Guest Post: Candied Fabrics

Hello There! My name is Candy Glendening, a fabric dyer who makes art quilts and every day art. You can find me regularly blogging about my artistic process here: Candied Fabrics. One of the things I like to blog about is artists who inspire me, and I try to point out exactly HOW they inspire me…so what better time than now to post about how Robin inspires me?

When I think of Robin’s art, the main things that draw me to it are

• Her incredible ability to combine colors.
• Those lovely, wonky, hand cut stripes!

Her blog regularly informs me about her

• connections to other people
• home

So…these are the 4 aspects of Robin that I’m going to use to create a piece. I’ve been thinking thinking about this guest blog for a couple of weeks now, and I had pretty much narrowed in on the 4 bullet points above, but I didn’t really get down to working on anything until Saturday morning. I don’t have the finished piece, but it’s close enough to done to show, 24 hours later – Phew! nothing like a deadline to get those creative juices flowing!

So, my process begins with pulling fabrics and fusing those that aren’t yet fused. What colors? Well, I started with a quilt of Robin’s and used the dropper tool in photoshop to pull what I felt the main colors were, and made a little palette to keep me focused:

Ooh! Ahh! So Pretty! I love that she combines bright white with both warm and cool tones! I got a little distracted trying to find that beautiful pumpkin orange and light/medium blue in my stash…. had I more I time, I probably would have spent a week trying to dye just those shades…but instead, I make do with what I have, and vow to try to replicate these colors in the future!

Here’s what I pulled and fused:

Next, I needed to pull some images from my digital scrapbook. A screen shot of my computer:

Image credits:

Lisa Wharton

Scoutie Girl

bookhou

I love the layout (horizontallized) from that Scoutie Girl montage, and the house shapes!

I start by sketching a simple layout:

 

And then cutting big blocks of color and fusing them in that layout on some wonder under release paper:

Then, I make some stripes, trying to keep the feeling that Robin was getting with her strips – lots of neutrals separating the brighter colors is what I saw.

 

Then, add stripes! Easier said then done:

I then made my quilt sandwich and did some stitching in the ditch. Then the fun part – adding houses to my village! Then I used my sketchy style of quilting to the houses for added emphasis, and 24 hours from the start, this is what I’ve got:

So, I’ll definitely give it a wonky edge (hopefully it’ll be less crooked in real life than it is here), then face it and insert a hanging rod.

I’m in a dreadful hurry at the moment, but I’d like to say I’m quite pleased with this, and I think it met my goals! Feel free to drop by my site in day or two to see it in it’s finished form! Pelase note, that my studio does NOT look like this picture right now ;-)

Thanks for the impetus to do this Robin! I’m off to the opera!