On August 1-3—in a really roomy, light-filled, and temperature-controlled (it was very sizzling exterior) classroom off a facet hallway of The Nationwide Quilt Museum—a fantastic cloth collage college of sea-life was within the making as twenty college students let unfastened with their materials, scissors, pins and glue to create nineteen very colourful fish, and one seahorse. In photograph above, splendidly untidy (messy however not scary) piles of material and scraps unfold on the tables of Lynn Gross and Corrie DeCamp.
In weblog posts final week and the week earlier than, I gave overviews of my 12-quilt “Specimens” exhibit at NQM in Paducah, Kentucky—put in and hanging till November 19, 2024. The museum additionally organized for me to show a category whereas my present was on show. The format we settled on was a three-day workshop, which is simply sufficient time to sink our cloth collage tooth into an ideal topic for a sizzling summer time week—fish. Fish imagery lends itself to a sure playfulness and flexibility to quite a few inventive types and coloration palettes.
I really like instructing this class as a result of it permits me and my college students to throw all warning to the wind and lose ourselves within the play of coloration and sample. There’s numerous data to cowl in simply three days, so there’s no time to dawdle in getting began, and this class jumped proper into the deep finish of creativity.
As all instructing mornings start, there have been every day demos and Q&A, main my college students via the material collage course of. Under are a couple of fishy quilt examples hanging on the classroom wall, so as to add to different quilts of mine we might speak about within the museum gallery.
To get a quick-start in a category comparable to this, I recommend beginning with one in all my fish patterns, which all however two college students did. In order I proceed with displaying you all of the unbelievable work completed in such a short while, I’ll hyperlink to the patterns utilized in case you’re impressed to attempt your individual hand at catching a fish, or two.
Let’s start on the finish
You’ve seen a couple of outcomes, now see their beginnings and progressions within the slideshow beneath:
Catching the waves with, “Wavelength”
This fish sample caught the eyes and curiosity of 4 of my college students (following beneath), however by the tip of sophistication it was arduous for even me to guess at their beginnings. It’s one of many issues that I discover nice about instructing this class—no two fish would be the similar, it’s not doable. Since we work free-hand and don’t create templates, it signifies that every collage—even generated from the identical sample—will robotically, to at least one extent or one other, range in form and association of materials because of the cloth choice and whims of every creator.
The artistic move of “Wavelength” in slideshow beneath:
Dipping into the goldfish bowl
Carpe diem, carpe carpem. Sieze the day, sieze the carp. My college students did each. Simply over 1/3 of the category selected my, “Carpe Carpem” goldfish sample, to base their fish design on. However as you’ll see beneath, they had been something however the identical ol’ carp.
The making of the wonderful evolutions of “Carpe Carpem” in slideshow beneath:
After which there have been 5
Rounding out the collection of my fish patterns is, “Spiny Lionfish.”—a fish that’s extra fin than physique, however an alluring fin it appears to be.
And right here’s the in-progress pictures of the ultimate 5 sea creatures:
