The Dyed Silk Blahs

Well, sometimes when you goof, you do it on such a grand scale that it takes your breath away for days. That's what happened to me this week. But since it's a little depressing, we'll get to that last.

Last week, I saw a program on Ovation TV called Art Or Not? and in it, they covered an artist who worked with Shiva sticks on large canvases. He made tiny marks all over the canvas with the paints, using them like crayons and adding layer after layer of colors until the whole canvas was covered. (I wish I could tell you the name of the artist, but I don't see it anywhere on their site.)

I was inspired and thought it would be a neat technique to try with fabric, so I wacked off a large hunk of white muslin, pinned it to my wall, and drew on it.

 

36" x 52"

(detail)

It was an awful lot of fun and while I don't know what I'll do with it, yet, I'm sure I'll be able to find something neat it can go into. 

I did another kind of crazy thing this week- I used a piece of breakdown printed fabric and one of my "melted" papers from my CitraSolv/NatGeo collection (to find links to this technique, please see the left sidebar for the link labeled "CitraSolv Concentrate") to create a quilt.

 

 12" x 24"

I adhered the paper to the fabric with a very thin coating of gloss medium applied to the back of the paper and then, when dry, ironed to the fabric. It has a nice, soft hand, despite using gloss medium. 

I was really pleased with the "tunnel" stitching I did on the top of the piece. 

 

(detail)

It gave it a great texture, I think.

Also, this weekend, I negotiated a solo show for the month of May at a Houston business, a restaurant called Mo Mong. I've done these shows before- in fact, I spent three years curating such collections for several different businesses- and quite frankly, I swore I'd never do it again. However, this is a very high-profile and busy restaurant, and the owner asked for my work sight-unseen, which was flattering. I'll let you know how it goes; hopefully I can sell some of my pieces!

So, onto my silk blahs...

A very expensive batch of veils arrived last week, along with twelve pots of acid dyes. The idea was to parfait-dye them in a large vat (bucket) with all twelve dye colors thrown into the mix. For those of you not familiar with parfait dyeing, it basically means to LWI dye by scrunching a piece of fabric into a tall, narrow jar, pouring in one dye color (I always start with the lightest color, usually in the yellow family), scrunching another piece of fabric into the jar on top of the first piece, pour in another color of dye and so on until the jar is full. Batch and rinse as usual.

I had it in my head that I would do this with large silk veils, but first did several different experiments until I was happy with the results.

Unfortunately, those experiments didn't really help with the mess that was to follow when I did it on a grand scale. My dyes clotted before they could be poured onto the silk, the silk refused to scrunch enough to get even the slightest patterning, and the dye, rather than blending on each piece in a nice melange of colors, refused to blend at all, so I got several red veils, several blue, several green, etc. I didn't even take photos. They're not unattractive, just boring as hell.

This week I will try to spruce them up with some screen printing and fabric painting and if that is successful, I'll be sending them to Lynn Krawczyk, who has generously chosen Art Now For Autism as her designated recipient of her annual Breaking Traditions fund-raiser this year. My scarves, if they turn out well, will be given to participants of the auction fund raiser as thank you gifts (and if they don't, I'll be donating some of my hand-dyed muslin, instead).

Look for this week's CitraSolv/NatGeo collage in the next couple of days. In the meantime, happy creating!

Stitching, Mistakes, Lessons and CS. No. 5

This quilt critter got some of my attention last week in the form of free-motion stitching. My stitching over all was not too bad- not too great, either, but about what I would expect at this stage of my self-education. The stitching is ok- but the stitch choice and even the thread color choice were both pretty horrible.

21" x 29"

Not having had any kind of sewing or quilting background, I'm in the dark as far as guessing what type of stitching is appropriate for each area, and how to get stitching to help me tell my story. As a paper artist, when a particular design element wasn't working, or was more prominent than I wanted it to be, a little paint would push it right to the background and I could go on with my piece until it was complete. Not so with stitch lines.

