An Unusual Use for Fabric

A member of the Quilt Art List (Jane Davila) posted a message to the group yesterday about her unusual use of fabric and asked if anyone else had used fabric in  a non-traditional way. I wanted to wave my hand and say I have, I have. But the list doesn't allow images to be included in messages and I hadn't done the blog update yet so I had no way to show them what I have been up to. I had to let the chance slip away. Today I am posted my unusual use of fabric. By the way you can click on Jane's name to see what she made, something much more elaborate.

I know the average person would have no need for such a large pencil holder, but with the gift at Christmas of some Faber Castell Polychroms I needed more storage. Can I say that I have a lot of colored pencils? Not all of the pencils in the holder are Polychroms, in fact most are my old Venus pencils, but I still have room for more Polychroms as I manage to acquire them. Since I need to order them from Dick Blick it will probably be a while.

I made my first pencil holder, hmm, last summer or spring I think. But it is now packed with pencils so I needed this new one for the new pencils.. The tubes are paper towel rolls that have been cut into sections. I first cover them with fabric using white school glue. Then I painted a layer of Gel Medium over the fabric, to add support and protect the fabric. Letting all that dry I hot glued the tubes together and then hot glued the tube unit to a cut to shape base of tag board. I use the shorter tubes for pencils that are getting a bit short and the longer tubes for my newish pencils. Works for me.

The above isn't finished yet, but I thought you might like to see what I have been working on. I should be drawing the center of my stipple border piece, but instead I have been doodling and working on the above. It is sort of another Zentangle, and at this point I have no clue if I will add color or not, just waiting to see how it develops.

Wednesday was a lovely sunny day, a bit cool but not that cold so I took advantage and made my first visit to Borderland State Park for the year. Most of the ponds had ice on them, but they weren't totally iced over.  We just had about a day and a half of rain so there is probably even less ice today.

Drawings are at the top some American Beech leaves. For some reason some Beech trees will retain their brown leaves through winter and into spring when the new leaves will finally force the old ones to fall. Wednesday I happened across a tree that still had a lot of leaves and those leaves were lit by the sun, so I made a photo and used the photo as reference for the drawing. I decided it was a bit hard to identify what I had drawn so I added some color to help separate the leaves from the back ground.

The bottom drawing is from a photo I made of  a pair of mallards swimming on one of the ponds with the background of bushes and trees. For this drawing I concentrated on translating the darks and lights in the photo to paper. I think it works, but it is sort of tricky to do so will have to think about this process a bit more.

Final image is the photo of the Beech leaves I made:

The above is by no means the first photo I have made of beech leaves, I love the color of them, esp. when contrasted by a dark background.

That is it for today, per usual comments are welcome.