This weekend, downtown Tempe is closing off Mill Avenue and several surrounding streets for the year’s first Festival of the Arts. I’ve had a sneak peek at the attending artists, and there’s a lot to love in a few blocks of tree-shaded urban oasis. Plus music, festival food booths, and street art contests!
Also, cool fiber art award ribbons:
Parking is crowded and always chaotic, so be prepared to pay for close parking, walk a bit, or take the Light Rail from other areas.
As I have since 2010, I put together the Festival’s unique award ribbons in appliqued, quilted, and beaded fabric: Best of Show, Best Booth Display, nineteen Category ribbons, two Chalk Artist ribbons, one portfolio piece for the Downtown Tempe Gallery*, three Young Artist ribbons, and three Honorable Mention ribbons.
This show’s theme art comes to us from Karolina Adams, whose booth features more quirky and dreamlike work.
Figuring out how to translate Karolina’s art was a fun challenge for the show organizers and yours truly. First off, the long vertical format forces some design changes that tend to get slightly repeated and riffed upon. Second, there’s a time factor: these ribbons form a constructed fabric that, if put together, would be a little larger than a baby quilt. That’s a lot to design and build in generally under two months, alongside our full-time jobs.
In the end, we picked handloomed Indian cotton recycled from Goodwill, an overdyed funky 1960s-style floral cotton print, blue and gold starry night cotton, yellow and orange marbled cotton, and vintage pieces of black cotton embroidered with white floral patterns (other Goodwill finds).
Each ribbon is built on a felt backing with bindings of the blue and gold star fabric, for a narrow and flat frame outside the frayed front panel edges. This has become one of my favorite edge treatments!
After the gel-transfer logo, category, and date labels were sewn on, I spent about 14 hours hand-sewing on glass beads in shades of translucent iridescent white, glittering black, clear, and yellow. If you look closer, you’ll see star-shaped beads on several pieces, flat moon-discs on many others, and iridescent glass butterflies on every ribbon.
Then came a marigold yellow cotton backing, the grosgrain ribbon ties, metal pinbacks, and my signature.
I think we captured the spirit of the Festival poster, and I hope the winners enjoy them. While I first included the ribbon ties and pinbacks to help award winners display their ribbons on their booths, I have it on good authority the winners often wear them as ties and jacket pins. I’m honored to be in such good company!
You may or may not see me there this weekend: I’m already onto the next big projects on a very long list.
*Outside of the twice-yearly Festival dates, if you are ever in the Tempe area, please stop in at the Tempe Downtown Foundation’s office to see one of Tempe’s hidden treasures: the gallery of purchased Featured Artists’ work and Festival posters going back several decades.
They can be found at 310 South Mill Avenue, Suite A-201
Tempe, AZ 85281 480-355-6060
Or go here for more information.