Carol Soderlund

A couple of weeks ago, I heard from my friend (and a woman I consider a mentor), Carol Soderlund. She's been traveling and teaching workshops all year, and she finally landed back at home for a few weeks' rest before heading out on the road again. She said she'd visited my blog to catch up with what I was doing, and that she enjoyed the work she saw (flattering!)... and then she shook my tree to its roots by asking one simple question: Where's the cloth?

Where's the cloth? Such a good question, and so insightful. 

And right, too. I haven't been working with fabric at all this year. A couple of collages with fabric I'd already dyed in previous years, some stacked journaling samples here and there, but no real surface design work on cloth. I've had my reasons for it- some of them valid, most of them excuses- but after a few emails back and forth with Carol discussing them, she gently suggested that I needed to get off my duff and pick up the cloth, again.

The good news is that she's teaching a class in October that should be just the ticket to reinvigorate my fabric muse.

Layers Upon Layers, offered by Carol at the Crow Timberframe Barn, promises to be a most unusual exploration of surface design. 

To celebrate her new class- and in happy anticipation of attending it, myself- I've interviewed Carol to talk to her about what her students can expect! 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Judi: When someone asks you what you do for aliving, how do you answer and why?

Carol: I teach art workshops for adults oncolor, fabric dyeing, and surface design.

Judi: While you’re known for your innovative and popularclasses, Color Mixing For Dyers and Color Mixing For Dyers II, your newestclass Layers Upon Layers sounds quite different. What can you tell us aboutyour new classroom experience? What experiences does this class hold for yourstudents?

Carol: I am very excitedabout the class! Last fall's class was so rich and varied. Each persondid very individual work, and no one's work was alike. There will be asmall amount of preparatory work in advance of class, mostly gatheringinspirational images, but also developing a textural print, as I am planning tobring a Thermofax screen for each student who sends me an image in advance. Iwill email about all this about to those who sign up 6 weeks ahead of class. Wewill also be working with blank silkscreens and creating texture boards. An emphasis will be experimenting with the order of layers to seedifferent effects. Those who choose to may be patching and stitching beforedyeing to create textures. 

 Ice Storm, © Carol Soderlund

Judi: Is this class about making complex cloth?

Carol: Layering multipletechniques on one piece of cloth is one way to explore layering, and I will bedemonstrating several ways to do this with layers of dye and paint. 

However, it is only one way to explore theconcept of layering, and much more limited than my concept. 

I envision layering as much more thanthat.  For example, I can see layering color with soy wax layers --color,wax, color, wax, color, wax-- as fully within the parameters of this class. 

Another example, layering cloth of varyingopacity--sheers and opaque. 

Another example, layering cloth of differenttextures--linen and silk and cotton and velvet, for example.

 Soy Wax sample, © Carol Soderlund

Judi: Can you discuss more about this statement inthe course description:

"Those who choose to may be patching andstitching before dyeing to create textures."

Carol: I was deliberatelyvague here, because I don’t want to limit anyone’s thinking.  The order oflayers will be under consideration. You could piece before dyeing or surfacedesign, or at any point in the process.  You could also patch --as in handstitch a raggedy edge piece on top of another piece and then dye it.  Ilove that the description made you wonder about it!

 Ice Storm (detail), © Carol Soderlund

I really hope to inspire each student to takelayering each in her own direction.  I also hope to stimulate some ideasfor directions maybe not previously considered. So while making complex clothMAY be involved for some people, others may explore the concept of layering inquite different directions.  I will be asking students to do some thinkingwork ahead of class, and to start collect some examples of layering asinspiration.

 Soy Wax sample, © Carol Soderlund

I am having a blast developing my samples and the concepts of what is possible.  I think the week will be very interesting. I will do several demos of technique, and will have “prompts,” but students will have much freedom to explore directions that in interest them personally. This will make for a very rich environment, where all are stimulated by what others are doing.

 Student Work, © Carol Soderlund

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So I know where I'll be spending the first week of October- in the beautiful setting that is the Timber Frame Barn, immersed in something I love and surrounded by like-minded artists. You should join me!

Happy creating!

Print Table Of Love

The studio is humming this week!

 

But the news that I'm having the most fun with this week is that I've found a brilliant way to utilize wasted space.

For a long time, I've had a small homemade table, approximately 31" x 46", sitting at the end of my primary work table. I've used it mostly as horizontal drying space and horizontal storage space... frankly, it was simply too low and I am too tall for it to be of much use for anything else. (Ten extra Brownie points to anyone who remembers what I used to have in that space and how I rigged it to provide a flat surface when needed!)

Last year when Greg and I originally built the table we used half inch melamine-covered plywood cut to size (any Hardware Big Box store will do this for you for free), and four telescoping legs from Ikea. The whole thing cost less than 50.00 and because the legs came with all their own hardware, took all of about 30 minutes to assemble. Of course, then I threw a tarp over it and forgot about the legs. The ones that, yanno, telescope.

This weekend, giving in to the demands of my back, I put my mind to the task of devising a tall print table. Predictably, it took me most of a full day to remember the table with t-e-l-e-s-c-o-p-i-n-g legs. Greg and I flipped the table over, pulled the legs out to their furthest position, and locked them in place. Presto, instant tall print table with bonus mondo storage space underneath.

Ok, so here it's not shown being used a a print table so much as an ironing station. Did I forget to mention how handy it is for that? As well as for photographing stuff. Painting stuff. Admiring stuff I've painted. You get the idea: basically it's just handy as snot.

Something fun I did this week on my shiny wonderful miraculous new print table with the telescoping legs was a little bleach discharge with a Thermofax screen and a Clorox Bleach gel pen.

While the pen does provide a narrow point that you could, if you were careful, write onto fabric with, I found it more useful to squeeze the gel out of the container into the well of my screen and pull it across the fabric with a squeegee. The consistency of the gel is absolutely perfect for this application.

(the pale brown areas were "discharged", or had their color chemically removed)

And it discharges hand-dyed fabrics beautifully. Of course, it's bleach so it still needs to be treated with care... If you're going to try this, wear a mask and gloves, please, and work in a well-ventilated room! The bleach also must be neutralized when using it to discharge fabric or it WILL eventually eat through the fibers. 

And yes, that's stacked journaling in the photo shown above. Fun, fun.

I feel like I'm back in the saddle again! Happy creating!

A Dharma-Sponsored Give-Away!!

I'm home from the Bahamas (more on that in another post), and I can't tell you how excited I am to offer you a new give-away. The lovely folks at Dharma Trading Company have teamed up with Approachable Art (yeah, that's me!) to offer my readers TWO fantastic gifts.

Are you new to dyeing and have always wanted to dive in, but been afraid of not having the supplies and instructions you need? Are you an experienced dyer who just loves getting more dye tools and books? Then you're going to love this! Dharma is offering not one but TWO of these fabulous dye kits to two lucky readers.

This is an amazing kit that contains the following goodies:

• 1 oz. #1 Lemon Yellow Dharma Fiber Reactive Dye

• 1 oz. #13 Fuchsia Dharma Fiber Reactive Dye

• 1 oz. #25 Turquoise Dharma Fiber Reactive Dye

• 1 lb. Soda Ash Fixer

• 1 lb. Urea

• 4 oz. Professional Textile Detergent

• 1 pair Rubber Gloves

• 1 Dust Mask

• 1 "Color by Accident" book (List Price $24.95)

• 1 Set of general dyeing instructions

 

Not only will you receive all the necessary auxiliary chemicals needed to dye fabrics, AND three cool primary colors that you can mix and match to create nearly any color, you'll also get the fabulous book, Color By Accident, by author and artist, Ann Johnson.

 

This is an incredibly generous gift donated by Dharma, and I want to thank them for being so kind as to consider my blog worthy of this give-away!

So here's how it will work. Between now and October 9th, 2010, leave ONE comment on this blog post telling me why you want to learn to dye fabrics, OR why you already love to dye fabrics, OR why you love Dharma Trading Company, and your name will go into the pool of contestants. On October 9th, I will use a random number generator to choose TWO names from the comments to receive these kits and I will connect you with Dharma representatives to set up shipping.

You MUST either leave your email address in your comment OR have your email abilities turned ON through your blog or web site so that you can be contacted about winning! If you don't leave me some way to find you when the contest is over, I will be forced to immediately draw a new name from the comments!

So let the games begin, and good luck to everyone!!

The Book

Late Saturday night, I returned from my incredibly intensive workshop with Carol Soderlund, Color Mixing For Dyers. I attended this class with eight other adventurous and hard-working ladies at the Fabrications Retreat in Kalamazoo, MI.

I have to tell you, if you love fabric dyeing and want to take your work to a whole new level, this is the class to take. And if you love hanging out with creative women, laughing, eating great food, and getting messy in groups, run-don't-walk to Cathy Arnett's baby, Fabrications. It was all just so much fun!

 Laura Cater-Woods and Teri Springer enjoying breakfast

Deborah Harowitz, Melody Johnson and Carol Soderlund

But as thoroughly enjoyable as the week was, it was also filled with hours and hours of hard work and mind-bending ideas.

Carol teaches dyeing and overdyeing from a 3-dimensional cube model that is astonishing to see when held cradled in her hands. (I'd love to show you a photo of the cube Carol built with wooden blocks and thousands of half-inch squares of dyed fabrics, but since it's her unique take on color, I don't feel that it's my place.) Having only the basic color wheel as my own theory tool, seeing color in a cube model really opened up my mind to a whole new world of possibilities.

The essence of the class teaches and illustrates more than a thousand MX dye recipes through a series of dyeing and overdyeing 9"x9" pieces of white cotton fabric.

Three color families were explored, each starting with a set of three primary colors.

The families, Earth Tones, Brights and Basics, were stacked into piles and then cut into strips.

Everyone got a stack of strips from each bundle- dozens and dozens of them- and then we set to cutting the strips into one-inch squares and mounting them in our books.

Helen, cutting her squares.

 Deb, studiously working. 

 Janice, playing it safe.

And check out Carol's t-shirt! She wore a different, eye-popping hand-dyed shirt every day!

My book isn't totally complete yet, I have about 3 hours worth of work to finish it, but I will do that this week. I want to have the decks cleared when my first Masteries assignment arrives on October 1. 

(EDIT: O O O O O go look at Lynn's post on the class, too... and please ignore the fat lady in the stripedy, messy studio smock!)

I stepped out of the hotel only twice during my entire stay in Michigan, but the views I saw from the car showed me beautiful, rolling farmlands and fields. 

On the flight back, I was privileged to share the first class cabin with a helper dog, a Golden Retriever named Mia.  

She was a beautiful dog with a sweet and loving disposition whom I worshiped instantly.

The coming week will see me hard at work completing my Book but then this weekend, my husband and I will be flying to the Bahamas for a well-deserved vacation. I'm not sure we'll know what to do with ourselves, finally being in the same place at the same time for more than a two-day stretch, but I'm betting we'll remember quickly enough!

I will try to blog once more before we leave, but if I don't, I'll be home by the 17th!

In the meantime, happy creating!

The Ugly Truth

Since I started this blog to talk about how and why I do what I do, unvarnished and with all my bumps and bruises showing, I'm committed to telling you about the mistakes I make, too, and showing you the results of those mistakes.

It's been a long week. I started out all happy and shiny, and as I sit here and type this morning, I'm ready to set a match to the wet studio and take up stamp collecting.

So, let's get started.

This piece...

... started life as a 3 yard length of black cotton. I batiked it with soy wax and then discharged it with bleach. So far, so good. I had soaked it in vinegar to neutralize the bleach, then decided after the final rinse-out that I would go ahead and use anti-chlor, too. By the time it had been through the wash after the anti-chlor, the rusty-yellow color was pretty faded, so I gave it an over-dye in carmine red and chocolate brown.

It was a crappy dye job. The carmine red did fine and gave the piece a darker value, but the brown collected mostly at the edges of the fabric in big, ugly splotches.

In order to try and save the piece and bring some unity to it, I decided to screen a pattern all over it.

I created a stencil on one of my screens using strips of clear contact paper.

Then I thickened up some brown rose dye and went to town with it all over the fabric.

I loved, loved, loved the look that screen gave me, and will very likely repeat the same kind of pattern again on future screens.

Only now, I can't get the alginate out. It's stuck in there but good. 

Last week I charged the rest of my screens with thickened dyes to do some deconstructed screen printing this week. For two of the screens, I chose the three cool primaries- lemon yellow, magenta and turquoise- willing to risk the possibility of making mud in the hopes of getting great color mixtures. The third screen was charged with a combination of yellow and brown dyes.

To prepare these screens, I used a technique suggested in the book, Breakdown Printing: New Dimensions for Texture and Colour by Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan. I poured the thickened dyes on top of the screen in puddles and then settled items down into the puddles to give the final screen some texture.

This is the project that contained the most mistakes and has yielded fabric that will need a LOT of aftercare (overdyeing, stamping, etc). Here it is at the moment, sitting in a bucket of rinse water while it waits for a different fabric to come out of the washing machine. Most of the dye has washed out, despite the fabric being soda-soaked previously. It now looks for all the world like a dropcloth.

My first mistake was, I think, getting the dyes too thick. As I was deconstructing them onto the fabric, the screens seemed to become glued to the fabric. I had to really yank at them to get them off and the thick puddles of dye often came off the screens and stuck to the fabric in large chunks. I was having such a hard time and was getting so discouraged, that I totally forgot to take pictures of the process. I fully intended to but only remembered after the fabric was already bundled in plastic to batch.

My next mistake was in using some sketchy items on the screens for texture. The idea is to use materials that will lift right off of the screen once it's dried- plastics, mostly. But instead of sticking strictly with plastics, I tried using some vinyl wallpaper scraps. They had fabulous texture on one side, but were paper-backed. Once the screens had dried, the papers behaved as if they'd been welded to the screens, and peeling them off was nearly impossible. I had also tried a scrunched up piece of wax paper for texture. Wow. I have no idea what the chemical reaction was, but the alginate broke down the paper and turned it into a slimy, stringy mess that I never was able to remove before screening.

My final mistake- and this one could have been a real screen-destroyer but fortunately wasn't- I got tired of waiting for the screens to dry so I put them outside in a shady spot. Of course, the sun actually moves, doesn't it? By the time I brought them back into the house, they had been sitting in the sun for hours and the dyes had baked onto them.

I think it's time to take a live class in breakdown printing, because there's something I'm missing and it's giving me less-than-fun results more often than not.

The next oops is hanging on the line right now. It started out well enough, with a nice, simple batik pattern and some yellow dye.

It got another layer of batik and dye, this time in two shades of red.

I should have quit while I was ahead, and seriously thought about it, but what kind of artist am I if I won't take chances? So it got one more layer of batiking and another dye bath. In Gawd-Awful Retro Brown.

The 70's called, they want their curtains back. And yes, you're seeing that right- only half of it is speckled... the fabric had been folded and the wax I'd dripped onto it didn't go through both layers. This is an excellent candidate for discharge, or for lining the cat pan, I haven't decided which, yet. I'd be slamming my head on the desk right now, if I didn't already have a scorching headache.

It looks as if the only survivor out of the studio this week (and I can't count myself in that number), is this unassuming length of fabric.

It's hard to tell by this photo, but this fabric has been stamped many times with many different stamps (all hand-made, of course) in multiple colors of textile paint.

I used textile paints because I wanted to create a resist for the paint that would follow as I stain the background. Like this:

It's coming along nicely and will probably sit on my table for a few days while I tinker with it.

And finally, am I the only crazy person who looks at her dropcloth (that's been hard-used for a couple of years) and sees the potential for art?

Happy stamp collecting!

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!