100 Days of Composition: Goals and Set Up

 

Upon completing 100 Days of Mark Making on Fabric, I took a few days off from daily mark making, creating, and posting. And those few days continued into a few more days, into a week, and finally into 3 weeks of very little creativity. I took some time to tidy up the studio and to catch up on writing my weekly blog posts, but that was the extent of my creativity. Austin Kleon's "I’m not languishing, I’m dormant" blog post helped put this pause in perspective while "waiting to be activated."

A few events helped pique my creativity:

• My friend, Sarah Goer, messaged me to see if I might be up for starting a new 100 Day Project. We've been each other's 100 Day Project accountability partners for the past year.
• SAQA is kicking off a Jump Into June: a short term daily creativity project. 

Goals:

I started to mull over my creativity goals and develop a new game plan. I took a few days to let it percolate before finalizing these 3 goals:

1. Create a series of 12" x 12" or bigger compositions using Mark-Making fabrics and Design Guides as a jumping off point, that are finished with quilting/hand embroidery.
2. Use Mark Making fabrics as the primary source of fabric. Ok to supplement with fabric from stash/commercial fabrics/= or create additional fabric as needed for each project.
3. Post progress each day to Instagram and blog about process/personal critique for each finished project.

Materials and Resources:

• Each composition will feature fabrics made as part of my 100 Days of Mark Making on Fabric Project. With over 492 pieces of fabric or a total of 37 yards of mark-making magic, there should be plenty of fabric to use with all 14 projects. However, it is ok to supplement with commercial fabrics from my stash and/or to create more fabric as needed.
• Two of Deborah Boschert's books will serve as references for this project. I'll be rolling to determine which Design Guide from her Art Quilt Collage book will serve as a starting point for each composition, as I absolutely loved the 8 small pieces I created in her Captivating Compositions class. Then I'll use several of the lists and prompts from Deborah's Head, Heart and Hands to reflect upon each week's finished project.
• Once again I'll be using dice to determine my creative assignments:
• 6-sided die for selecting focus color (other colors/neutrals are permitted)
• 8-sided die for selecting a design guide from Deborah Boschert's Art Quilt Collage book and Captivating Composition class).
  
  * Many thanks to Sarah for providing me with a 7-piece Polyhedral Dice Set which includes die ranging from 4 to 20 sides!

Weekly Game Plan: 

To help me stay on track to complete a small composition each week, a weekly schedule was developed to devote one or more days to each step of the quiltmaking process:

• Day 1: Dice roll, Pull fabrics/Fuse/start layout
• Day 2: draft layout
• Day 3: refine/fuse/draft stitching
• Day 4: stitch 1
• Day 5: stitch 2
• Day 6: stitch/finish 1
• Day 7: finish 2/blog with process and personal critique

While I built in a little bit of wiggle room, this timeline is always subject to change depending on my schedule and the needs of the project. The most important part is making daily progress!

First Roll and Fabric Pull:

Here is a sneak peek of my first dice roll and fabric pull for the first project:

6=Purple Fabrics
1=Symmetrical Design Guide

More than an hour was spent pulling and editing down the purple possibilities in order to include a range of values and textures. These have all been backed with Pellon 805 Wonder Under fusible, although I may add more fabrics to the mix once I start composing my layout.

As with past projects, I'll be posting my progress daily to Instagram and sharing more of my inspiration, process, and personal critique in a weekly blog post here. I hope you will join me on this new creative adventure. Or perhaps you'd like to join me using fabrics from your own stash. If you would like a MSWord or PDF copy of my Game Plan, feel free to contact me via email.