail art" card, along with elements of fiber.  These pieces are mounted on 8.5 x 11 watercolor paper.

This event takes place ONE day only:  Wednesday, February 16th!

Please mark your calendars and join us for the excitement.

One hundred percent of the funds raised will be donated to the American Cancer Society.

"Silence"-A mixed media collage for "ONE"

I am showcasing one collage each week leading up to the ONE (One Cause, One Wednesday, One Hundred Collages) event.
Here is the third of my five collages. Each collage utilizes all or part of a "mail art" card, along with elements of fiber.  These pieces are mounted on 8.5 x 11 watercolor paper.

This event takes place ONE day only:  Wednesday, February 16th!

Please mark your calendars and join us for the excitement.

One hundred percent of the funds raised will be donated to the American Cancer Society.

"What You Get"-A mixed media collage for "ONE"

Each week I plan to showcase one collage each week leading up to the ONE (One Cause, One Wednesday, One Hundred Collages) event.
Here is the second of my five collages. Each collage utilizes all or part of a "mail art" card, along with elements of fiber.  These pieces are mounted on 8.5 x 11 watercolor paper.

This event takes place ONE day only:  Wednesday, February 16th!

Please mark your calendars and join us for the excitement.

One hundred percent of the funds raised will be donated to the American Cancer Society.

"Koi", a mixed-media collage for "ONE"

Following in the steps of Linda Teddlie Minton's plan to showcase one collage each week leading up to the ONE (One Cause, One Wednesday, One Hundred Collages) event I have decided to do the same.
Here is the first of my five collages. Each collage utilizes all or part of a "mail art" card, along with elements of fiber.  These pieces are mounted on 8.5 x 11 watercolor paper.

This event takes place ONE day only:  Wednesday, February 16th!

Please mark your calendars and join us for the excitement.

One hundred percent of the funds raised will be donated to the American Cancer Society.

The Sketchbook Challenge!

So, you want to start keeping a sketchbook but every time you sit down with your book in front of you and pencil in hand you freeze up and just can't seem to get started.  Wouldn't it be helpful to get a glimpse inside another artist's sketchbook and see how they use theirs?  Well, you are in luck because help is on the way!  I'm excited to tell you that I have been invited to join an amazing group of artists in The Sketchbook Challenge.  The Sketchbook Challenge is a new project launching on 1/1/11.  Follow along with us as we fill our sketchbooks based on a monthly theme that will be announced on the first of each month.
You will be sketching alongside:
Jill Berry
Sue Bleiweiss
Laura Cater-Woods
Jane Davies
Jamie Fingal
Judi Hurwitt
myself
Lyric Kinard
Jane LaFazio
Kelli Perkins
Carol Sloan
Carla Sonheim
Susan Sorrell
Melanie Testa
Diana Trout
Violette

Each month we'll announce a new theme on the blog and will be showing images from our sketchbooks
and talking about the intention/inspiration behind them.  We hope to inspire our followers to keep sketchbooks of your own.  Please visit the blog for more details, as well as to pick up a badge for your own blog.  We hope our followers will post comments on our blog, as well as images on your blogs of your pages.  Along the way we will be doing some giveaways and special offers!  I hope you will join us!

Making Encaustic medium and paint

I spent the day learning to make encaustic medium and varying opacities of paint at Michelle Belto's home-studio.  I appreciate how meticulous she is about safety.  Encaustic work has to be carefully monitored in terms of paint temperature, ventilation, and being safe when mixing powdered pigments.  These are things that surface design artists should be aware of, too.  I know too many people who have developed extreme sensitivities to chemicals after years of working with them in less-than-optimum circumstances.

As part of the day-long "Essentials" workshop the students were provided with chunks of primary colors and white.  We created other shades of paint by mixing the colors and adding varying concentrations of them to medium.  I learned how to test for opacity, add mica for an iridescent quality to powder pigments prior to mixing with medium, and learned that artist oil paint can be used to create encaustic paint by leaching as much linseed oil as possible from the oil paint before adding to encaustic medium.
We poured the paints into silicone candy molds and allowed them to set.  The other student and I shared our colors, though (strangely) we were mixing similar colors without knowing it!

 grinding damar resin before adding to beeswax.  Ratio:  5 parts wax to 1 part resin

 mixing paint color on the griddle, adding to medium

 After wax and damar has melted it must be filtered to remove the inclusions in the resin

 pouring paint into molds

 Michelle Belto grinds pigment, adds just enough linseed oil to bind the pigment,
and then adds the mixture to medium

 a small, quick little painting on birch board

 clockwise from top left:  2 cakes of medium, student-created paint bars in varying

opacities (some with mica-added), and beginning palette of encaustic pigment bars in can

 a sample piece of varying textures (created in 2009)

on birch board

 mixed-media collage using leaves, an old calendar, and wax

on birch board (2009)

encaustic on birch board (2009)