Alaska Fiber Festival Workshops Continued

During the Alaska Fiber Festival 2010, on March 10th, another of my workshops offered is Abstract Textural Surfaces With Canvas.  If you take the workshop the day before, Limbs: Abstract and Figurative, this new workshop will build on the techniques of free hand rotary cutting.  Both of these workshops stand on their own, but can also be taken back to back.

The technique in common, is  free hand cutting and piecing.

  This workshop, "Abstract Textural Surface With Canvas", uses 5 colors of light weight canvas 20" x 20" pieces.  (The surfaces need to by dyed or colored before the workshop.)  


My interest in using canvas for more textural surfaces happened after spending a month in New Zealand in 2005, traveling and teaching workshops.  Pure and simple, I wanted more texture in my work and started in that direction.  This simple technique is easy to combine with other work and can also be developed using just the canvas. 

We will be free cutting random strips and sewing them back together to create pieced fabric to be used in our composition.  Supplies will include the 5 colors of canvas, a sewing machine, rotarty cutter and matte, thread to piece the canvas, 2 colors of 6 strand embroidery thread, needles for embroidery thread and a small needle nose pliers.  We will do both machine work and embellish by hand work.


On the north island of New Zealand lies the Waipoua Forest.  This forest changed my art life immensely.
The textures are amazingly different then the southwest. Of course this is not hard to imagine when you are comparing desert terrain to extreme moisture for the foliage, trees and plant life.  The textural surfaces of the bark on the Kauri trees took my breathe away.  I was further influenced by trees that were unlike anything I had experienced before.

This workshop is inspired by my experiences with the textural surfaces of the Kauri and their surrounding territory, in an abstract way.  We will discuss how this work can be built on and examples will be given to develop ideas after the workshop, but to start we will create textural surfaces that are freely pieced.

There are photographs here of both the forest and some of the artwork that has been created with the techniques we will learn in the workshop.

We will discuss how this work can be built on and examples will be given to develop ideas after the workshop, but to start we will create textural surfaces that are freely pieced.  

There are details of some of the pieces.  This is more of the size we will work on in the workshop because of the time constraints. Questions or more information needed on this workshop, contact me.