CitraSolv Art Contest

Spring is slowly creeping its way into summer, and life here is returning to normal. Greg is back to work this week- with a much lighter schedule than normal- and my wet studio is humming once again with activity.

Inside my handy mega-jar are nine pieces of gorgeous, silky cotton sateen. They measure between 1 & 1/2 yards and 2 & 1/2 yards wide and are 44" selvage to selvage.

I reached for my nine usual dye colors and then changed my mind and grabbed nine other colors, instead, not knowing for certain how they will mix or if they will just make mud.

In layers, from the bottom of the jar to the top is lemon yellow + golden yellow, rust orange, carmine red, magenta, ice blue, deep purple, colbalt blue, emerald green and finally finishing with chartreuse. The jar was so full, I had to tape down the top to keep it all contained. I stuck fairly close to the color wheel, so there's a strong possibility of at least some of the pieces being really special.

I know, kind of crazy to risk so much expensive fabric when I'm not totally certain of the outcome, right? But the risk of either disaster or success is one of the things I love about art. Either way, I will post my results here soon.

Finally, there are only a few days left to enter your CitraSolv art work into their contest, The CitraSolv Collage Contest. I submitted five of my pieces, so wish me luck!

This week will see me at my sewing machine again, still stitching on one particular piece that I hope to be able to show you, soon.

In the meantime, you know the drill, right? Happy creating!

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!

What's Keeping Me So Busy!

Hi everyone!

I know it’s been a week or so since I last posted, but I’ve been busy with all kinds of projects, some of which I’d like to tell you about today. But fair warning, this post is photo-intensive, so if you have load time trouble, I apologize.

First on the agenda is that I’ve decided to enter two of my assemblage pieces into a Call For Artists from the abecedarian gallery, in Denver. I found this listing on the Fiber Arts Calls for Entry blog. The theme of the show is “assemblage and collage” and gives free reign on the materials used in each piece.

I’m going to enter this piece (if you click on it, you'll see a larger photo of it), a collage of painted fabrics and paper, fibers, my own hand-made beads, a little bamboo and a bit of wire. It measures 12.5" by 16.5" without its frame and is now hanging in my husband’s office.

This is the second piece, which is a collage of painted fabrics and papers, lots of hand stitching, dyed scrim and thread, and hand-made beads and buttons. It’s mounted on white cotton.

The entries will probably go out tomorrow or the next day. Wish me luck!

The next project I’d like to share with you is some of the research I've been doing on a commissioned textile/quilt piece which I will be starting officially in late September. My hope for this abstract quilt is that it will be heavily textured, mostly linear but with a touch of chaotic movement- which is sort of my trademark- and wonderfully touchable. I will be attempting to force the piece to distort so that it will undulate gently off the wall, rather than laying flat, and I'll be stitching it before dyeing it.

Towards that end and for the last few months, I've been assembling quilt sandwiches using all different types of materials, such as paper, various shrinkable and non-shrinkable batting and interfacing, and synthetic fabrics. Each piece gets machine stitched, painted, dyed, shrunk, distorted... anything I can think of to alter the surface in the way I envision for the final piece. All of these test pieces are small; I'm keeping them in a 3-ring binder inside plastic page protectors just so I can keep all of them together with the notes I took while constructing them.

The first two pieces were stitched and then dyed, and even painted a bit after quilting. Not thrilled with the style though- too homey for my client, who wants clean, modern lines and edgy materials.

By now, though, I'm realizing that I want more densely-packed stitching, not less, so I start moving in that direction. Also looking for more distortion, I stitched the next piece to Tyvek and then melted it (NOTE: all reasonable safety precautions should be observed with this process... including the careful use of a respirator!)



I liked that look a lot but continued to experiment. I tried different stitch patterns in the hopes of moving the fabric around more, dyeing first and then stitching to emphasize the thread choices. and using rayon and other melt-able fabrics as backing materials.


I was getting closer to what I wanted, but just wasn't there yet, so I kept experimenting, this time with paper.

The first paper test was on an unpainted grocery sack that had previously been gesso'd (a white primer), and stitched to Tyvek. Then it was painted with acrylics and shrunk.


Pretty cool, though because it was brown paper and not fabric, the Tyvek met with some distortion resistance.

The next paper piece was painted first and then sandwiched with batting and muslin. I used various weights of thread on this, mostly just to see what they would do, and all of them preformed beautifully considering the thickness and texture this had.


The next few experiments surrounded the idea of using directional stitching to produce puckers and ridges. Some of these pieces were dyed first, some painted after stitching.


Finally, I hit upon the idea of adding movement and texture to the piece not just with stitching and foundation distortion, but by taking advantage of the damage the raw edges of fabrics suffer during the vat dyeing process.

By the time a piece of fabric has been soaked, dyed, soaked again, rinsed multiple times, laundered in the machine, and finally dried, the raw edges of even the highest thread count fabrics are mangled and frayed and absolutely lovely.

Occasionally, depending on what product you used to color the fabric, the fringe even collects a higher concentration of pigment than the woven fabric itself, which produces such lovely, soft, vibrantly-colored textures.

Wanting to play on this raw edge notion but still wanting to have a finished-edge quilt, I hit on the idea of stitching my surface treatment directly onto a finished and bound quilt sandwich.

I constructed a small quilt sandwich with a PFD white cotton top, wool batting (still in the hopes of producing some shrinkage and distortion later on in the process) and a white muslin back. I did a pillowcase turn to finish the edges. I stitched everything with white cotton thread because I want it to dye right along with the fabric.

To the finished backing, I stitched narrow strips of torn white cotton fabric. I placed them close together so they would shoulder each other around for space. The texture I achieved is almost too pretty to dye!



But dye it, I will, probably today or tomorrow. I expect that those fragile fabric edges will take qite a beating in the process and I can't wait to see what the final result will be. I will post photos in my next blog entry.

This post has gone on long enough for one day, I've no desire to monopolize your very precious time, so just let me remind y'all that not only is there still time to sign up for my grand opening give-away, but you can also enter up to three times by commenting on that post on three different days!

Keep flying high and happy creating!

Things I Love

Thread schmutz


(The threads that hang off the edge of fabrics after they've been washed, dyed, rinsed, soaked, washed again... well, you get the idea. Yes, I actually save this stuff... the birds love it for their nests and as often as not, some of it will end up in my quilts, too.)

Cheapest Alter-able Tool Ever:


(A wallpaper seam roller with sticky-backed fun foam shapes attached to it to create a continuous roller stamp. The plastic rollers are about a buck in the hardware store and the heavy wooden-handled ones, which are my favorite, cost about 6.00 but they last for years. The sticky-backed fun foam shapes can be bought in craft stores by the bucket, in the kid's departments. Each bucket is about four dollars. Use the shapes as-is or cut them up to alter them. My favorite way to "ink" them is to squirt paint/reinker/dye/textile paint/dye-na-flow/etc into a small polyester sponge- the yellow ones they sell in the grout or automotive departments that don't get stiff when they dry- work it in a little with a craft stick to even out the pigment and then roll the stamp roller onto the sponge. It's just like using an ink pad- which also works, btw.)

Over-Flowing Stamp Drawers


(This one contains as many of my favorite tribal stamps as it can hold. I've been carving stamps for years... can you tell I'm a little obsessed with it? These work great on fabric or paper.)

A Size 90 Topstitch Needle


(With ANY thread.)

Rain



(After months of drought.)

More Gradation and Odds and Ends

Mornings around here are quiet and soft. I'm an early riser and I like to hit the ground running... It's the perfect time to get a lot of work done before the heat really cranks up and while my energy is at its highest. But yesterday morning I woke up feeling restless and unfocused. I couldn't settle in and decide what I wanted to do. I wandered from space to space- the studio, the sewing desk, the garage- and nothing leaped out at me. I was on a slow build to a cranky day.

