As you can see, I’m chugging merrily along, getting ready for the show. In case anyone is interested the details for the show opening are as follows:

LAND ESCAPES

Vicky Taylor-Hood & Laurie Dempster
October 15 – November 10
Opening October 15th, from 2-4pm
Devon House Gallery, Duckworth Street
St. John’s, NL

The piece above is finished (save for a properly-sized hanging rod). It’s not the greatest of photos, as I haven’t done my photo session yet, but it’s enough to give you the general impression. The rocks in the foreground are painted fabric layered and stitched with painted spun polyfibres that have been heat-crinkled for texture. The surf is tulle and Angelina fibres. Quilting is by machine and incorporates a variety of metallic, monofilament and holographic threads which, due to the photo quality, can’t quite be seen here.

The piece below is the completed night house scene from a previous post. You can see the overall effect quite well here. The moon is layers of tulle, iridescent lamé and tulle (in that order and is machine stitched around at the centre, with the outlying edges of the tulle being hand-tacked in place.

The ocean fabric worked particularly well in this piece. It’s a hand-painted piece of satin that I worked using Pebeo Setacolor fabric paints. Those paints claim colour fastness only with natural fibres, but they actually hold extremely well with man-made materials as well. The trick in using them is to allow them a good week to “cure”, since artificial fibres can’t be heated as hot as natural. I initially thought that they might not wash well, but did an experiment and found almost no colour washout. This is a moot point for my work, really, because anyone who throws an art quilt into the wash honestly shouldn’t expect it to survive. My main concern is light fastness, at which the acrylic-based paints such as Pebeo makes excel.

So it’s back to work on another couple of pieces that should be done by the end of the week. If I get a chance later today, I’ll photograph the results of the completed “Women as Trees” series that I quilted and bound over the weekend.