141 – Chaos
Chaos! Best description for the past several months. More on that later.
Chaos is the word I chose as the graffiti that will be on the amusement park wall of my Fear quilt. Two boys are positioned as if spray-painting, but the word or image they are making needs to make sense with the general tone of the entire scene. And then, how to make it look like graffiti? Not wanting to paint it on, I decided to mimic the look by thread painting. I quickly discovered that spray-painted graffiti is not as easy to create as it looks. The often-elaborate graphics look like they were created spontaneously – but stylized calligraphy and coordinated colors must be quite planned and practiced – especially if spray painters aim to successfully complete their graffiti surreptitiously. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t come up with the look I wanted. Mine always resulted in more of a logo look. (I did like the final “logo” so much that I painted it on a t-shirt for my son’s birthday, but that was a different diversion!) I finally decided that just the word Chaos stitched out in red, blue and white, with some white drips, would be enough.
The correctly sized word was traced onto dissolvable Solvy stabilizer. Then, a lot of stitching followed by rinsing away the Solvy. While waiting for this to dry, I finished cutting out some zombie girls for a signboard and dotted material that looked like marquee lighting. I arranged everything in place on the wall. Chaos slightly overlapped the “Now Showing” words (that I had created with similar thread painting) to look as if the graffiti was defacing the sign. I stitched it into place with white thread, adding some stitching to look as if white paint was dripping from the graffiti. Pretty happy with the overall outcome, even if it is not the spectacular graffiti street art that I had envisioned. I do have new respect for street artists!
As I prefaced, Chaos has been the operative word in my life. My sister-in-law passed away rather unexpectedly. My husband and I came down with a terrible sickness that would not go away – all the Covid symptoms with none of the positive tests! So many delays because of a complete lack of energy and not wanting to spread germs, leaving an awful lot of catch up to be done. My daughter about to have her second baby, so helping with the grandchild (exhausting!) Home repairs and contractors, scheduling and running out for meetings and to make choices of materials. Like I said, chaos…
Now that I have stitched out this word, maybe there will be a return to normalcy!!
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