It's going to take time to learn how, where and when to stitch, and what threads to use. I'm fortunate to have a good friend in snowy Canada, Elle, who has taken pity on my confusion and is flooding me with excellent information that will help fill in a lot of the gaps in my sewing education! Thank you, Elle!!

One incredibly important thing I did learn from this piece is that, for myself, the straight line stitch is far more fascinating. It leads the eye along on a trail of discovery. If I want a viewer to notice a particularly neat area of a hand-dyed or painted surface, a wiggly line heading to it and then playing around it will pull the viewer's gaze with it. Representational stitching on my own work, like I did with the leaf pattern on this piece, doesn't currently speak to me.

 

This piece has been constructed using only my own hand-dyed and painted fabrics. 

On other fronts, My CitraSolv/NatGeo Collages continue. I'm up to number 5 and I believe I have six more masonite panels to use up. 

CS. NO5, 2-8-2010, 16" x 18"

Once again, I kept the design simple because I wanted to play with tinting the papers with various mediums. Here, I've used both watercolor paints and fabric dyes to stain the papers once they've been applied to the masonite. 

Collage has always been difficult for me, I tend to agonize over every decision and have even walked away from- leaving incomplete- complex pieces I had worked on for months because I simply couldn't decide when they were finished.  Some pieces tell you, "STOP NOW!", while others will play cat-and-mouse with your muse until they exhaust you and send you away, bored and frustrated. Art is capricious that way.

The purpose of doing these collage is to try and break through my obsession with needing to over-analyze the placement, size, shape, value, color and relevance of every tiny element. I'll let you know if it worked when this series is complete.

My friends over at LQuilt have their forums up and running this week and I would love it if you'd come over and join me for discussions about fabric surface design, the tools we most love, and how to build your own stash of fabrics that you've created yourself, and any other subjects relevant to surface design!

See you there!

- Judi

Busy Week!

I got a lot done last week and throughout the weekend, so lets dive in!

I started the week LWI some inexpensive muslin with some excess dyes left over from last week's silk experiments.

Pretty boring except for this one piece, which took on a look similar to indigo.

 

Better quality muslin would- naturally- have yielded better results, but I had the fabric, I had the dyes, and I wanted to use it all up.  These lengths of cloth will be prime candidates for stamping, stenciling and other surface designs sometime in the future.

Next, I played a bit with discharge paste on some of my previously hand-dyed fabrics. I've used the paste in straightforward color removal before, but last week I wanted to explore using it to replace one color with another. I stamped, stenciled and screened both plain discharge paste and paste mixed with textile paints onto this piece of previously hand-dyed, dark gray fabric.

 

 36" x 48" 

I found that I preferred stamping the paste on, rather than pushing it through a stencil. Initially, the paste used through my stencil seemed to sit where I'd placed it, but over time it absorbed into the fabric and spread out, leaving me with large, white-ish blobs. Disappointing, but a good lesson- I suddenly heard Melly Testa's voice in my head from an old episode of Quilting Arts Tv: "Work very, very dry."

I finished that piece of fabric off by painting deep red curved and circular marks onto it and then dyeing it a deep rust color.

It's unsuccessful as a wholecloth piece, in my opinion- it's too dark overall- but it has some really lovely details in it, so it's likely I'll cut it apart one day and use it in pieces.

I switched tactics and fabrics and, following Melly's example of working dry (though she was using thickened MX dyes in her demo, not discharge paste), I ironed a freezer paper stencil onto another smaller scrap of hand-dyed fabric. I squeegied the barest amount of clear discharge paste over the stencil, making sure it was absorbed into the fabric before gently removing the stencil. This worked to give me crisp, clean edges.

What I found really fun, though, was the neat texture you can get when you "color replace" a second image on top of an image you've already discharged.

 

Here, I've stamped a 50/50 combination of discharge paste and transparent red and yellow textile paints onto a dark green background. 

 

I chose these two colors to demonstrate the efficiency with which the paste works to remove the original color. If I had simply not used the discharge paste, and stamped red and yellow textile paints onto a dark green background, the yellow would have nearly vanished and the red would have read as a muddy brown. But because the (green) color has been removed, both the red and the yellow read clearly for what they are.  

