A few details on the Habitat front

I have been surface treating yards of fabric, cutting, reassembling, embroidering, embellishing and serging.  Three different sewing machines are in use.












AT the end of a long week, I had nearly 20 modules completed.  I taped them up on a wall to begin to see what needed to happen.

I learned that I need to do a lot of calmer modules to rest the eye.  Not a problem!  They will probably be a soft blue/grey.

 I also decided ( a soft, non-binding decision at this point) that there will be a dark, brown road/ vine that will meander through the design, leading the eye and assisting with the actual structure.

Working Day and night now

I am working in high gear now on the Habitat project.  Each module has many many steps.  It all starts as 12.5" squares of fabric, some of them dyed for the project, most of them receiving a combo of Paint Stix and aerosol Lumiere paint through stencils, rubber s tamps or rubbling plates.  Once a stack of squares have received their surface decoration, they are stacked and cut into 4 rectangles.  These rectangles are shuffled and joined together to make new squares.

piecing stage #1

The newly designed squares are now cut into trapezoids that will be shuffled and assembled.

Piecing stage #2

The final assembly of the squares is accomplished with fusibles and lots of decorative stitching.

Piecing stage #3

When sufficient surface stitching has been completed, 2 fully embellished squares are fused on both sides of Peltex, a super stiff pellon product.  The shape is cut out of  this "board"  and will then have its perimeter run through a serger for a finished edge.

A square all finished except for the serging!

Baby steps for Habitat

In the breezy studio, it's pretty darn cold and the color references are equally cool.  Not frigid, mind you, but cool, calm and collected.

While I still need to purchase more cloth, more interfacing and probably other un-imagined things, there is enough thinking done to START.  In January there will be 2 workshops with Habitat clients that may shift things. Meanwhile, with holidays and more renovation work on the studio, I will try to be productive.  My contractor will soon slay the breezes that come through ALL the doors in this old building!

Before Thanksgiving, my assistant Dale and I  donned attractive hard hats and visited the new Habitat for Humanity offices.The office accent colors are already a cool, calm, blue-grey with feature walls of natural wood.  

 The hanging I will fabricate will hang across somewhere around the column in this photo, forming a permeable wall between the cubicles and a gathering area.

Surfaced design: procion dye, Dynaflow paint, paint sticks, Lumiere fabric paint, stencils and rubbling

Earlier this week, I got the serger back from the Bobbin Doctor and began the experiments with that.  I determined that the heavy Peltex will got through and will cut!  Hooray!  Determining the tension was not too hard.  From there I went on to do more work on the embroidery machine, learning a couple of small software packages that may allow me to input text with the computer keyboard.  In the next few days I will be working with Airstash to transmit designs to the machine from either  the computer or the iPad or iPhone.  Believe it or not, one of  the text packages is optimized for the iPhone rather than the computer.

So, although only 5 measly "squares" have been fabricated, a lot has been happening around here.