Cloth Paper Scissors - March/April 2009 - (Page 12)

popping the question We asked readers: How have you improvised? When you can‘t ﬁnd—or don‘t have—the tool or materials you really want, what‘s the craziest substitution you‘ve ever made? And what were the results? We received a variety of responses from our very creative and adaptive readers. Maybe you‘ll learn a few new ideas we did. When traveling by plane, I ended up stuck in the airport waiting for a ﬂight. I took out my art journal and found that I had already ﬁlled up all of my pre-made backgrounds. So, trying to ﬁgure out a way to get rid of the blank, white page, I used my coffee to stain the watercolor paper and used items found in the airport to collage onto the pages. These turned out to be some of my favorite pages as they inspire me to look around at what is on hand to incorporate into my journal. I can also still smell a hint of coffee each time I open that journal. Pam Carriker in Springﬁeld, MO One improvisation is a “modiﬁcation” to a tailor tacking foot. I needed a [sewing machine] foot that I could run many strands of yarn through while zigzagging in order to make a cord for a purse strap. I had been using a beading foot, but the opening was not big enough for all the strands I wanted to use. I went down to the sewing store and asked my friend Susan (the owner) if I could browse through the feet to see what she had that I could modify. With my little hacksaw I cut off all the “unnecessary” parts, smoothed the cut edges with a rasp, and voilà, I was in business. The other is a rubber gasket that I ran across in my husband’s shop while looking for pliers to “make adjustments” (an act of being at my wits’ end) to the spring that controls the tension disks of an old (1949) but great Singer® sewing machine that my mom gave me. No matter how much I loosened or tightened the spring or adjusted the tension screw on the bobbin case, I could never get a nice balanced tension. When I saw the rubber gasket, with its cone shape and a hole in the middle, I decided to see what would happen if I put it in place of the spring. As I sewed on some scrap material I would tighten the screw a little at a time until I got a good thread balance. And there it has stayed I don’t dare mess with it because now it sews beautifully, including the Sulky® Holoshimmer and Metallic threads, without any complications. Laura H. Osbun via email Once, in the middle of a project inspired by Maija Brummer’s “Endless Summer” article (QUILTING ARTS MAGAZINE, Summer 2005), I needed some late-night fabric dye or paint. Having none on hand, I scrambled for a likely substitute. The beautiful pink roses she used in her “Rambling Rose” piece were my target colors. The idea came to me that my ﬁve-year-old granddaughter seemed to sport a perpetual red “mustache” because of drinking Kool Aid®. There was plenty of that in my cupboard, and the raspberry ﬂavor, mixed with very little water, produced wonderful, different pinks for the roses. Voilà! Who knew? Betty Acker in Frankfort, KY I needed to add a ﬁsh to a pictorial quilt I was making and I couldn’t ﬁnd any cotton fabric that would give the look of wet scales. Then I came across a piece of bathing suit fabric with silver dots over stripes of bright blue, yellow, and pink. I painted it with iridescent purple, green, and white. The bright colors disappeared and the silver dots remained. The result was a ﬁsh that glistened! Vivian Kapusta in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada …you were going to be stranded on a desert island, what ONE art supply would you take with you and what ONE natural item would you want to be available on the island so you could create? Send your responses to bdelaney@interweave.com. We enjoy hearing from our readers. Correspondence we receive (both by post and email) is considered property of Interweave Press LLC and letters chosen for publication may be edited as necessary for length and clarity. if knew I make handmade books as gifts. My local art supply store ran out of the sticky-backed spine tape, so, upon a suggestion from my sister, I used duct tape. It worked! I cover it with velvet or other fabric so it doesn’t show. One more great use of duct tape—and one more reason to listen to my sister! Linda West via email I was determined to marble some paper even though I didn’t have half of the materials to do it properly. I was scrounging around trying to ﬁnd something that would serve as a gelatinous surface on which to put my paints, and Metamucil® was the answer. The results, which could probably not ofﬁcially be called marbling, were lovely, and I will probably try it again some day. Emma Gessel in Riverton, UT C P S

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Cloth Paper Scissors - March/April 2009

Cloth Paper Scissors - March/April 2009 Musings Contents Now Read This The In-box Who Did This? Popping the Question Muse Flash The Workshop: Modeling Paste “Recycled Circles” Artist Profile: Sara Lechner Fickle Flowers “Skeletons in your Closet” Reader Challenge Printable Cotton Collage Stop! Look! Listen! Revisionary Journals Creating Custom Paper for Collage Metal Magic Artist to Artist with Martha Lent An Apron as Personal Armor I Made This: "Gypsy Cats" Versatile Identities Marketplace Classifieds and Ad Index Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman Homework

Cloth Paper Scissors - March/April 2009

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