Monday, November 28, 2011

Just for a Laugh

How many blankets does one dog need???






It's Been to Long

for the past two and a half weeks my living room has turned into a seamstress shop. I have been working on this quilt for ATLEAST 8 hours a day. There is glitter all over the living room, and Tank is really starting to dislike not being able to lay on the couch with me while I am doing this. Each piece is hand cut and hand sewn. It has been a very grueling and tedious process, which I feel in the long run is going to make me appreciate this piece all the more.

As of tonight, this is what I have finished so far. I only have about a foot or so left to do on the top of the quilt, and I will be finished with the sewing portion. Each row takes about four hours, if that tells you anything about how long and crazy this process has been. This is also the bed that I will be bringing to the space to display the piece on. I cannot wait to see it finished and in the space, It's going to be awesome!


Here is a detail of the patch work. Each patch is cut from white transparent materials, so that you can not only see the pills but hopefully it gives sort of a ghostly feel. I also chose shiny and glittery fabrics to keep with my theme of beautiful finishes.


Slaving away.
(The butterflies have nothing to do with it, it was just the only white quilt I could find around here that was reasonably priced and I could work with.)


Here is a small glimpse of what the piece will look like when finished. Each patch will contain different colored pills. I have sewn the patches with a small open portion, so that I can easily add the pills when I get the quilt in the space. This will keep the quilt from being so heavy and keep anything from happening to the pills or the quilt.
This isn't the greatest pic though.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Insert Title Here


I have decided to make molds of a hammer and a hatchet, with many other tools or weapons to follow. I haven't decided whether these will be used for my "Dressed to Kill" piece or whether I should do a piece similar to the bats where these tools have the gold "blood splatter" on them and they will be displayed sort of trophy like. The piece would be called "Tools of the Trade," and in this case the trade is murder. I was thinking about displaying them on a peg board like you would see in a lot of garages, but then I got to thinking maybe the peg board, mounting and the pieces could be in a shadow box or something, to further emphasize the trophy feel. The same goes for the axe mold below.

This axe mold is going to be huge!! I already had a few battles with the bat mold so I can only imagine what is going to happen with this mold. I tried to make this one a little less heavy by giving it a more triangular shape, but it is still going to be a beast of a mold. Which makes it all the more fun to test my boundaries and see just how big I can go.
I have decided to take Brian's advice and take a more subtle approach to the "Passed Away Peacefully in His Sleep" piece. I have bought a quilt which I am going to use as a base to add patches filled with pills. I have chosen different types and textured white transparent fabric for the patches. The colors of the pills will subtly show through the fabric, so that at first glance you may not even notice the pills. I had a hard time deciding whether or not to use the white fabrics and colored pills or colored fabrics and white pills. but I figured that the white fabric would look aesthetically better with all of my other work and that it would give it a more ghostly feel.
I also tried to decide when it was ok to use something found like pills and when should you make it out of ceramic. I think that the answer to this is in the WOW factor, and practicality. I wasn't sure whether to make my own pills or to buy them, and spray paint them to the color that I want. Due to time, and weight I figured it would be best to use real pills. Plus I got to thinking about how much just a bean bag weighs, and to have a blanket covered in ceramic pills would get really heavy really fast. I feel that with this number of pills and the way that they are going to be displayed that the wow factor is already there without me having to make all of the pills.