Boxes!

I love all kinds of fiber. So, its just natural I would be drawn to paper. I have been following Wendy's blog Threadborne at http://wendyfe.wordpress.com/ On her website she features beautiful fabrics and papers that she dyes with plants ala India Flint. One day she featured boxes she and her husband made at a workshop. I fell in love. I ordered the supplies and away I went.

These are my first two. These are 4"x4"x3". They are made from binder board, painted with acrylic paint, and papered with decorative paper. That's it in a nut shell. I added beads to the top as handles for these boxes. They were not complete until I distressed them with ink and paint. In the case of the pink box, I patted water on the ink and it bleeds to form a really cool texture.

Here is the lavender box.

 

 

 

Here is the pink box.

 

  

These will be for sale on etsy. Click here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/DarcyBergArt





 

The next chapter of the making of "The Girl Next Door"

I got the fabric for "The Girl Next Door" back from Spoonflower in about 4 days. Not bad. I had her printed onto the cotton-silk blend fabric. One side is cotton like and the side that the image is printed on to is silk-like. She is a little dark but when you ask someone else to print your image you have to expect things like that. Overall, I think she turned out pretty darn good. Here she is on my portable design board.

 

The next step is quilting the piece. I print out at least two images on 8.5 x 11" sheets of paper. Two because I need to doodle the quilting pattern with a pencil. And one sheet is definitely not enough. Here is what I came up with.

 

I pin the paper on a piece of cork board that I have in front of my sewing machine. I use it as a guide. Which means that I may or may not use it as I'm quilting. The process of drawing the quilting pattern takes place to engage my hand and my brain. It may be a couple of days before I actually quilt the piece but I'm always thinking of it. When I finally sit down to quilt the piece I'm pretty sure of what I'm going to do. But sometimes I go off on a tangent and do something else. One thing that I do for sure is figure out where my light, mid and dark values are. It is not my choice with this piece that the quilting become significant. It is important but the image is more important.

 

 

I select my threads for quilting. Black and white pieces are much easier than color pieces because the color selection is narrowed to grayscale. One thing to watch is the warm grays and cool grays. Sometimes they mix. Sometimes they don't. The important thing at this point is to warm up on a piece of muslin and use some of the threads to see how they look together.

 

That's it for now. See you again soon!



 



 

The making of the "The Girl Next Door"

The Surface Design Association (SDA) Illinios Chapter has opened a Call for Entry for all Midwest SDA members. Email me at darcy@darcyberg for a copy of the prospectus. The name of the show is "Blind Eye". The exhibition's concept: Too often today we see tragic situations that result from the lack of action. This exhibition hopes to explore the destructive results of ignoring a situation or people’s ignorance to thinking everything will be ok when they choose to not get involved in making the world a better place.
 
Alright. Now, what to do...what to do...what to do. Do I develop something about the environment? No. Do I develop something about elderly people? No. I decided that I would do a photo shoot of two little girls running somewhere. Could it be down a road or a lane? And then I had this idea that I would take a shot of a street sign that said "dead end". I could collage the 2 shots in Photoshop. Great plan.

So I contacted a friend and asked her if I could use her two little girls as models. The girls were thrilled with the idea. I was thrilled she agreed to let me use them as models. We went a local park and took about 300 images in various poses. The girls were great! And their mom was happy to act as my assistant. Bonus! As payment I took them all out for ice cream cones and gave their mom images I took of the girls that I thought turned out nice.

As most plans go, after viewing the images that I took I changed my mind about my piece. I selected this shot of one of the girls.

I loved the look on her face and the light bouncing off her hair. Okay, any of you that know me and how I develop my portrait quilts know that I love to work in Photoshop. I began to work my magic. Cropping is the first order of business.

 

What a face! Perfect!

Now on to the sliders for brightness and contrast. Then on to levels. Next to saturation and sharpening. A little use of the dodge and burn tools and I'm off to the next level. 

I have two favorite programs that are third party plug-ins for Photoshop. One of them is Photomatix to produce an HDR (high dynamic range) image. The other is Nix Silver Efex. This program turns color images into a black and white. Voila! Here is my final image.

  

Since the size of the piece has to be 15" by 15", I have to send the piece out to be printed. My printer will print to a width of 13". That's not wide enough. I could have added a border but I considered to be distractive. It has to be the image only. Now you might be thinking, I could have tiled the image and pieced together but I don't like that look. I like a whole cloth piece. So off to Spoonflower she went. Here's the link to Spoonflower: http://www.spoonflower.com/welcome

 

That's all for now. I can't wait to show you how she turned out!

 

"Violet" gets into 'botanic/organic" Union Street Gallery

Here is my newest class: Machine Quilting Techniques. Check out my teaching schedule for Winter/Spring 2012 on my website: http://www.darcyberg.com

I hope to see you soon!

Here is my current show. Hope to see you there!

It Was a Great Party!

Fun was had by all, especially me! Thanks to all my friends, old and new, for coming to see me! You are  great support to me.