Dyebaths and Resists and Thread Schmutz, Oh My!

Are you sick of flour paste resists, yet? No, me either.

This piece, which never really did a whole lot for me...

... got a bath this week to tone down its high contrast, a bit.

Now that I'm liking it better...

...it got covered with flour paste today.

This is the largest FPR I've done so far, cotton sateen measuring 90" by 45" (selvage to selvage), and it's taking up my entire work table in the wet studio. However, the weather here right now is unseasonably dry and I expect it to be cured by tomorrow morning and ready for its next layer.

Monday's FPR was dry by yesterday morning, so it got its next layer, too- medium green textile paint.

Because this was treated with textile paint, it will need to cure for about a week before it's safe to wash out the flour. It looks promising, though a bit busy. It might need a final, unifying overdye of a solid color.

Also out the dye baths this week were some mostly unremarkable scraps as well as some lovely, nubbly cheesecloth.

On March 6th of this year, I started stuffing excess thread schmutz into one of my hanging squirrel feeders.

It looked so pretty and was such a great solution for offering nesting fiber to the birds while keeping it mostly contained. Over time, it has begun to resemble a "disintegration bundle", which I've found fascinating. (A disintegration bundle is a package of paper, fabric, metal and fibers that some artists hang from fences and trees in order to study the effect the elements have on the materials.)

I can tell that the birds are using these fibers because I find them tugged out and hanging loose, and they are also strewn around the yard, like bright little baubles in the grass. My hope is to one day spot some of this material in a birds' nest so I can photograph it.

And finally, one from the feeders.

Happy creating!

Off And Running!

My three entries for FABRIC 2010 : Handmade Designs on Fabric for Quiltmaking are in the mail and on their way to Columbus. OH., and after a quiet but wonderful weekend at home with hubby, I was back in the studio this morning, chewing up the scenery.

First thing this morning, this large length of cotton sateen from my last batch of hand-dyeds...

... Got the flour paste resist treatment...

... And now waits to dry. It's destined for a textile paint crackle in a mid-ranged green. As is common when exploring a specific technique, I made a small but important refinement to my process this time with the use of a seventy-five cent plastic tool from the hardware store.

The lowly spackle blade shaved time off my flour paste resist application and gave me a lovely, thin coating which not only saved me on flour (because I didn't need as much to get full coverage), but should promote fine crazing that will look wonderful on the finished fabric. I won't know until much later if this is the last layer this fabric will receive or not.

Once the FPR was set aside to dry, I spent some time monoprinting with thickened black dye (sorry, no progress photos for those- I forgot to take them and now the pieces are wrapped in plastic and batching). I used a product called SuperClear, which is essentially pre-thickened print paste (water and sodium alginate mixed together), and wasn't entirely thrilled with it for monoprinting. It was too thin to really get interesting impressions but I think it will make an adequate-if not spendy- paste for deconstructed screen printing. I'll use the rest of what I have and then go back to making my own. 

Finally, to finish the day, I did some more monoprinting with Neopaque onto some hand-dyed pieces. These pieces are still in their "ugly stage" and will get more layers over time until they're finished. 

Nothing earth-shattering, but a solid start to developing themes for my Blurred Boundaries entry in July.

At the end of the day, despite the mess to be cleaned, a cluttered desk = a productive day and a good start to the week. 

The rest of the week promises to be as busy. Hope your week is everything you want it to be, too... happy creating!

No, THIS One Is My Favorite!

I love it when I make a good piece of fabric, and for the moment, that fabric is my "all-time favorite". This week, I have a new favorite.

To recap, this piece of jar-dyed cotton:

... was introduced to this flour paste resist: 

The humidity is high here now almost all of the time, but because of that, the new AC unit in the wet studio has been running non-stop and this piece of fabric dried in just two days. It was unpinned and carefully crumpled by hand.

Then came the really fun part. I wanted to do something different with this resist and instead of adding color in the form of thickened dyes or textile paints, I wanted to remove color.

Since discharge paste needs ironing to be activated, and because ironing a piece of fabric with flour paste resist still on it would probably make it smell like burnt toast, I decided to thicken some bleach and paint that on, instead.

I had my Bleach Stop all ready to go in a large bin of water, and had added sodium alginate to a pot of bleach... but then I just sat there, scared of what I was about to do! I had doubts; would the bleached crackle even show up? (Yes.) Would it react badly with the flour? (No, not at all.) Was the bleach too thin and would it lift too much color and leave behind huge ugly patches? (Nope and nope.)