And then I noticed the terrible, mangled living room curtains. For various reasons (I have cats- 'nuff said), these sad, limp little sheers, which I had loved when they were new, have seen their last fabulous day and have been in a slow decline for a while. Looking at them made me crankier... until I flashed on that three-yard expanse of white cotton in my stash, begging to be turned into curtains.

Suddenly, my energy spiked and I forgot about how grouchy I was all set to be.


So, another gradation, this one intended to match the decor of my living room. Now, understand- my walls in that room are yellow . That's right, yellow. Stop laughing, they look great! The accents in the room are in rich browns and reds. So it made sense for me to do a scarlet ~> lemon yellow fade.


The colors turned out even more vibrant and beautiful than in the last batch, but this run had some difficulties. The two darkest pieces somehow wound up with small spots of a dark dye on them- I suspect the green dye from earlier in the week. I'm not sure how that happened because I had totally cleaned out the dye area before starting this new batch (even the tarp had been laundered). Nonetheless, there they are, little irksome spots. I hope I figure out where they came from before it happens to another batch. It doesn't matter in practical terms for this batch- it's just curtains for the living room and those spots will be easy to conceal- but it would be good to understand what happened, for future reference.

When I get the curtains stitched and hung, I'll snap some shots and post them. It's going to be all ragged edges for these babies... no tidy seams, no cut edges. I'm going to "collage" curtains. Sounds like fun, yeah?

That's the good news. The bad news is that we're now officially in a drought situation. We haven't seen rain in months and our city has clamped down heavily on water violators. Even if they hadn't, my own conscience would not allow me to continue using as much water as I have been in these last couple of weeks. So no more immersion dyeing for me for a while- at least not until this drought breaks.

In the coming weeks I'll use all these wonderful fabrics to print and screen onto, for experimenting with discharge pastes and soy wax batik, and of course, to make art quilts.

Odds And Ends

- The International Quilt Festival/Houston catalog arrived yesterday. It will take me the whole weekend just to read through it all and decide which class(es) I want to take. There's a three-day class on dyeing and constructing art quilts with silk (a fabric that I must admit intimidates me somewhat) which has me drooling into my bra, so that could be the winner.

- The hummers have returned. It's a little early for them so this could just be a lone rogue but I put one of the feeders out, anyway, and will keep it maintained until they migrate back across this area in the late summer/early fall. Wish me luck snapping photos- they're quick little guys who fly like they're on rails. The odds are in my favor, though... by September we'll be knee-deep in hummingbirds.

- I started a new quilt with some of my hand-dyed fabrics. It's not large, maybe 22" x 26".

This is a down and dirty photo of it in its planning stages. I take these photos once I'm satisfied with a layout, so I can disassemble the piece and then reassemble it properly with fusing, stitch, spray mount, or usually a combination of all three. The photo quality doesn't matter at this point- it's just a visual map.



This piece consists of a hand-dyed background in green, fused to Timtex for stability. It incorporates more hand-dyed fabrics as well as a dyed paper towel. This is a detail of some of the stitching:



(P.S. I hate knotting threads at the back of the quilt. Yeah, I do it anyway, but you can't make me like it).

- I've written an article about revitalizing your creative muse and have submitted it, along with a few photos, to the magazine Cloth, Paper, Scissors in the hopes that they will want to publish it. If not, I'll post it here, instead. Wish me luck!

- I've also decided to enter into The Eye of the Quilter: Inspiration contest, sponsored by Quilts, Inc., the amazing folks behind the International Quilt Festivals. This is a photographic contest- you submit three of your best photos (they don't have to be quilt-related), the ones that you feel inspire you the most. I've only just begun taking photos but what the heck? I'll never know what it's like to try these things if I just sit and watch them pass me by!

Have an awesome week and happy creating!
- Judi