Dyeing, failure, destroying quilts and trademarks

Okay, it was a mishmash kind of week with no clear direction. I’m playing and catching up – it’s wonderful to be able to have the time to do these things.

DYEING

I have put my hat in the ring to submit a piece for Prism Play, a Regional Studio Art Quilt Associates exhibit. The concept is that each piece in the exhibit will be based on a single color, pulled from Joen Wolfrom’s color tool. The exhibit will be hung continuously around the gallery showing the entire spectrum of color. Isn’t that just the coolest concept? Can you imagine how awesome that will be?

My color is yellow green:

This is just my gathering of ideas and materials at this point. Eventually I’ll be making a 45″ x 15″ piece. I love sheers and I pulled the above pieces from my personal hand dyed silk organza stash, The problem is that the pieces are not long enough. The other materials may or may not make it into the piece. The little black grass scene is just for ideas – we cannot use black or white at all, only the color from our card. Nice challenge!

I needed more fabric so I dug into my meager dye supplies and got after it. I used Dharma‘s acid dyes and the microwave-in-a-bag method. I followed the directions off their site. They are so helpful! If you call them they will walk you through the process.

I am not a regular dyer and I was shocked that it took 4 hours to produce this:

They are all supposed to be green! The really dark ones are green but that blue on the right? I hear that it is common in dyeing to have colors that surprise you. I have much to learn. I was pleased with the outcome though!

I think I will do some handwork on the panel as well as some free standing embroideries. It will have a nature theme – that’s as far as I am right now. I like to have an idea where I’m going – working this way is very uncomfortable.

FAILURE

I’ve written previously that I have taken up yoga. I want to improve my balance and flexibility and yoga is the ticket. I am pretty sucko at yoga in general but I’m pathetic on balance. Every day I get up at the wee hour and walk about 3 miles. After I return home I do about 25 min of yoga – I’m all warmed up so I can go right into some difficult-for-me poses.

Among the things I do daily is work on balance. Balance is very important for aging women. So, for 3 minutes I fail at balance. Every day. It’s not like I’m trying to do some intricate pose, I’m simply trying to stand on one foot! It has taken me 6 months to get to the point where I can lean forward balanced on my right foot with my torso parallel to the floor. I can hold that for maybe 40 sec. On my right side. My left side, not so much. But I do this every day and pretty much fail, every day. But I’m failing less!

You really do have to fail to get good at something, you can’t avoid failure on the way to mastery. I feel a kinship with my students who are learning to free motion quilt. They can clearly envision what they want their fmq to look like, but they have to work and fail to get there. Me too.

DESTROYING QUILTS

I have wanted to work this way for a long time: cut up and reassemble a quilt or quilts. I have a ton of quilts I don’t like that are not remarkable. I also have many class samples that no longer fit my needs. I sorted through my quilts and came up with a pretty big stack to pull from:

And that does not include the BIG stack that I will eventually use to create some quilted jackets.

I started by culling through some of the pile and cutting out and saving the good quilted bits and discarding the rest. I somewhat randomly cut out pieces and played around with them just a little bit:

This is PLAY, the very beginning of the process. I can see that there is some promise.

Then I thought it might be interesting and a lot easier if I cut them up into pieces of the same size:

I know, looks like a checker board so far. A couple of things though: I would somehow adhere them to another substrate, then create another story with a layer of quilting on top of this, heavy, with beefy thread. This would be background. Also, I could use smaller blocks and create letters or a statement. Or, use more random shapes but combine the black and white.

I don’t know where this is going and it may not go anywhere. It’s been fun to play with and seriously, I would love to come up with a creative way to use those old quilts.

TRADEMARK

I really didn’t set out to learn about trademarks, I really didn’t. I shared a finish last week, this piece using sheers and lettering. I’m really excited about this concept! I see many possibilities as well as a class, so I made this as a class sample:

I received an email from a newsletter reader who let me know that a company has trademarked that phrase. Oh no, I did NOT want to take someone else’s intellectual property! Who knew that was a trademarked phrase? What if anything did I need to do? At the very least I figured I would not post this as a class sample on social media.

I went to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) website and it’s pretty easy to see if a phrase has been trademarked. Hmmm, I didn’t find it there. I wrote the alert reader who let me know that it was just “Start before you’re ready” that was trademarked. I confirmed that by searching on the USPTO site.

But there was more to learn. The trademark only applied to the applicant’s industry, athletic apparel. So it WAS legal for me to use the phrase after all. Whew!

Bottom line, if you are going to use a phrase in project and want to make sure you’re not violating someone’s trademark, research it here first. I am grateful to my reader who alerted me to a potential problem. I love my readers, you too!

I’ll link up with:

Nina-Marie’s Off the Wall Friday
and
Finished or Not Friday