I took a deep breath and painted on the bleach. I kept checking the underside of the fabric to make sure I wasn't lifting too much color and when I was satisfied, I submerged it into the Bleach Stop and agitated for 15 minutes (as per the package directions). By the time I had manipulated the fabric in the Bleach Stop, most of the flour paste resist had melted away, as well, so into the washing machine it went.

I didn't know until I'd ironed the piece how successful it had been. Since the full-sized photo of it doesn't really show the crackle effect (it's subtle but extends across the entire piece of fabric), I'll show you the detail shots, first.

And this is a shot of the entire piece.

This piece of cotton sateen measures one and a half yards long by 44" wide. The thread count is 150 x 80 and the hand is soft, silky and has amazing drape. This piece is a winner, in my very humble opinion, and it will be sent off with my entry into one of the two art fabric contests I'm entering in the next few weeks.

(Thank you, Terry, for your encouragement with this piece of fabric.)

More fabric awaits a frenzy of surface design in the next two weeks. The first entry is due between May 1st and May 15th, a very small window. I want to be sure that my entry is packaged and ready to ship by April 29th and sent on the 30th.

I hope the coming week finds you healthy and inspired to make art. Happy creating!

Back To Work!

After two weeks of nearly no artistic endeavors (the first week spent just grooving on Spring, the second week caring for my hubby after his hospitalization), I found it more difficult than I thought it would be to get back into the studio. However, come Sunday afternoon, I nonetheless had 14 yards of white cotton sateen cut into nine pieces, ready to be pre-washed and soda-soaked for Monday morning LWI jar dyeing. 

So why am I doing even more jar dyeing? Because in addition to entering this competition, I've also decided to enter the art cloth competition, Blurred Boundaries. It will be held at the end of the Fabrications Retreat and since I'll be attending this year, it would be a shame not to try.

So, coming off the clothes lines all day on Tuesday were some fabrics that were lovely all on their own and ripe for further surface design, and some disappointing fabrics that were begging for more color.

From the top of the jar to the bottom (and with the accompanying dye color listed below each photo):

(chartreuse, 54" x 44")

(emerald green, 54" x 44")

 (cobalt blue, 54" x 44")

(deep purple, 54" x 44")

(deep purple, detail)

(ice blue, 54" x 44")

(magenta, 36" x 44")

 (carmine red, 54" x 44")

(rust-orange, 90" x 44")

(lemon yellow + golden yellow, 54" x 44")

(yellow, detail)

Some of the fabrics were pleated before dyeing, some scrunched. As you can see, a few pieces have an inordinate amount of white fabric showing. As a dyer, it feels like an amateur mistake; as an artist, it's mostly unusable white space.

The culprit was the weight of the fabric. This is the first time I've worked with this sateen and while it's a lovely, heavy product, it obviously likes a LOT more dye solution than I gave it- although how I could have squeezed even one more ounce of liquid into my jar is beyond me!

Not a problem, though, because there's always The Almighty Overdye (do I hear organ music?)

Over-dyeing boring fabrics is the staple "Do-Over" of fabric dyers through the ages so in that tradition, two of the failed pieces are now sitting in fresh dye baths and will hopefully produce more interesting results in tomorrow's wash-out.

In other activities, the carmine red piece went from this...

... to this:

A flour-paste resist in the making. Hopefully it will begin to set up soon so I can move it- possibly even to the outdoors for a little while. I'm going to try something quite different with this resist and I'm very excited about its possibilities, but I'll save telling you about that for later in the week when hopefully I can also show you finished photos.

Surface design has, for me right now, eclipsed art quilting or adding stitch to my art pieces, although I am still slowly working my way through several UFOs that are currently under the needle. I think I need to face the fact that production of finished work might always slow down when it comes to the stitched layer because it's simply not my strong suit. Still, only time and practice can help that.

I hope everyone has a creative week!

A Winter Of Surface Design

I promised myself a winter of surface design, and I've kept that promise; what a joy it's been! I've gone through a lot of yardage and made a lot of fabric that I'm now itching to sew into, but so far, this is the piece I'm most proud of.

35 1/2" x 48"

This length of fabric contains three layers of surface design. The first layer was hand-dyed in a jar, in MX fiber-reactive dyes. The second layer is a stamped image created with thickened black MX dye. The third (and last) layer, the one most recently applied, is a crackle finish which employed the flour-paste resist technique I tried out last week. 

The paste was applied, left to dry and then broken and crazed.

I used Neopaque textile paint in brown, thinned with water, to create the crackle effect.

I'm thrilled with it. The next flour-paste resist I do, I will pre-soak the fabric in soda ash so that I can use thickened dyes to paint the crackle- the hand will be more pleasing, I think, though the fabric paint is soft and pliable.

Disappointingly, this piece falls just short of the size requirement for the FABRIC 2010 : Handmade Designs on Fabric for Quiltmaking contest, but now I know how to recreate it on a larger scale, if I can.

So this weekend, I took my last ten or eleven yards of muslin, cut them into six pieces, and did this to them.

Two-and-a-half gallons of jar-dyeing love, filled to the very brim. Still pushing myself to work larger (after all, larger pieces of beautiful fabrics tend to inspire larger pieces of art), each of these six these pieces measures at least a yard and a half wide by 108" from selvage to selvage. 

Cotton muslin, pre-soaked in soda ash, twisted lengthwise with LOTS of great help from my husband, and soaked in six different dye colors starting with lemon yellow at the bottom, bright orange next, then fire engine red, magenta, deep purple and finishing with turquoise stuffed into the very top of the jar. 

As anyone who has slopped a large load of laundry out of the agitation cycle of a broken-down washing machine knows, dripping wet fabric can be physically challenging to muscle around. I'm managing nicely, although this stuff is heavy, and the fabrics are starting to come out of the washing machine and go onto the clothesline as I type. 

This morning I'm incredibly grateful for the wet studio- I could NOT have done pieces this size in the kitchen sink without risking a terrible mess. In the photos below, the selvage edges are those on the right and left of the fabric.

(folded almost double across my clothes line, this is the largest piece and the first one that went into the jar)

(the second piece into the jar)

(the third piece into the jar)

The other three pieces, in shades of blues and purples, are in the washing machine right now. I'll post photos of them in my next blog article

I won't really know exactly what I have until I iron them out and have a chance to really examine them but any other treatment they get will need to come later in the spring- the rest of the week will be devoted to making quilt sandwiches and sewing and hopefully, by the end of the week, I'll have a completed piece of quilt art.

In the meantime, happy creating!

Ye Of Little Faith...

Now I'm scrambling to devise more horizontal space so I can do this again.

And again (click photo for a better view). Holy cow. Aside from having this thing taking up so much room in the studio, the flour paste resist I started last week turned out to be a lot of fun and incredibly easy. A little stinky, though... my flour might be out of date, I used an old bag that had been in the pantry for a while.

So, as I mentioned last week- I started with a large but boring piece of hand-dyed fabric. I pinned it to my work surface, which I'd covered with a flannel sheet. Then I whisked together 4 cups of water and 2 cups of plain white flour, adding the flour to the water slowly.

I poured the flour paste onto the fabric and, wearing rubber gloves, moved the paste around gently with my hands until it had covered the fabric. I took a wooden skewer and drew into it. Only a small amount of that seemed to show in the final piece but it's worth exploring further.

Then I set it aside to dry.

It took about 4 days for it to fully dry. Crackling the dried paste was easy... I just unpinned the fabric and gently scrunched it in my hands, a small amount at a time, until the whole thing seemed cracked. I was worried the paste would start flaking off, but it never really did until I wanted it to.

I painted it with Golden fluid acrylic paint in Dioxazine Purple and left it to dry and cure for another four days. I couldn't help but take a peek as that paint was setting, so I popped some of the dried paste off.

Even that little peek made me realize just how well it was going to work. 

Guh. 

My final worry was that the flour paste would never come out. Once again, however, I've been reminded to trust the process. I soaked the fabric this morning in a bucket of cool (tap) water and after about 20 minutes of soaking, I manipulated the fabric gently in my hands. **The paste melted right off.  I spent about 15 minutes making sure it was all removed, then washed the fabric on a soak cycle in my washing machine with a little Synthrapol and ironed it dry. 

I LOVE this technique. I don't know how yet, but I want to find a way to stack large pieces like this to dry so I can do more than one at a time. I'm thinking large masonite planks separated by bricks, or somesuch. Such a stacking system would also help me a ton when I do other large, wet media techniques on paper and fabric. Hmmm... modifications to the wet studio may be necessary.

Happy creating!

** Something worth noting: when I dumped the dirty water out of the bucket during my clean-up, there were a huge amount of undissolved clumps of flour paste in the bottom of the bucket. If I had just upended the bucket into my sink, all that garbage would have wound up in my drain! Please try to remember this when you pour out the water and leave the debris in the bucket. Scoop it out with paper toweling and discard.