Working on Show

I'm not very happy.  I have so many "What If's" filling my head, but I'm not able to work on them right now.  I've been spending the weekend doing some of the nuts and bolts to get ready for my art group's annual Dec. show.  I'm leaving for Mexico in one week, and I want to feel like I'm on top of my show stuff before I leave.   I'm finding that the "What If's" are taking me in a new direction, one that I would love to focus on for a while, but I need to step back to my earlier work and get a few pieces finished.

Last year the show was a huge success, so we are all hoping for a repeat performance this year. We know the interest is there, it's the economy that's scary.  I've decided to think of ways of scaling down my pieces, making them less elaborate and labor intensive, and more affordable for this year's show.

Here are a few of my pieces from last year:

I went back to my original inspiration for this piece, chains of fabric birds made in Thailand, and decided to incorporate some of my birds into simpler chains:

I've also been finishing off some pieces of the funky couching I was doing:

All the little details of inventory, labels, hangers take so much time, but I'm happy to have gotten a jump on it this weekend.  I may have to take a break though and get a few of those burning "What If's" out of my head this week.

The Big Comfy Couch

I tend to flit around and try various art forms, but I always seem to come back to my love of fiber and hand stitching.  I'm trying to spend a few months focused only on fiber to develop my ideas a little further.  Right now, inspired by African textiles, I'm experimenting with couching chunky bits of fabric.  I wanted to replace my well-loved, and well-worn, purse from Guatamala, capturing the ethnic liveliness minus the hours of hand embroidery.  I came up with this:

I participated in an inchie swap earlier in the year (embellishing one inch squares of fabric) and really enjoyed the portability of working on small pieces.  One inch was a little limiting, so I'm doing my couching experiments on small squares and rectangles ranging from 3-6". 

They will eventually be incorporated into a larger wall piece.  I'm currently experimenting with painting background fabrics to link them together and add a sort of graffiti element: