my first collages

I was going through photos tonight on picasa and found a treasure trove of my old collages from my first collage class at the Art Institute of Chicago, back when I had no idea how important collage would become in my life. I believe this lotus one above was my first collage.

I was in a program there where I was headed toward a certificate in Painting and I stumbled into this collage class and also a wonderful class on "the Artists' Sketchbook" by this fabulous teacher that just transformed my way of thinking artistically. I never did finish the program, but I do remember talking to my advisors and having them say to me in true, generous, art school form: "You're just painting with thread and paper now... you've found your medium" I'm so happy for the few years I was able to take classes at the Art Institute. What a wonderful experience that was.

This one is a pretty accurate skyline collage of Chicago, made all with fabric scraps.
I spent so much time on it. I donated it to a charity auction (I can't even remember what it benefitted!) and it sold. Sometimes I wish it hadn't sold and I'd been able to keep it!

This one was really big.
It was very soon after our wedding and I was playing with sewing on paper
and also working with acrylic transfers. I had a lot of fun doing this one.

I made this one over a weekend in Arizona, on hiatus from a very long cold Chicago winter.
The desert had never seemed so beautiful to me before.
I spent the whole (rainy) weekend in the house with good friends -
we called it "The Summit"... and stitched this little memoir.

This was an attempt to unite my collages with my growing bead collection as I was starting my jewelry company. I was a part of a funny group of much older people (and me) that called themselves the "Midwest Collage Society". We met monthly and collaged and shared together. We also would trade all the time and I got the coolest collection of burlap coffee sacks in those trades. I think I still have one somewhere... somewhere.

This one was a weird idea I had to use the tiniest scraps of fabrics from some tossed out samples from work (I worked in the Interior Design business). But when I was getting to see how they all looked stitched together, I thought it looked really lousy. So instead of tossing it, I just embroidered my failure as a joke across the project.