Mono printing w/Geli Plates - Jane LaFazio 12-06-11

This workshop was offered by Visions Art Museum in San Diego - a bit of a drive for me to arrive for a 9am class, so I drove down on Sunday and spent the night nearby.  There were thirteen students who worked in the main gallery of the museum and were able to enjoy the current exhibit "Interpretations" - a juried exhibit with work from Visions members. I took pictures during class and at the end when various students put all their work on a table for us to view.  I have tried to keep track of which work was done by each student, but I may have made errors.  If you notice one, please let me know as soon as possible so I can correct the mistake.  I have chosen one piece or a panel of pieces for each student and will post these again along with all the other images on a Picasa album as soon as I have the time to organize it.
 Jane LaFazio Blog:  http://www.JaneVille.blogspot.com
Visions Art Museum:    http://www.quiltvisions.org/

Click on photos to enlarge.

This is a Geli Plate from www.gelliarts.com  They come in two sizes and Jane provide each student with one of the 6X6 plates to use in class.  

She also provided the Biocolor paint she prefers to use http://www.discountschoolsupply.com/
 and a large selection of plastic stencils. The students brought fabric, a brayer (or two), stencils/stamps, paper towels and plastic drop cloths. ( I much prefer using a plastic table cover with a flannel backing because it doesn't slip around on me.) I think a 1" - 1-1/2" paint brush would be helpful and I borrowed one from the museum supply room.

Jane has some great stencils, including this lovely tree and this great baroque design.  She also has one with a jumble of numbers that several students used.

Cindy Tanner (Austin, TX) and teacher Jane LaFazio. 

Quilt is by Pamela Allen "Fishing Derby Mesopotamia 2000BC", 2010, 48"X58"

Kay Laboda   Quilt by Judith Larzelere.

Jo Griffith and Claire-Lise Matthey Anderegg looking at Claire-Lise's work.  Quilts by

Work by Jane LaFazio using mono prints on reclaimed fabric with hand stitching in different threads.

I previously misidentified this to be by Jane LaFazio - it is, instead, by Gillian Moss.   She has just started hand stitching  - flowers in the background and ladder stitch along one edge.  I believe this leaf design was done with a freezer paper stencil.

Work by Gillian Moss.   For some of these she has used a paint brush to texture the paint on the gel plate.

Claire-Lise Matthey Anderegg used the plastic tree stencil both as a resist and a direct print.

Jo Griffith layered many stencils and colors - I especially like the checkerboard stamp she incorporated.

Kay Laboda gleaned leaves and pine needles from the landscaping.  She also used the number stencil.

Alicia Hallett was particularly productive.  She stuck with the same color palette so all her pieces could be used together.  I like the layered geometric stencils in the lower left corner.

E.J. Brown was there from Austin, Texas, and had taken a drawing class with Jane the previous day.  She has used rubber bands in the lower left corner and a variety of stencils.  On the right side she used fabric markers to trace the outline of a stencil over her yellow/orange mono print.

These two strips are mine.  I had a hard time applying a thin enough layer of paint onto the gel plate and created a lot of almost solid six inch squares of color.  The circle stamp is an old birth control pill container that has been in my "plastic stuff" box about four decades - I hate to throw away these useful "artifacts".   The fabric I took to the workshop was an assortment of rejects from previous dyeing classes.  I never know what to do with those ugly pieces, but Rayna Gillman inspired me to overprint and overdye.  Jane LaFazio explained that one of the "tricks" to the mono printing technique is layering - so I started out with one layer already on the fabric.  Most of what I had was dyed green the first time around.

Lisa Yoder printed five gel plates close together - might be a long skinny quilt or incorporated into something larger.  She varied her palette which gives her many possible directions.

Virginia Sumner did some successful layering on this piece.  I believe the flowers are one of Jane's stencils, but I don't know about the white scribbly lines.

Cindy Tanner, who traveled from Austin, Texas, with E.J., used a plaster scribing tool to make this design and added the color using colored pencils after the paint had dried.

Sandy Brownell, who is new to fiber arts, followed Kay's action and gathered some pine needles and leaves to use in some of her mono prints.

 

Nancy Lemke got into the layering technique and used different stencils and resists.  She also tried mono printing on a long piece of cheese cloth.

Roseanna Lynn Welter quilt from TCQC 11-27-11

This quilt was part of "My World in Black & White", the first exhibit sponsored by the Fiberarts Connection of Southern California.  It was quite a good unjuried exhibit that showed in half a dozen venues around SCalifornia.  I added a few of the quilts to the Collection, but not this one.  However, it kept "haunting" me and some months later I contacted the maker to purchase it. 

It is a monoprint done with dye dipped string, a technique that was taught in children's art classes years ago (and maybe even today), but one that I was not familiar with.  The artist has enhanced the loops and arcs of the monoprint with black machine stitching that gives the appearance of sea fans or coral.  Or perhaps the debris on a storm ravaged beach.   The end pieces look amazingly like surf on sand.  I thought the scribbly quilting was odd at the time, but in the years since it has become some quilters' signature quilting style. 

"After the Storm"  Roseanna Lynn Welter  2001  33"W x 45"L

Monoprinting.  Machine piecing and quilting.  Cotton fabric and thread.
 http://artquilts.home.comcast.net/~artquilts/

Following and filling in the loops and arcs of the monoprinting.

Surf on sand with scribble quilting.

The artist intended this to be a horizontal quilt, but I much prefer it as a vertical, so I added a muslin sleeve to one end.   Which prevents me from hanging the quilt face-to-the-wall and enjoying the mystical image on the back.

 

You can see that Rosanna Lynn was undecided about a title and added "After the Storm" to the label - it was that name that was used on the entry for the "My World in Black & White" exhibit.