Sara's Daydreaming

I had trouble with this theme. I am frequently distracted and unfocused from what I am supposed to be paying attention to but I don't seem to have clear daydreams - more like a cloud spun through a maze or a hamster on a wheel. I thought of showing a closet of size 4 dresses but I am not into producing realistic images. I also want to use the 12 by 12 format to try out different techniques. The end result is I remembered a class I took at IQF last year by Laura Coates Perez entitled  "Tea Bags and Ephemera". It involved attaching ephemera to fabric with matte medium. The teabags were used to trace or print images. Rubber stamps and shiva paintsticks tied things together. In my house one of the issues is finding the rubber stamps and or ephemera you know you have but can't get to. That gave me some (probably well needed ) limitations.

I started by soaking muslin in a very dilute solution of water and Golden iron oxide paint. I was going for mottled and rusty which happened in few places but it did add a pleasant yellow/orange background. I ended up doing 2 pieces. The top piece has silk rose petals, English and Arabic text cut from discarded books that my husband found in a library trash area, magazine images, a teabag, Chinese Joss paper and some rubber stamps. I used Shiva paint sticks on top of the image. I was getting impatient waiting for the matte media to dry so I started another using flowers I found in an old copy of Oprah magazine. I rather like that one better.  Quilting is done using invisafil thread. Since the quilts were using non-traditional techniques, I decided to finish them the same way - I zig-zagged silk sari yarn to the border of the quilt and then pinked the edges to meet the yarn border. I used a continuous piece of yarn for the sides and tops and one piece across the bottom to tie bows in the corners. They do represent the swirling chaos in my mind!