Fray Me, Baby!

I've been obsessed all week with these fabrics, which I showed you in one of my last posts.

Something about the moody, almost bruised color palette stuck in my mind along with the weirdly opposing vibrancy of the hand-dyed fabrics, and just wouldn't let go. It asked to become an art piece.

Both the base fabric (in teal green) and mostly-purple piece (at the top of the photo) are hand dyed cotton fat quarters from my latest gradation.

The largest accent fabric was done on a lightweight, hand-dyed, pale green cotton that started its life as a bed sheet. I splattered and squirted multiple colors of alcohol inks onto it, let it dry and then ironed it nearly to death. To emphasize the somewhat circular pattern, I dripped clean isopropyl alcohol onto it from an eye dropper. If you've ever worked with alcohol inks on paper or other surfaces, you know that this will "push" the other pigments away and form variously sized dots with somewhat hard (visual) edges. Later, I would use these dots as guidelines for free-motion quilting a rock pattern.

I used two other accent fabrics. One is the back of a piece of painted and stamped duck cloth (the back turned out to be more interesting than the front), and the other, a piece of artist's canvas, was painted, stamped and dyed (really, I threw the kitchen sink at that one; I'm amazed it didn't just dissolve in protest).

I've developed an interesting little technique. When I work with paper, I know that I can tear it in many ways to achieve an almost endless variety of effects. Cotton fabric is, of course, stubbornly different in that way- you have a warp, you have a weft and you are obliged to work within that structure. If you tear the fabric, you can't achieve a "deckled" edge in the shape of your choosing; you get a straight edge with fraying.

I've found, however, that if I cut a piece of fabric- well, really the term I'm looking for here is hack- if I "hack" at a piece of fabric with either my straight-edged scissors or my pinking sheers and then launder the fabric as usual, I can control my beloved thread schmutz to a much greater degree and get a variety of organic shapes.

I used this technique to create several "distressed" strips of each of my fabrics, which will become focal points in the final piece.

When I do any kind of collage work, throughout the process, I snap photos of designs I particularly like. I tweak the design over hours or days (sometimes months, truthfully) and then before I begin final assembly, I take a few more photos- what I call "down-and-dirty shots". I don't care about color correction, angles or lighting for these shots, I just want a record of my final design decisions.

 

So enough about the individual components. Onto the construction!

My focus over the years in my painted work was always to bring the strict structure of hard, simple lines and geometric shapes together to work in harmony with more distressed, aged and chaotic themes. It seems only natural that my textile work now follows that same progression.

In this piece, I used the intentionally tattered remnants of my chosen fabrics to emphasize my desire to produce order from chaos. They lay in a tangle against tightly-stitched, meticulously pieced background work, reminding me that without a little wildness, structure quickly becomes stricture. I used a few raw-edged appliques, as well, and haven't fussed too much over them wanting to get in on the fraying action, too.

One more thing to tell you about before I show you the final piece (and then ask for an opinion). I am exploring new ways to finish a quilt top. I hate binding a quilt, and it reminds me too intimately of being boxed in, something I've fought against for a very long time. For this piece, I constructed the whole thing on a large piece of un-primed artists' canvas. I sort of had a vague idea when I started that I could, when all the decorative stitching was done, sew it to another piece of the canvas and then do a pillowcase turn on it. Maybe even paint the back with matching acrylic paints.

At first, the whole thing was very stiff and unyielding, but as the canvas stretched and was worked into, it began to soften, fray and generally loosen up. Before I was finished with my quilting of the piece, I was already considering not doing anything more to the piece to bind it. The layers of fabric combined with the heavy thread work has made the sides too inflexible to fold them back and get a nice flat final seam.

Now I am thinking about leaving the piece as it is, without any kind of binding. After all, what is finishing and trim for? To cover all the raw, messy edges. I've spent my life trying to cover my raw, messy edges and I've finally realized that it's the frayed parts of me, the parts worn down with hardships and laughter and years, that are my contrast and texture.

So I ask the quilting experts, and beginners- would you finish this piece or leave it raw with all of its work exposed?

This is the piece, sewn to its canvas backing material, with all its thread schmutz flying.

And this is essentially what it would look like if I cropped it down and trimmed it out.

 

Mom says I'm over-thinking all of it. What do you think?

Next week is Thanksgiving here in the states... have a wonderful holiday, those of you who celebrate! And as always, happy creating!

Progress On Some Fronts

Sassy Red Hibiscus Ignoring The Cold Weather

I really need to find better titles for my blog... maybe an automated title generator? Then I'd have titles like, "Gentry wallows from within goosenecks." You wouldn't know what the heck the post was going to be about, but it would be a real eye-catcher anyway, right?

This week has so far seen me make a few costly mistakes that I should have known better than to make, but that I know is part of the learning process.

When I started teaching myself to paint, many years ago, I learned about color theory mostly by making a lot of mistakes. One of my most consistent mistakes- the one I stubbornly perpetrated again and again- was trying to force some colors to work and play well together despite knowing full well that they would refuse. I would just get it into my head that I'd be able to mix purple and yellow, for instance, and get something really wonderful that wasn't mud-colored. I knew it was just a matter of time before the purple and yellow submitted to my will, so I kept mixing.  And I kept learning. And guess what? Purple and yellow can and do work and play well together- if you embrace their particular individual quirks. Oh, yeah, and if you learn how to mix them so that they form creamy, earthy love.

