Decisions, Decisions

I spent nearly all my studio time this weekend working on the latest quilt, just finished this morning. I haven't a clue, yet, what to call this -- if a name jumps out at you, please let me know!

The digital image was printed on muslin, the other fabrics were dyed, deconstructed printed, shiboried and/or discharged. I embellished this piece with beads, after judiciously adding Lumiere. Boy, that took some courage, to add paint to a finished quilt!

The unfortunate news today is that my Canon printed died. Darn, it was doing so well, printing so gloriously, and then about 6 weeks ago started to have one problem after the other. And today the print head just quit. I'd been so happy with this Canon (after numerous Epsons and HPs) that I almost considered driving it to a Canon Service Center somewhere to have it repaired. But the reality is that the nearest Service Center is up to 200 miles from here one way, let alone the price of the repair. They just don't make these things to be fixed anymore. Much less expensive to buy a new one and start over. Oh well!

For some reason these last three quilts made me remember some textile work I did in the late 1970s when I lived on Maui. One piece I did was about the same size as Going in Circles, it had three Yin Yang symbols, or maybe they were Ouroboroses (an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon swallowing its own tail and forming a circle) batiked onto muslin, then dyed teal blue with Dylon dye, which was about all that was available in that time and place. Then batted and backed and hand quilted.

Another piece was done with textile crayons -- those things you color onto fabric with and heat set with an iron -- it was an image of a lush Maui mountainside, greens and browns, might have been inspired by a photograph I took with my Kodak InstaMatic, also batted, backed and hand quilted. Shortly after finishing these, I hung them in a wannabe cafe in Makawao, adjacent to PuPu's, the little homemade take-out deli where I was a cook, and within a day they'd been stolen off the walls.

Not much more to say about that. But it is interesting that my art quilting vision now is virtually the same as it was back then ~~ Make wonderful fabric and quilt it!