Here's another example of using discharge paste to remove dye from a hand-dyed fabric (this time in an earthy green) and replacing it with two other colors- yellow and turquoise...

Using discharge paste to create surface design is simple and effective, and is probably going to become a staple in my technique repertoire. 

Continuing throughout the week with more textiles, I did one last experiment dyeing silk veils. Once again, I cut two large veils into 16 pieces, soaked them in vinegar, wadded them into meatballs and froze them.

The results were again quite lovely.

 

I'm now ready to dive in and dye ten very large silk panels, parfait-style. Look for a post about those (and the reason for my sudden interest in silk) in the next few weeks.

And remember the down-and-dirty image of this piece?

It has now become this...

... and is getting both hand stitching...

... and free-motion machine stitching....

I hope to have it finished by the end of the week or sometime next week.

Tomorrow, look for a post about my CitraSolv collage, Number 4 and for details about my new association with LQuilt. 

Until then, happy creating!

I Must Be Crazy

I've been playing with silk lately, specifically 8mm Habotai silk veils that I've been cutting into smaller pieces and parfait dyeing, using fiber reactive dyes. I wasn't thrilled with the first batch out of the dye baths.

(Parfait Dyed Habotai Silk)

While the lengths of silk were lovely, and their colors rich and deep, there was little to no discernible patterning- none of those crisp, complex landscapes of shifting color that flow across the cloth when you parfait dye cotton.

(Parfait Dyed Cotton Muslin)

Most of the colors in the silks seem to have blended together so that they almost read as solids. Beautiful, but not what I want.

Enter the Brain Trust over at The Dyer's Forum.

There's been a lively discussion lately on the subject of snow dyeing**.  Being a southerner, we don't know from snow, and I've been suffering from serious Dye Envy of those lucky enough to be able to play with this variation of scrunch dyeing.

However, there have also been some excellent suggestions for closely replicating snow dyeing, for the more snow-challenged among us. The most likely successful technique suggested, it seemed to me, was to wet, tightly scrunch, and then freeze your fabrics before applying the dyes. But while this technique has evidently proved to be successful on cotton, I haven't seen any discussions about it's viability with silk. Thank goodness I'm adventurous.

So, leaving nothing to chance for my next experimentation- and still chasing those beautiful, crystalline patterns I've achieved previously on cotton-  I cut two more silk veils into sixteen pieces, each measuring approximately 12" x 12".

This time, instead of soaking them in soda ask, I soaked them in straight vinegar for several hours. Then this is where it gets a little looney. I scrunched each piece of silk up into a wad about the size of a meatball, tied them off with string, and stuck them in a baggie in the freezer.

I felt odd doing it (the words of my Aunt Peg whispering in my ear, "Nice girl- a 'lil strange,") and the kitchen reeked of vinegar for a full day, but my results were much closer to what I wanted, this time.

After a day in the freezer, the mini silk meatballs had their strings removed (I want patterning, not tie-dye) and then got popped one at a time into a tall, slender container, in this case, the only container I had that would fit the bill- a modified blender cup. Each one received a splash of one of nine dye colors starting with yellows, and then moving into greens, blues, purples, reds and finally ending with orange.

After the silks had been allowed to batch set for about eight hours, and I was sure they were thawed, I steam-set them in the microwave for about a minute and a half. The wash-out cycle then proceeded as it does with cotton, with hand-washings followed by machine washings in Synthrapol. One key difference between cotton and silk is that the silk must be ironed when very slightly damp or you'll have a bear of a time getting the wrinkles to fall out.

I got a lot of very pretty patterning, though way more white areas than I wanted. More dye solution, possibly poured more slowly onto each piece, could solve that problem. However, my real mistake with this batch- also easily correctable, thank goodness- was my color progression. Once the orange dye at the top of the pile mixed with the purple and greens below it, it was all brown, brown, brown from there out. Fortunately, the brown I got was luscious and coppery and shimmering.

So in the next batch, hopefully the final experiment before launching into full-sized veils with a much larger dye bath, I will keep what works and tweak what doesn't: I'll soak the silk in vinegar (I could be crazy, but the colors were richer and deeper than when I soaked the last batch of silk in soda ash), tie it off, and freeze it. And then I'll go back to my usual color progression (yellow to orange to red to purple to blue to green) to achieve the color scheme I'm looking for. I'll post my results when I have them.

In other news, I got a lovely gift box from the folks at CitraSolv. 

These goodies (with plenty of Concentrate for my next Nat Geo massacre!) came last week in a beautiful upholstered box that I can use to keep... well, magazines, what else? Thank you, Melissa!

Also, I've entered into an arrangement with the folks over at LQuilt to host and moderate some surface design forums for them for the next few months. I was excited to be asked, I love their technique videos, and it should be a fun experience getting some discussions going. I'll give you more details about the forums once all the kinks are worked out.

Coming up this week, I'll be posting photos of my week 3 CS collage and of my newest stitched piece, which is coming along nicely.

In the meantime, happy creating!

**(Here is an excellent blog that describes snow dyeing.)

Rescuing Ugly Fabric

(I'm so sorry this tutorial was so slow in arriving, life jumped up and got in the way of its completion!)

We all have them, even if we don't admit it: fabric scraps we bought on the sale table at the craft store ten years ago, stuff that was included in kits we never completed, and even more that we don't recognize but that wound up in our stash, nonetheless. We know we won't use these neglected fabrics. Not in their current state, anyway.

But there is hope for such castoffs, using inexpensive supplies from your local hardware or craft store and a little imagination.

I took this fabric:

... and turned it into this:

I also took this, a really horrible fabric that I would never use:

And turned it into this, a fabric I probably will use in the future:

 

Fair warning before you begin: this WILL change the "hand" of the fabric. The fabric will become anywhere from slightly to moderately stiff by the end of this process. However, it still stitches beautifully and as long as you're mindful of the limitations of your sewing machine needle- or your hand needles- to go through tough fabrics, you can add virtually endless, thin layers of stamping and paint.

Here's what you'll need:

~ Any fabric you know you will never use in its current state. The uglier, the better. Smooth fabric can yield good, crisp (stamped) images and more heavily textured fabric will yield a more distressed image, so choose according to your needs. I use cottons almost exclusively, so I offer no guarantees for how this will work on man-made fabrics!

~ Padded surface for printing. An old towel folded up will do perfectly, and it has the added benefit of being able to pin your fabric to it to keep it from shifting.

~Safety or straight pins. Inexpensive pins are fine for this job- they're going to get covered in paint anyway, so you won't be using these on fine textiles.

~ Acrylic paints in several coordinating colors. Craft paints work as well as artist quality paints for this technique. There are also several brands of excellent textile paints on the market, as well. Spend as little or as much as you like.

~ Fabric or textile medium. I use Delta Cermacoat or Liquitex Fabric Medium because it's what I have in the studio, but most acrylic paint companies make their own version that should work just as well. PLEASE NOTE: for this technique, If you are using paints specially formulated for textiles you will NOT need an additional fabric medium!

~ Stamps. This is the time to pull out and strut those hand-made stamps. Making your own stamps is incredibly simple and there are an almost endless variety of materials you can use, many of which will yield stamps that you can use for years. (I'll be working on a tutorial in the near future for making your own stamps and printing plates.) If you're using stamps that you haven't created yourself from original images, please be respectful of international copyright laws!

~ Paint palette or palette paper.

~ Cosmetic sponges or sponge brushes, and sponges that don't get stiff when dry. I find these sponges- great big yellow ones- in the hardware store in the cleaning supplies aisle. When I get them home, I cut them into smaller pieces. It's important to use these sponges for this technique because you want them pliable when dry.

~ Mister filled with water.

