Tea Bag Revival

Libby Williamson is a fabulous teacher, as she proved once again in her Tea Bag Revival class at Artistic Artifacts on Sunday.  (She also taught a 2-day Paint and Stitch class on Friday and Saturday.) Sue was in the Sunday class with 2 friends from out of town - all 3 of us took the 2-day class 2 years ago. Libby's art and style is very intuitive and whimsical - very "throw out the rules and make up your own", so there's no pressure to be perfect.  She creates a fun and relaxed environment to try something new. The focus of the class was using tea bags (steeped, dried and emptied) as the foundation for collaged art.

Here's Libby with one of her sample quilts. The brown squares you see are the tea bags.

In the  foreground of this photo, you can see some of the prepared tea bags.  The tea bags are fused to a muslin base to stabilize them for sewing.

Here Libby demonstrates the process for emptying the tea bags and fusing them to the muslin.

This is another of Libby's samples.  Enlarge the photos to get a better look at the mini collages.  We used small pieces of fabric and painted papers to create the collages, which are machine stitched with black thread and also embellished with hand embroidery.

These are Sue's tea bag collages.  All the pieces are "glued" to the bags with matte medium which has to dry before proceeding.

The stitching is kind of intuitive, some just outlining and/or keeping with the mostly geometric shapes.

These are the machine stitched collages.  There are 6 more in addition to the original group of 12.  The next step is adding hand stitching.

These are the collages Denise is working on.

And here are Paula's collages.  Aren't they both great?

Libby did some instruction on how she arranges them on the background, as well as adding some other fabrics under and between some of them.

After some additional stitching at home, Sue finished the embroidery on 12 collages.  She is working on 4 more for a grid of 16.  Then it will be time to play with adding some additional fabrics to the background and stitching it all together.  There will likely be more hand stitching as well.  Stay tuned for more on the final product.  This was a fun class and we highly recommend Libby as a teacher.  She teaches all over the country, so if she's ever in your area, sign up!  Libby's website is called Art Soup and you can also follow her on Facebook to see what she's up to.  If you're a subscriber of Quilting Arts, she been a cover girl and has articles in 3 issues - June/July 2017, April/May 2018, August/September 2018.  Check them out!

Paint & Stitch Magic

Over the past weekend, Sue had great fun in a 2-day class at Artistic Artifacts with Libby Williamson of Blue Denim Design.  Libby is from California and has a unique approach to art quilting, which combines painted paper collage, free motion thread sketching, machine applique and painting on cloth.  We created 2 different projects using related but different techniques.

We started with getting messy by painting some papers to use in the collage work.  Libby uses deli paper as a mainstay of her painted papers, but also recommends maps, book pages, sheet music, etc. She even gave us some Monopoly money to paint! 

Paint can be applied with a brush or fingers (or both) and stamps and other objects can be used to add additional color and pattern.

Here is Sue's friend Paula getting messy!  We also worked with gelatin plates to create papers and fabric prints.

Here are some of Sue's painted papers, some of which you may spot later in her collage.

This is one of Libby's collage samples.  The background is a heavy canvas that is fringed on the edges.  The colored pieces are all painted papers that are applied with matte medium.  Details are added with free motion stitching in black thread.

Here's the piece Libby did in class to demo the collage process.  Notice the 3 segments that make up the house are the Monopoly money.

We did so much in the 2 days, that I decided to break the post up into 3 parts, so be sure to check back for more.  Libby is a fun, relaxed, and generous teacher and I highly recommend her classes.  Here is a link to her blog.  Libby will be teaching at Craft Napa in January 2018, so if you are contemplating attending this 4 day retreat, check out Libby's classes.  (Sue and Paula attended Craft Napa this year.)