Participating

This summer I discovered Jude Hill and her Spirit Cloth blog, and if you scroll down a bit (or click on Professional Fiber Artisit Jude Hill on the right) you can see the feature I did on her and her work. Currently she is offering up wonderful stitching workshops about how to create a variety of stitched feathers.  Her goal is to collect 1000 from stitchers around the world and put them together into a piece that she will donate the proceeds from to charity.  To date she has collected a little over 400 feathers, ours included from my students here at Whitney. 

Here's how the process went:

I offered this up as an extra credit assignment and had 7 students participate.  We started off with a bit of Eco Dyeing (ala India Flint)  We prepped our fabrics as we would for Tye -Dyeing.

Then choose natural dye stuffs to work with.  Many of the kids chose pomegranate seeds, Korean grapes and various tea leaves.   

It was fun to open the cloths up to see the results.  A rock that leached a bit of it's pigment into the cloth above...

fan folding and resisting with paper clips...

and laying down a few leaves and wrapping them around a stick as the stick was rolled into the cloth. 

These were some of the results.

My two favorites were done by junior freshman Karisma Dev and junior Rita Labib.

Below are the finished stitched feathers along with their story cloths that we mailed off to Jude.  Jude featured our pieces today on her blog with the stories.  Once on her blog click on Gathering Feathers on the right.

Junior Joyce Lee (above)

Senior Aparna Vancheswaran

Senior Ingrid Huang

Senior Johanna Paz

Senior Pauline Yang

Freshman Karisma Dev

and Junior Nida Fatima

Ever since I started this project I'm seeing feathers everywhere.  Here on my arm with a bit of shaving creme that came up off my leg LOL

So anyways the feathers flew off last Monday to Jude and she posted them today, so make sure you check it out.  One of my best art students this year, senior David Hyun, decorated the mailing package that we sent them in.  Beautiful!

For EXTRA CREDIT: cut a piece of brown paper into the shape of a feather and on the front side put your name and period.  On the back side tell me whose feather you liked the most, and hand your feather to me tomorrow when you walk in my door.