At our March Fyber Cafe meeting, we had fun doing a design exercise with geometric shapes. I stole this from another group's blog, Kathy Schmidt at Quirks Ltd. in the UK
click here & scroll down to Nov 22. We each started with Six 5" squares of
bright fabric, with fusible ironed on the back, such as Steam-a-Seam or Wonder Under. Then the two squares with the darkest value we cut once, to use in the background, the remaining squares we cut into other smaller geometric shapes, about 4-6 pieces from each square. We cut rectangles, strips, squares, lot of circles, crescents, snakes, many different triangles, stars, eggs, etc... I provided a yard of black solid cotton, to use as a background, and we placed the larger pieces first, then the smaller cut shapes. We started just throwing them on, but had to stop and put more thought into the placement.
We were allowed to place pieces on top, underneath others, overlap, and all over the black fabric, you could move previously placed pieces, we played a long time. Every so often we moved two steps to the left, so you worked on a different section. At the end we each removed two pieces! The idea was to consider design options, balance, value, line, repetition, shape, and color. After everything was in place, we stood back and gave it a good critical look, a few things were tweaked. We wanted a little more of the black/negative space to show. Paper was placed on top and it was rolled up, to take home and iron all the pieces in place.
As I ironed it, I fussed a little, mostly on how they overlapped and to even out the black space. After ironing, it was cut up into 16 sections approximately 8" x 10" some of them cut straight, and some wonky. Each artist will receive a piece to play with, cut up, repiece, add or subtract, extend, cover over, alter, or embellish. Just to have fun playing with color and design.
It will be very interesting to see what everyone does with their piece. There were thirteen who participated, if you were not there at the last meeting, email Amy for one of the extra sections.
