Meet Marcia Derse

Boy I'm feeling very lucky today.
A few years back a dear friend of mine Natalie Barnes of Beyond the Reef asked me to do a demo in her booth at Long Beach Quilt Festival -- of course, I said yes and set about creating something just for this opportunity. Being that BtR is all about Hawaii & the beach I designed Ocean Waves, but when it came to fabric selection I headed to Natalie's place. She had just received in the full line of ....

you guessed it, Marcia Derse fabrics. Wow!!
I fell in love with the colors, textures and depth that
Marcia's fabric IS,

..and to have Marcia share a bit about her process,
and how it all comes together makes me feel lucky indeed.
Hope you feel the same way and enjoy the words & pictures from Marcia.

When you begin to design a line of fabric-where do you begin?

Whenever I can find the time I devote a string of days to fabric dying. I use the fabrics I make for my own artwork but I always hold back knock out colors and patterns that I can’t bear to cut up for my design collections. I just finished a small batch of new designs and was delighted to find two pieces of fabric that simply jumped out of the pile, I know they are going to inspire me to work on a new collection.

Once I have a few inspiration pieces on hand I go back through my "library" of fabrics and start pulling fabrics in order to build a color story. There is a ton of weeding out and editing during this process and the theme develops over time.

Where do you turn for inspiration?

I always find myself playing off of the seasons and the colors surrounding my home and in my garden. I spend a lot of time at home getting inspired but when I start to feel a little stir crazy I love to get out and go to the library or the art museum to find insight. Blue Tiles from the Swiss Room is a piece from my new collection Mosaic, it is inspired by a large Swiss fireplace in The Toledo Museum of Art that I have loved since I was a child reading the book Heidi.

What is your favorite part of the fabric designing process?

There are so many steps in the process. Once all the work of washing, dyeing, and ironing are done, I love the reward phase of revisiting every piece of fabric I have in my stash, opening them up and making piles of my favorites according to color and design.

When I met you, you had a sketchbook full of textures you had collected.

Do you have lots of sketchbooks filled with textures? Do you remember when you began collecting? Why did you begin & continue collecting textures?

The answer is yes, and for as long as I can remember. In my studio I have shelves of journals filled with scraps and treasures. I have a habit of pinning everything I collect on my composition wall so I can see it. More often than not, I don't have much space on my wall to work. When the walls start closing in on the artwork I take everything down and I grab a blank book and start glueing, sewing and layering all my inspiration pieces adding buttons, ribbons, papers and photos from other collections. Most of the time the book becomes a gigantic mass that hardly resembles a series of pages. I have always loved books and I find it very satisfying to have all my treasures from different eras cataloged in my studio.

 

 

All of Marcia's fabrics can be seen on her website....
click over and you will love seeing it ALL.
BUT, this weekend she will be working to put her entire new line on the site.

I will be sure to send out a reminder,
meantime I hope you enjoyed this peek into Marcia's fabric designer 'self',

as for me, I now know what I can do with all that stuff
I collect and have pinned to the walls around me!

Fabric - Fabric - Fabric

Last month was to be all about fabric, but life seemed to be against me spending time totally engulfed in this fun wonder stuff. Family 'happenings' pulled me in a totally unexpected direction --

so, I'm letting the fabric roll on into October....

to kick it off here are some stacks of fabrics that have been selected for quilts in my upcoming book... some of these have already been turned into fun quilt tops, others sit teasing me to 'pick us next'.

which pile would you pick?

Mixing Words & Fabric - Meet Cindy Rinne

Talk about fabric and someone always asks - ' what do you do with your scraps'.

My answer always involves Cindy Rinne. She is a long time friend, amazing art quilter and the one who loves getting a bag of its and bits from me. Cindy then takes them and transforms them through her collages.

Over the last couple of years she re- committed herself to one of her first loves, poetry... and she found ways of combining this with her fabric works.

Enough, now it's time to Meet Cindy...

Which came first the poetry or the quilts, and how did you get started with quilt making?
The poetry came first as I started out as a watercolorist and then acrylic painter. I have always liked collage and included texture in my water media works. I was adhering photo transfers on fabric and fabric squares in the 9-patch block onto wood when I was invited to my first quilt meeting. Both of my friends were painters and had gotten involved with quilting. I enjoyed the guild meetings, especially learning about the history of fabrics and the history behind the various traditional blocks. I attended for three years before trying quilting. I was having my photo transfers done at a quilt shop. The owner, assuming I was a quilter, said that these photos on muslin will make beautiful quilts. I drove away thinking that I am not a quilter, but the idea stuck. I designed my first art quilt and never looked back.
When did the light bulb go off about combining these?
The light bulb went off last summer. I helped to start a poetry critique group called PoetrIE. I was seriously getting into poetry by last summer. I even had a bio of poems being published. A poetry friend of mine and I decided to do a drawing-a-day for the month of July. At the same time, my PoetrIE group decided to write a poem-a-day. It was a crazy month trying to write and draw everyday, but transformation came. The story I was writing became the source for my drawings. I translated the word "drawing" into using fabric, ink, pencil, etc. I will be having a solo show of this work next spring including a reading at the opening of the poetry we both wrote for this story.

I know you like using others scraps ....when did this begin, and what's the best thing about using these scraps?
As I said, I have always enjoyed collage. Before I was mostly collaging paper. Now I began to collage with fabrics. In art quilts I could use most any fabric as my pieces are not washed. The best thing about using scraps from others is that I think about them as I use their fabrics, including you! This way each of my fiber pieces is a community. I've even had people come to my exhibits and pick out the fabric they gave me. It's fun for them to see what I did with their treasures. I receive some special fabrics (international, vintage) because I only need small pieces.

What is one of your favorite ways to spend an afternoon?
I enjoy being in nature which inspires both my art and poetry, but as much as I quilt and write alone, friends and community are vital to me.

 

 

Hope you enjoyed meeting Cindy.
Fantastic use of scraps don't you think?!?
(btw - Cindy is in one of the pictures on my header -- can you find her?)