Class Discussion - the third project

I went to class feeling pretty good about my project, I was excited to get going, whereas my classmates - many of them were still trying to find materials that worked; wondering about the mechanics of doing something large; some were sort of paralyzed, not with fear, but with uncertainty; maybe feeling that what they were about to do was "wrong" in some way?

We went around the room looking at what others brought in. Some of the work I thought had really interesting possibilities - the beads and glue with its "molecular" qualities and the bamboo sticks which could turn out to be a wonderful structure.

When Layne, the instructor, came over to mine, I said the inner tubes represented travel to me and I liked to ride my bike. Well it took her about a half a second to say it was too pictorial, too obvious. So there it was... spoken out loud, my inner fears expressed. She said I should depict how I feel when I ride my bike not the situation, what she liked about the sample was the freeness of the design. I'm thinking "crap" now I have to start again, make it more abstract, more pattern. Now what? Nothing popped into my mind - slight panic - how am I going to fill up a large space with a bunch of squiggles?

Starting again... what are the different feelings I have when I ride?

The third project - "supersized" cloth

The most successful of my fabric sample projects was the bike tube, rubber bands, and staples, and of my samples had the most flexibility and possibility.

What do all the parts mean?

Bike tubes: riding a bike, travel, freedom, rhythmic, exploration, your own power, happiness, health, scenic, learning, hard, sweat, accomplishment, satisfaction, power.

Rubber bands: stretchy, colorful, widths, pliable, holds things together, close things, they get brittle, make them into a ball, slingshots.

Staples: Shiny, sharp, holds things together, fastener, metal, hard.

So on to the inner tubes - travel - bike trips... I first thought of a patchwork of tubes radiating out from a center circle, kind of like a bike wheel, putting in the sections remembrances of trips gone by. I could show Texas, the bigness, the wind, the flowers; and maybe the Gulf with it's waters in 5 shades of blue... But the empty spaces would need to be dealt with, how would the whole thing hold together? I didn't want to put it on a rectangular frame. Somehow I thought of maybe taking some inner tube circles and "chaining" them together to form a cloth background. Something didn't feel right, the more I thought the less I liked it, the "wheel" idea seemed too obvious, the "chain" structure too different from the rest, it didn't go together.

Then I came up with a big patchwork quilt idea - a story quilt. So I sketched different "vignette" of my trips and then came up with an all over block design to plan it out and work out some dimensions. I was fairly happy with the idea, it was certainly more personal than my weavings, but was it to literal? it was kind of like painting pictures with rubber bands instead of paint. Was it "The Invented Cloth" we were suppose to do?