The art challenge for week 21 in the Documented Life Project was to use cheesecloth as a texture medium. I know it is hard to believe, but I do not have cheesecloth in my stash of fabric. So I did the next best thing—improvise. I took apart a gauze bandage for my “cheesecloth”.

For the base of my project, I used a paper textured with wall spackling paste through a stencil I made when experimenting in this post. I painted it with acrylic paints and then toned down parts of it with white gesso.

It reminded me of a bright colorful flower garden and gave me inspiration for the direction to take this challenge. While working in my garden lately I have run into more spider webs amongst the leaves. The “cheesecloth” had a weblike look to it, so I sprayed it with blue fabric paint, let it dry and glued it across the painted spackle for a web. Since I was headed in the direction of a garden in this piece, I decided to use the two pieces of candlewicking embroidery I made (see this post). However, the garden was too bright colored for the white embroidery on white fabric, so I used Inktense Blocks to color them as well as adding doodles with permanent marking pens.

More flower shapes were cut from muslin scraps and sprayed with fabric paint. For stems, leaves, flower centers, and more butterflies, I cut shapes from Gelli® prints I previously made. When I make prints on my gelatin plate, I save all the prints (even ones that I don’t think turned out well.) Parts of some of those prints make wonderful cut pieces on cards and other projects. I added shading with a colored pencils.

The quote I found (by anonymous) fit my garden perfectly. “The butterfly is a flying flower, the flower is a tethered butterfly.”