Art Retreat

What a wonderful time we all had at the Bandon Art Retreat, eight of us from Fyber Cafe, spent 3 days on the beautiful Southern Oregon coast. For more details of what everyone did, check out the Fyber Cafe blog, click here The retreat center above Forget-Me-Knots Quilt Shop click here is a great space, it sleeps 8, has a BIG sewing area with a whole wall of design space, and a wall of floor to ceiling windows, a large kitchen and quilts on all the beds, within walking distance of "Old Town Bandon."

I spent most of my time working on quilting a top I had made at the first retreat 2 years ago. I had used only hand dyed fabrics I had made at our dye workshops. I free hand cut the petal shapes and arranged them on the large design wall. It had been a very freeing, loose, way to work, I had just wanted to have fun and be creative. So I spent Monday afternoon and evening and all day Tuesday quilting on it, lots of hours and thread. I used rayon threads and at least 10 bobbins of superfine black thread. Each petal is quilted with a different pattern, if we had not stopped at Landreth's and seen her quilting samples that she has for her long arm machine, I probably would have quilted them all with an echo flame pattern. But she got me thinking outside of the box, and freed me up to do lots of fun, different designs. I had thought about using a rainbow thread in the black, but I am glad I did not, the black gave your eye a place to rest, confetti colors would have made it very busy. Instead I made little curlycues coming off the tips of the petals.

I finished all but the top right corner, I needed a few more petals, and my big table at home to trim it up square. I got it finished the next week and am still working on hand stitching the binding. I finally thought of a title, "Exuberance."

Wednesday morning I cleaned up and put my sewing machine away, and then worked on some T-shirts. I used Jacquard Decolourant with stencils to decorate 4 dark t-shirts. The bleach discharge paste, worked well, once it had dried, it is ironed to heat activate the bleaching process. The clock work/gears one, I took home and cut a reverse stencil of some of the gears, and used copper acrylic paint to add more detail.

I also did a teal shirt, with large gingko leaves on it, with a commercial stencil and some small gingko leaves with hand made stencils. We all had a great time, potlucking, going to lunch, going to the beach, shopping at "Old Town" touristy shops, visiting the new Face Rock Creamery(cheese factory) and the "Wool Shoppe" in Langlois, South of town, where we got some Merino/silk blends in luscious colors for needle felting and spinning. See the Fyber Cafe blog for more details.

I am linking this to Nina-Marie's "Off the Wall Friday" click on the badge in the right hand column, to see what other wonderful artists are up to this week.