Geri deGruy's blog of art, musings, and inspiration

In creating no-pressure, small pieces of art, I often want to try some new techniques or just get out of my "box." I want to go crazy in ways I don't allow myself when I'm working on a "serious piece" (!&#%^@%$!)

Here are 3 of these pieces and I'll share 3 more tomorrow.

1. 

It is totally unlike me to trust myself to cut profiles out of paper, but that's what I did. I sat for half an hour, randomly, almost mindlessly, cutting profiles. Automatic cutting. HA! This isn't wild and crazy, but it is out of my box for sure.

2.

This is an experimental quilt I called "Housing Crisis." (I made this piece is early 2008.) 

No obsessing over this, just running with it. That is a definite difference with these pieces...no performance anxiety, very little thinking, just running with it without some artistic goal in mind.

This quilt is small, maybe 10 x 12". Simple muslin is the background. The White House picture from a magazine is cut into parts and sewn onto the muslin, as is the American hat. That scene is covered with mesh from a vegetable bag which is also sewn on. Finally I added red and blue ribbons and sewed around the edges to finish it off. 

3. 

~6 x 8"

First I painted a piece of soluble paper in gold and green silk paints. (Soluble paper looks and feels like paper but it will dissolve in water.) With my sewing machine, I sewed a grid onto the paper and then wet sections of it so I could rub those sections away with my finger.  I sewed that piece onto the green velvet paper and added more of a grid.

Now I sewed a pear shape thickly onto the paper, filling in the stem with copper metallic thread. I had some left-over pieces of heated gold embossing powder which I scattered over the pear shape. (When you heat embossing powder, it becomes a liquid which you can use for all sorts of things like making molds, beads, embellishments. I save the little broken off pieces from this process.)

I had purchased a jar of Self Leveling Clear Gel which I'd never used. I brushed a coat over the pear and let it dry, and then another coat. This stuff is pretty cool. It's kind of thick out of the jar but it levels out on a flat surface for an even, glossy coat. I'm not sure it was the right thing for this project, but it was fun to use and I've used it since on other pieces.