What you'll do:

~Using safety or straight pins, pin your fabric to your padded surface, making sure to pull the fabric taut without stretching it. This step is helpful but not critical with small pieces of fabric, but if you have a large piece of fabric you want to paint, it's going to want to shift and move a lot, even if it is pinned. If it isn't pinned, it could quickly become frustrating. Don't bother ironing out the wrinkles, they'll fall out by the time you're finished. You can use the fabric with its right side up or down, it doesn't really matter- you'll see little to none of the original print in the final product.

~ Spritz fabric lightly with water. You're not aiming to soak it, just to dampen it.

~ Set up your paint palette. Place a large dollop of each of two or three coordinating paint colors (in my case I used golden yellow, orange-red and red ) side by side. Then below them, squeeze out a large dollop of textile medium. I try to use a ratio of about 50:50 but you should read the directions on your textile medium because it may be different. Finally, off to the side of the palette, I often squeeze a smaller dollop of titanium white.

 

~ With a foam brush or sponge, swipe through one or two of the paint colors and the medium, picking up all three on the brush at the same time.

~ Brush paints and medium onto the dampened fabric, covering the original print as much or as little as you please. This is where the thicker paints will come in handy- they will provide more opaque coverage than thinner or liquid acrylics will. Allow the colors to blend on the fabric as you work, or if you prefer more defined blocks of color, you can do that, too!

 

 

~ Cover your fabric with paint, picking up occasional bits of titanium white to add variety and value changes.

 

~ Before the fabric dries, use the paint still in your sponge brush to add texture. "Slap" the fabric lightly with the flat edge of the brush in a pouncing movement. This will distribute unexpected splatters of paint across the entire surface.

~ The next step- stamping- can be done while the paint is still wet, or it can be done once the paint dries. For the sake of time and because I already have my paints and tools out and set up, I usually just work wet-into-wet.  Load a dry, pliable sponge with no more than two colors of paint (more and you risk muddying the colors) and a dab of the textile medium. I usually do this by mashing the surface of the loaded sponge gently with a craft stick to distribute the paint throughout the sponge. Dab the paint onto your stamp, covering the surface with a light coating of paint. Don't overload the stamp with paint or it will give you a smeared, blurry image.

~ Pick a spot on your fabric and stamp. More gentle pressure will yield a lighter image with a more distressed look. Firm pressure will yield a clearer impression. Continue stamping, changing paint colors (use clean sponges if necessary, to avoid muddying the colors), until you're happy with the design.

 

 

~ Allow fabric to fully dry. If your paints or textile mediums need to be set for color fast permanence, be sure to closely follow the instructions on your textile medium or fabric paints.

Mixed Media And A New Studio

The garage studio remodel is complete and I now have the wonderful, brightly-lit wet/dry studio I've always longed for.

This is what I started with:

 

It's always been a wonderfully workable space that I've filled with my art supplies and tools, really my favorite room in the house, but even so, it had serious problems. For starters, it was a typical garage- poorly lit with just two naked bulbs overhead, no insulation to speak of, and prone to catching dust, dirt and leaves blown in from outside. The uninsulated garage door had large gaps down each side between the wall and the door, so all the cold air in winter, all the heat and humidity in summer, and all the bugs in the universe had a standing, open invitation into my work space. It made creating art in there challenging, but I still I did it for many years.

Now those problems are history. This is the space today:

It may not look that different, but trust me, it really is.

Let's start at the top and move down... the bare bulbs in the ceiling are gone, replaced with three sets of track lighting, each with four halogen bulbs. Two of the tracks light my work table and the walls, and one set is aimed at what will become the design wall. (That part of the job hasn't been finished yet, I still need to get the supplies for it, but it will measure about nine feet across.)

(And speaking of my worktable, I added a carpet pad to the top to make it easier to stamp, screen print and DSP. No more carting small padded surfaces from the painting studio where they live, to the garage studio and back again.)

I also tasked the electricians with giving me wiring that provides more current in the hopes of later adding a mini-fridge to store my mixed dyes. They installed four new plugs with all that wiring, two for me and two for my husband.