This past weekend and right up through yesterday, I've been making similarly stubborn mistakes and someone should take away my "Kiss Me, I'm A Quilter!" button because these mistakes aren't resulting just in some muddy brown painted papers that are easy to throw away or paint over, they are large-scale mistakes that are costing me real money.

Mom needs fifteen yards of chartreuse fabric, broken down into three values: three yards of light, six yards of medium and six yards of dark. Late last week, I cut three sections off a bolt of white muslin she and I had bought for this purpose, prepared the dye baths, batch-set the fabrics over night and stubbornly insisted to myself that the Bright Green I'd used would look exactly like the Chartreuse I'd promised her.

Guess what didn't happen?

I didn't get chartreuse, is what didn't happen. Who could have predicted that, raise your hands? So... fifteen yards in a lovely bright green colorway. I'll use it as my front lawn until the spring comes, I guess, so the yard will look green and growing even in the dead of February.

So, back to the cutting mat, hack off fifteen more yards, use honest-to-goodness Chartreuse dye this time (I'm stubborn- not stupid), and batch-set over night. I didn't have enough Chartreuse to do the whole job, I'll have to wait for more dye to arrive on Wednesday for that, but I was able to do three yards of light value and six yards of medium value.

Wait, don't tell me. You can't see a value difference in these three pieces either, can you? It's not the photograph, that's what they really look like. Despite using half as much dye per yard for the "light" value as for the medium, I got the exact same value. It has to do with the amount of fabric per liquid per dye powder and the actual application of math. Now, I'm a bright lady, but yeah, a picture says a thousand words- mainly that my math sucks.

I will buy some Anti-Chlor, dunk the lightest value in a bucket of bleach water until it reaches the proper value, and wash the whole mess out. Next time I agree to dye fifteen yards of fabric all at the same time, either give me the proper math well in advance, or smack me around a little until I wise up.

Other things got done this week, though, fun things.

The above little piece finally found a binding. Never mind that I had to trim off more of it than I had planned because, in an effort to try new things, I fused the binding on rather than using a traditional binding, and when I started stitching it, the machine ate one whole corner; the only way to repair it was to shave a quarter-inch off that entire side.  Learning curves are harsh. Completing something feels gratifying, though.

On the books for future weeks, besides my commission installation, will be these fabrics in these combinations to create small art quilts upon which I can practice my free-motion quilting.

 

 

 

All of these fabrics started as plain white muslin that I cut straight off the bolt. It feels really good to know that my work is always 100% my own, from the stamped images I carve myself, to the hours spent dyeing, screen-printing and DSP fabrics.

Some of these bits were created yesterday using pre-dyed fabrics and, of all things, alcohol inks. This is not going to be a favorite technique of mine, however, because while the results are visually interesting, some of the ink colors seem to be totally impossible to set despite multiple ironings, while other colors set quite nicely. And of course, the hand of the fabric changes and gets a sort of crispy feeling to it, like it could crack if you crumpled it in your hands.

Still, experimentation is life.

Finally, this piece, which ended up being a joy to stitch, has most of its binding completed.

 

The really neat thing is that I got my Fall issue of the SAQA newsletter last night (I only recently signed up and they kindly sent me the most recent one) and read a wonderful article about NOT adding bindings to art quilts. I guess I've always feared that without a "proper" binding, my quilts might never be taken seriously by jurors and quilt show judges. I want so much to eventually create textiles that are not only visually and texturally exciting, but are of the utmost quality I can produce; I assumed that mastering traditional bindings was a necessary skill set I will need to move me towards that goal, but perhaps not (though I'd still like to learn how to make one efficently, in time).

However, after reading that article I feel freed from the task of binding every textile art piece I create, a job I never enjoyed doing and chafed at, creatively. I can perfect a pillowcase turn, a method I far prefer, and still feel that my quilts will one day reach the highest standards of excellence.

Onward and upward! Happy creating!

Compositional Conversation 13

You won't believe your eyes!! Artist Leslie Riley has added her astonishing and bold voice to our Conversation. Please go take a look (and comment, if you're inclined, and I'm betting you will be!).  We're in the home stretch, now... one more artist will add her perspective to the work and then the piece will be sent home to it's originator, Terry Jarrard-Dimond for finishing.

Dye Candy Giveaway!

Chris, over at Dye Candy is hosting a fab giveaway of some of her gorgeous, hand-dyed fabrics. Run don't walk to the Dye Candy blog or its sister blog, Greetings From The Shady Grove!!

Compositional Conversation 12 (and a really great bag)

Kathy Loomis added her bold and distinctive voice to our Conversation. Go check it out at Terry's blog!

Also, while in Vegas we saw another Cirque du Soleil show at the Bellagio called "O" (last year we saw "Ka" and totally fell in love). It was eye-popping... a circus in water! While there, I grabbed a fab new purse in their shop.

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Gorgeous, right?