Wee Little Fashion Experiments

For a while I was painting these little experiments on small pieces of fabric and painstakingly adhering that melty stuff to the back of them so you could buy them from me and iron them onto your own clothing. This is one of those panels - this lovely freestyle drawing is of a teenager swirling and twirling and stretching in her ballet class. Well, she's probably a tween, not a teen, not that it matters, but it sort of does if you remember your tween years, you'll maybe remember the magnificence of being neither here nor there. Not a child, and not grown up, either.

An art friend came to visit my studio one day and I bemoaned that I had stopped making these and that it was just as well anyway because I had been calling them "patches" and that name for these never felt adequate. And so my art friend said, "That's because these are panels. Art PANELS." And I said "Whoa!" 

So now I want to start making them again, because they are ART PANELS for fashion. Every time I make one for sale, I end up sewing it to a cool shirt and selling the whole shirt, so all my art panels are skipping their art panel stage and going straight into being fashion. It's like they're never getting to be tweens.