My Life With Hair

Last weekend, I spent 3 days in Susan Shie's Outsider Art Diary Quilts Workshop. Wow! What fun it was! I loved using the air pen. (I'd run out and buy one, but I'm not sure I'd use it enough to justify the $130 price tag.) I went in with the attitude that I wasn't making Great Art, which allowed me to try different things without stress.

I enjoyed Susan's Library Time, when we wrote and sketched. I treated it like Morning Pages and just got rid of a lot of crap that was floating around in my mind. My sketchbook has twice as much writing as sketches!

The first day's theme was "hair" - my quilt shows me at different hair stages.

I didn't like how the paint bled when I painted on wet fabric. (i.e. my dark hair bled into the background.) I also didn't like the straight paint look. Blending paint with extender &/or water worked the best for me. I purposely didn't mix enough paint to do the entire background. I like the variation in colors that I got as I painted across the quilt.



The writing on a face is about me when I had that hair style.
In the space around the faces, I wrote hair stories and memories. I used a Rub-A-Dub laundry marker and several ultra-fine tip Sharpies. I don't like the thick line of the Rub-A-Dub and I wish my Sharpie markings were stronger.

I used Susan's binding method, but am going to do some free-motion quilting instead of using her free-form grid. I painted one quilt each day of class (themes were 2008 and whine/wine). They are still works in progress.