January 2022 Live Online Fabric Collage Class—Part Three: Colorful Canines

Thanks to each of my students from this January 2022 Live Online Class. I hope that they—and all my students—realize that they’re the one’s who make the class what it is. Tom and I have set up a framework that allows attendees to get the most out of the instruction. But it’s the students’ enthusiasm and hard work that gives the class life. I feed off the energy in a class, hopefully giving it back to them in the form of my own attention and enthusiasm. In this way, a class forms a sort of feedback loop that creatively pushes us all through those five intensive days.

Before and after the official beginning and end of each day, the main Zoom meeting room is “open” for anyone to show up early or work late. Many of the students took advantage of this and I’d hear discussions going on as I walked into my studio in the mornings. Janet Delsener had a very nice comment in our after-class survey where we asked about any frustrations during the class—”I was frustrated recognizing my inexperience compared to the rest of the class and feeling less capable. Encouragement from other class members helped and I got over it.” Again, thanks to all of you for a lovely and supportive week.

This week’s post finishes up the series of three covering the students and their work from that January 2022 Live Online Class. Photo above is “José’s Dog” by Sandra Koterba.

As usual, for this class we divided students into three breakout rooms. When grouping, I consider their subject matter, fabric collage experience, and/or their relationships to each other. For instance, friends will sign up together, and this time the class included my first mother and son pair. Tom and I ask each group to come up with a name for their room, usually based on their subject matter. This week we are visiting the Colorful Canines; two weeks ago it was the Winging It group; last week was the Crazy Fur Sure group. (I always enjoy hearing what names they give themselves!)

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Colorful Canines

The ladies of the Colorful Canines all had dogs as their subjects (as you would expect) and all arrived with the desire to create their canine portraits with colorful and unexpected colors. As with comments from other attendees, Janet Delsener addressed a question about the use of the Zoom breakout rooms and replied, “Somehow you still felt the presence of others in your breakout room and there grew a sense of concern for each others projects.”

At our Meet and Greet Zoom gathering the evening before class began, I asked everyone in turn if they had a personal goal for the week. I’ll include their answers and other comments in the write-ups below.

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Janet Delsener—Michigan

Janet made huge steps with her pup Ernie’s portrait over the course of the week. I think one of the biggest was her understanding of the type of fabric prints and colors that work best for fabric collage. I can’t remember if it was the afternoon of day one or two that she took off early to raid a local fabric store. She came back with a few treasures to help create the softness of Ernie’s fur and expression.

Circling back into the Colorful Canines to talk with Janet was always a memory test to see what she had added to or even replaced since I was last there. Which is a good thing, especially since Janet’s goal for the week was, “learn.” All the adjustments and changes Janet made were based on how she was “seeing” more and more with each day—the patterns in her fabrics, the colors and values against each other, the shape of Ernie’s face. And that’s exactly what should happen. I look forward to seeing where Ernie ends up!

From Janet:

As my first experience with fabric collage I will say that I learned a lot but realize there is much more learning ahead of me. My Ernie quilt is still in pins as I redo and redo him but each time I gain confidence in the outcome and the process of this art form. I draw great inspiration from not only Susan’s amazing work but also from the creations of my classmates. I highly recommend this class!

This may have been Janet’s first full class, but she did do a bit of homework with her Southwest Kokopelli-inspired spiral, below. A little play and fun before getting down to “work.”

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Sandra Koterba—New Jersey

Right away in our pre-class coaching session, Sandra told me that her inspiration for creating a portrait of a friend’s dog was one she had seen in a previous post, Joanne Schwartz’s dog portrait of “Catch.” Joanne created Catch with liberal use of the big patterns and bold colors of Kaffe Fassett fabrics—so that made for an easy recommendation of fabrics to add to Sandra’s stash before class—more Kaffe fabrics!

And that’s exactly what Sandra did, arriving to Day One of class with José’s dog well on his way. Sandra’s goal was to learn “what colors to put where.” In the following sequence of photos, you can easily see how Sandra has used the bold floral designs in her fabrics to depict the dog’s fur in both length and contour. If you focus on his muzzle and eyes in particular, you can track the changes and progress that Sandra made, learning what fabrics, and colors, to put where.

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Margaret—Florida

Okay, so I’m not afraid of color, but when I saw Margaret’s selection of deep orange fabrics for her little white dog Reba, I had to take a pause. And here’s what I’m so happy to have learned from years of teaching—never say never. Margaret had already thought a lot about her colors, and her goals were “value and shape.” Orange certainly has a greater value range than white, so why not? And just look at the result, a great portrait of her larger-than-life sweetie. I have to smile as Reba looks like she’s ready to burst into a flame of excitement.

Margaret also worked ahead of class, creating a spiral with the fabrics she planned to use. That exercise helped her to see better how her range of values worked as she collaged the spiral from darker to lighter values within the orange range. Here’s what Margaret had to say about creating a fabric palette for use in the spiral and her dog:

I had mixed emotions about cutting up the fabric into small hand size pieces. However, I admit that I used the cut up fabric board a bit differently than intended. I found it useful to establish a mid range color range. I then cut fabric up in relation to the closeness to the mid range fabric. I also found it useful to look at the fabric board, then I would go to the appropriate location (worked really well the first couple days until the fabric got messed up) and pull the fabric that I wanted to use. So I used it as a way to understand what fabric I had available to me.

From Margaret:

I think the biggest advantage of online—no travel expense or hassles. [Also,] your own fabric collection is at your hands. Sometimes you don’t know what fabrics will really play nice. I would not have traveled with turquoise fabric, but it became important and all I had to do was walk into my fabric storage area.