Celebrity Cruise Contemporary Art Collection

I just got back from a Celebrity cruise with my whole family for my mom's 75th birthday.

One thing that surprised me was the large collection of art on the ship.

It turns out that Celebrity has one of the world’s largest collections of contemporary art

with over 14,000 pieces in their collection.

You can learn more about their collection in this short video.

These bustes exotiques were a main feature in between floors in the central staircase.

They are by artist Liza Lou

If you take a Celebrity Solstice cruise you can borrow an iPad and take a tour of pieces in their collection.

Journal Pieces Weeks 40-43

Wk 40, Anger

 Freemotion

  

Wk 41, Relationships

Applique, freemotion, and working on velvet for the first time 

Wk 42, Freedom

Another school year over, and how I feel about it

 Some hand stitching and beads

Wk 43, Leymah

Inspired by Noble Peace laureate who helped bring peace to Liberia

I am researching her for a larger peice for an exhibition called

Broad Changes: Women of Social Justice for

The Fiber Artists for Hope  fall exhibition

Journal Pieces Weeks 36-39

Wk 36, Buttons

One last block to re-purpose.

This is incomplete, got a li'l tired of sewing on the buttons

Wk 37, OK

I learned that sometimes you just need to say, "Ok"

Wk 38, Untitled

Playing with scraps and composition

Wk 39, Heart

I was given this screen print and I played with

color and thread painting

It was a lot of fun

The back

Weeks 31-35

Week 31, 27 eT

 Since my birthday is on the 27th, I am obsessed with the # 27.

The green swirl is the last letter of my first name, and the first letter of my last name
as I sign it in my signature

I used silk and sheers

Week 32, The 70's

This patch had been donated to me and several months ago, if not years, I had

made the patch into this small quilt

The colors and feel of the fabrics reminded me so much of my childhood

I decided to repurpose it using a variety of surface design techniques

I painted on it

Used bubble wrap to stamp patterns on it

Used paint sticks and fabric gel pens to decorate the piece

Then I appliqued some fabric, sheers, and scraps of netting

Adding final touches with some stitching

This piece was a whole lot of fun to work on.

I tried to be spontaneous and not over think any design choices

Wk 33, Peace

Artist Maggie Weiss presented a thermafax workshop at her beautiful studio

in Evanston for Illinois SDA members

Here she is running an image through the machine

This creates a screen so the image can be reproduced many times

Here we are making our prints

Maggie explains the different paints to us

I made several prints and made them into small postcards

I accidentally printed on the wrong side, so I screened a peace the correct way

This is to remind you to live with peace inside and outside yourself

Close up of stitching

Wk 34, Maneater

I had so much fun repurposing that patch (I have 3 of them) I decided to do another one.

When I was about 10 I crawled into my brother's bunk bed and decided to see what

listening to music was like. I turned on the clock radio and the song

Maneater by  Hall & Oates was playing.

I listened for a while and decided that music made no sense, a woman can't eat a man.

I turned the radio off deciding music was not for me.

I used several surface design techniques on this piece too.
I now need to have the radio on at all times and love music.

Wet Felting, Week 32 Journal Piece

Fellow fiber artist, Frances Krueger-Jackson offered to teach me and a friend how to wet felt.

The process startes with laying out the roving on a sheet of bubble wrap

You can see how beautiful and rich the colors of the fibers are

Next we get the fibers sopping wet with soapy water

We put another layer of bubble wrap over the fibers

roll it up with a towel and rock the roll it back and forth for 15 minutes

This is just the first step in getting the fibers to hold together

There were several steps of beating, rubbing, and slapping of the piece

to make sure the fibers all held together securely

Here is the finished piece

It was a lot of fun and a lot of work to make

and I look forward to doing it again soon

Week 27-30

Week 27, Tracking

An experiment with fabrics and beads

Week 29, St. Patrick's Day

Represents the fun we had going out for corned beef sandwiches and Guinness

on a beautiful sunny and warm St. Patrick's Day

Week 30, Spring

An experiment with reverse applique

I layers the color fabrics under the black, stitched the shaped,

then cut the shapes out of the black to reveal the color fabric

Febuary Pieces 23-26

Week 23: Art Doll

I was doing a unit on sewing that culminated with my students

creating an art doll, so I needed a sample.

Week 24: Five

Used 5 gum wrappers in 5 colors, a half of a $5 I found,

and metal rings recycled from bow ties

Week 25: Heart

Thread painted in sections of a heart doily from a thrift store

for Valentine's Day week

Week 26: Squares

I awoke to this vision of squares

then added the wooden beads and ribbon