Remembrance Day and Poppies

Thought I should post this today as it is Remembrance Day - a piece I made to remember my mother who loved poppies but also for what poppies represent.

Ostinato

 Ostinato is the name of the piece I made for a fundraiser for the National Academy Orchestra and the Brott Music Festival http://fibrations.org. Fourteen fibre artists from across Ontario created 18 fibre art pieces inspired by the music of Maurice Ravel, Manuel de Falla and Édouard Lalo. The works were shown at concerts over the summer and bids were accepted at concerts and online. Dwayne Wanner organized it as a way to promote the orchestra but also to promote fibre art. He worked really hard and did a great job. He has a great website http://www.dfwannerquilts.com/
Ravel's Bolero inspired my piece - the build up of the rhythm (a persistently repeated motif is called ostinato hence the name) which gets louder and more intense and the thought of Spanish dancers in their hot coloured dresses . My piece is made up of 2 parts: an intensely stitched canvas piece that gets wider and more intense in colour as it moves from left to right. On top of the waves of colour I stitched the notes of the rhythm. You might not be able to see from the photo but the stitching also distorts the canvas so it undulates. I enhanced this by molding the finished piece into waves before I attached it onto the 2nd part - the underlying black quilt.  I quilted images of my idea of spanish dancers and hundreds of circles on the background piece using black thread - very hard on the eyes after a while! For the most of the stitching I used Wonderfil's polyester 40wt thread http://www.wonderfil.net/wonderfilcms/v1/Default.aspx  which worked very well especially considering how intense the stitching got in places.
I enjoyed making the piece and regret not taking some close up photos - no time as per usual as the whole piece took a longer to make than I imagined. 
Wish I knew where the piece ended up.

Halloween

I love Halloween but it certainly takes up a lot of time - carving pumpkins,

decorating with spiders

I got fed up fighting with that horrible synthetic white stuff you make pretend webs with and made a reusable web with see through knit fabric that has webs printed on it and overlaid a felt (recycled polyester felt) web on top. I made the web a bit like making paper snowflakes and folded the fabric in quarters and cut away. It didn't take long to make as I only did 1 line of stitching over the main web lines. This worked out well as I am then able to use the white web lines to poke the spiders legs onto to hold it on to the web.
So now back to work - I have got into the Sassy Little Craft Show 7to midnight  Dec 15th at The Central 603 Markham Street (Bloor and Bathurst, near Suspect Video) and I have just sent in my application and photos to the Holiday Art Market at Wychwood Art Barns for Dec 11th. I'll post links later.