There was this really cool rubber
thing on the bike trail near the
highway, so, of course, I picked it
up and brought it home. I
slapped it on the counter but
my husband wasn't happy about
the object being on the counter.
"Do you know what that is?" he said.
"No, but it's cool" I said.
He said, "It's a sewage grinder
pump gasket. Get it off the counter!"
It had come creeping out from under one of our Adirondack snowbanks in March and thinking, "How germy could it be after being out in the snowbank all winter?" I gave it a Clorox bath anyway, just in case.
I thought was the perfect for the ARTAA (Adirondack Regional Textile Artists' Alliance) exhibit of art quilts made from "Road Kill" aka junk that members found on the sides of the roads or wherever they happened to be walking or hiking that spring. So the creative process began.
I decided I'd have to use toilet tissue. After all, it was a sewage grinder pump gasket. So I painted canvas with gel medium, criss crossed it with toilet tissue then painted another layer of
gel medium mixed with watercolors over the toilet tissue. I scanned the gasket, printed the pictures on PFD cotton, printed Extravorganza with a photo I'd taken, rounded up some scraps of fiberglass sheet rock tape I'd painted and began the composition. All went well until I tried to quilt the piece on my Bernina. The "dang" thing had become so stiff from all the gel medium that it wouldn't bend well enough to cooperate with the sewing machine. So I cut it into two pieces. It still didn't bend well, but I managed to sew minimal lines of quilting through it to hold it together.
SGPG Diptych has been part of two ARTAA exhibits. People are really getting a kick out of the exhibit and want to know what we're going to do next! We really don't have flat cats in the
exhibit just the remains of several stuffed animals the grandchildren donated to the cause. My thanks go to Eileen Donovan for the photography.
