It’s spring. Next weekend is the Tempe Festival of the Arts, where 40,000 people will somehow find places to park around the core of Tempe’s Mill Avenue Downtown district. Hundreds of artist booths will line Mill and its side streets. There will be decadent food and more decadent booze. Several million dollars will change hands, in one of the biggest art festivals in the Southwest.
(And we’ve already had three or four slightly smaller ones going on just before this, in nearby cities. That’s right, while the rest of y’all are freezing and shoveling snow, we have open-air art festivals in the spring and fall when the blast furnace climate isn’t so bad. Don’t worry. You’ll be laughing in July.)
I recently finished the latest round of award ribbons for the festival: sixteen category winners and one best-of-show, all in fabric applique and bead embroidery. (I’ve done this twice a year since 2010. It’s a hoot, even if it takes approx. 50 hours to design and complete.) This spring’s design was a riff off the festival Featured Artist Andrea Merican’s luminous watercolor painting ‘Just Breathe’.
Seriously, I nearly fell over when I saw that piece last year. Watercolor is not an easy medium. It demands a delicate marriage between trained skill and the recognition of serendipity.
For our award ribbons, the festival organizers and I chose a creme raw silk striped with gorgeous candy colors in the weave, a rich dark purple suiting, bright blue printed cotton and blue linen, orange satin ribbon, commercial prints in multicolored wrought iron ornament patterns, digitally printed sections of a 1926 Arizona road map, several patterns of blue-green to acid-green cotton, and a riot of polyester sewing thread from soft pastels to vivid orange and scarlet.
I will admit that my current favorite fabric glue, Beacon’s Fabri-Tac, makes a strong but unseen appearance in these ribbons.
The basic motif is the balance between light and dark, and the botanical focal point is either a stylized yucca in bloom, a fruiting cardon cactus, or a prickly pair cactus. Glass beads in harmonizing colors add a bit of sparkle. The show labels and titles are printed, then hand-inked on cotton applique. All ribbons are finished with coral-orange seam binding, white-on-white cotton backing fabric, grosgrain ribbon ties, and a metal pinback so the lucky artist can pin it to booth draperies.
Category ribbons are 16″ x 4″. The best-of-show ribbon is 20″ x 5″. All are signed by me.
I look forward to seeing the winners and their art.