Number 9 Behind

Summer is definitely over. The bees are put to bed and the building is almost complete, so it's time to get back to the studio.

I've been working on a project that just hasn't worked out and with a new deadline looming I needed to come up with a project that was satisfying. Once again I was trying to make my mind work on something that just wasn't the right time. I guess some artists can do that but I'm driven by where my mind takes me & this time it just kept coming back to felting.

The subject for the Group of Eight challenge was "behind". I can't tell you how hard I found this subject. Nothing was coming to me except Michael Angelo's 'David' and how beautiful his ass is. I was going to construct that ass but decided it might be too daring for a group challenge. 

I had some alpaca that I got from a friend and it's been calling to me to do something with it. I also had watch parts that came from another friend. Soooo I felted the alpaca background, added the watch parts and a random strand that my daughter made while trying to spin the alpaca. It was her first time spinning and I fell in love with how random it ended up. We joke that when she gets better with the spinning that I won't end up with this kind of artful tidbits to add to my projects.
 

"Number 9 Behind" is significant because I've always considered myself number 9 in the Group of Eight and Behind, because of the subject as well as how far Behind, I actually was in completing this project.

The kindness of friends...

What a wonderful weekend it was. I was with friends this last Saturday & Sunday doing exactly what I love. Saturday was a Surface Designers studio day & Sunday was spent with friends in downtown Toronto's market. I am very grateful for receiving wonderful gifts from wonderful people.

The watch parts came all the way from France...woo hoo...fabulous!!

Ferrero Cameo

The GOE group quarterly challenge this quarter was issued by myself. I wanted to do something that the group had never done, yet something that is growing in popularity, so I chose Steampunk. I haven't seen the submissions yet because the reveal is Wednesday night. So please visit the GOE site next week to see what everyone has submitted. This was quite the challenge for me. I had many ideas but it's very difficult to execute many of them. I have a book of antique posters and I remembered one in particular that I really liked and decided to do my fibre Steampunk rendition of Mucha's Bysantine head. The hair colour & curls remind me of my eldest daughter, so naturally I loved it from the beginning. I never thought that I would be doing it Steampunk style but I think it works.

Ferrero Cameo

 

I wanted the background to be a little mystical, so I chose a fabric that I purchased while on vacation with a good friend. My son gave me some of his bicycle gears. There was motorcycle chain collected from a business close by to my husbands work. The watch parts were in my stash and had been collected for quite some time. When I was close to being done I needed to think of how I would frame the piece. Once again, it was my son that suggested something like a cut foil frame. So that made me think of the Ferrero Rocher chocolate wrappers that were collected over Christmas. I tore them into pieces so that I would get an interesting reflection and glued them down to a panel that my husband had cut out for me.

I really like this piece and loved the process from start to finish.

Spring has Sprung

So now I had to get down and start the challenge and just forget about the damn size of that fabric...I was running out of time. I still didn't know what I was going to do. I just knew that I wanted a play on the words rather than the usual spring stuff...so I was playing with my watch and clock parts and pulling on this spring, when it sprung out of it's tiny home...in the shape of an "S". So then I started thinking about what I could do with the S in my design and came up with the spelling of "Spring". I left it on my desk and whenever my family walked by it, they would comment on how much they liked the layout. So off to the encaustic bench I went, with my LITTLE square of snow dyed fabric and my watch parts spelling out "Spring".