Hearts and Flowers

Thank goodness dreary February is brightened up by Valentine’s Day. This year I decided to go traditional with hearts and flowers to celebrate, though I won’t turn down a nice bottle of wine or some dark chocolate.

I think I once made a hearts quilt, but it was gifted a long time ago. Rather than go the quilt route I found it was faster and more fun to sew some hearts onto leftover blank greeting cards. The background is painted pattern tissue, and the hearts are old sheet music that I painted and stamped. The papers were heavy enough I didn’t have issues with the needle holes.

The flowers are ones I made when I was learning to control a watercolor brush. I needed lots of practice so I had lots of trials to choose from. Not only did I use them in the work below, but I featured them in a Florida Project collage spread.

I added thin marker lines to accent the petals.

The candy and florist industries may not appreciate my efforts, but I am happy to use some of the bits I’ve saved to create love tokens.

I’m linking to Off The Wall Fridays.

Paper and Thread

What if I could have the fun of creating art with paper without the gluey mess? Last month I took David Owen Hastings‘ Stitched Paper Collage online class in the hope of finding an answer. As a result, I now have a method to create paper compositions that’s easy and non-sticky. It allows me to create simple work quickly, yet has the potential for larger, more complex pieces. And, it gives me an outlet to use all the magazine pages and monotype print oopsies I’ve collected.

Supplies are simple: sewing machine, thread, paper to cut up, and backing paper. The last can even be cut up brown paper bags. David adds refinements to help you line up your cut up papers, which can be as small as half an inch wide. Once you do one or two basic pieces to get the method down, you can take the approach wherever you like. One caution is you can’t stitch too much on the paper as it will tear. And you can’t rip out stitches for the same reason.

Here are my first pieces, done on a paper bag.

I made the center one last. Each is 6 by 6 inches.

In the days after the workshop I cranked out several 6 by 6 inch pieces, using some of the monotype discards given to me by a friend.

My parts piles.

I love using the curved bits.

I got surrealistic with magazine ads.

Here I used wallpaper samples.

A combination of papers.

If you’re wondering about the dangling threads, they are a design choice. David likes his to dangle. You can also pull them to the back and tape them down so they don’t show.

I gather you can join several smaller pieces with archival tape to create a larger composition. That’s where I hope to go next with this technique.

I’m linking to Off The Wall Friday.