The plumbers came in and added a desperately-needed, deep, 2-sink laundry tub.

On the wall above it, you can see the new air conditioner/heating unit. This is a relatively new technology that allows you to heat and cool up to 4 rooms with ductless, wall-mounted units. Of course, it needs professional wiring and plumbing, and the compressor unit, which sits outside, is sizable but still smaller than whole-house units.

None of these improvements would have made much difference, though, if I hadn't insulated the space, too. I had a heavy, insulated garage door installed (with a door opener, for hubby) and had insulation blown in the attic space above the garage.As an added bonus, the garage door has four small windows, so for the first time ever, I have natural light in there during the day.

It feels like a whole new room added to the house, although my husband's side still contains typical garage items- tools, household chemicals, lawn gear, etc. It will still serve all the functions it did before, but in a climate-controlled, well lit space that is a joy to be in.

To celebrate, I did a little mixed-media art, something I don't spend much time doing anymore. An article in the newest Cloth, Paper, Scissors offered something I didn't think I'd ever find again- a new way to play with paper. After spending years and years making, altering, painting and destroying paper, I thought I'd seen it all, but I was wrong.

 

 

3 examples of papers made with CitraSolv

In "Creative Spirits- Transforming papers To Make A Unique Painting Surface" (pages 18-20), artist Cathy Taylor shows us how to use a de-greasing product called CitraSolv Concentrate to "melt" the ink of a National Geographic magazine in order to create amazing papers for use in mix-media art.

The process is simple- paint each page with CitraSolv, squish it around a little and after about 20 or 30 minutes, peel the pages out and lay them aside to dry. Here are some of the pages I did after removing them from the magazine.

So that you all can learn from my mistakes, I'll tell you a couple of things the article didn't mention. For one, evidently this is the only product that will achieve this particular effect. I didn't have any CitraSolv and couldn't find it in the two grocery stores I checked, nor in either Lowes or Target. I thought that one citric de-greaser is probably about the same as another, so I tried it with Goo-Gone. Didn't work. I just wound up with a soaked, unhappy-looking mess.

Fine, I thought, this is such a unique technique to me that I'm motivated to make it work. Off to the web I went in search of CitraSolv. I bought some, anxiously awaited its arrival and then dove on it when it showed up. Another sopping wet National Geographic magazine later, I realized that I had NOT bought the product called "Concentrate", I'd purchased some other CitraSolv cleaner.

I really wasn't happy with myself, but I gave it one more shot, bought the correct product and used it. And yeah, it really works! The Concentrate melts the inks, which, when you peel apart the pages to dry, slides around the paper, mixing and making great patterns. Some of the lettering can still faintly be seen, and ghostly remainders of the original images can also show up. It makes an entire magazine's worth gorgeous of paper.

Which brings me to my next caution: if you do this, be sure to have LOTS of flat surfaces to dry your sheets of paper on. If the papers touch one another, the wet inks will interact with each other. That can form great edges and such, but for the most part, you'll want to dry them separated, and a typical NatGeo magazine has about a hundred pages in it. 

Another interesting tidbit that I found after doing some research into the subject is that National Geographic coats their paper first with metallic gold paint before printing on it. This helps to give their photos that iconic glowing, high-quality look. But it also means that when you melt the ink off, the metallic becomes more obvious, so all the pages now have a lovely sheen.

I decided to use some of the papers immediately in a collage.

CS No. 1, 1.2010, 16" x 18"

(detail)

I used a masonite scrap left over from a shelving unit we built several years ago as the substrate. I didn't prime it all. I fused Wonder Under to the backs of the papers and then fused them right to the board. I may play with it a little later on with paint or somesuch- or maybe I won't, just not sure.

I did make a small commitment to myself, however. I have ten or eleven of these masonite scraps and dozens and dozens of magazine pages I melted, so I'm going to create quick and simple collages once a week with them, until I run out of masonite. You'll be seeing those posted here each week.

The fabric painting tutorial is almost finished, though it might end up being posted a little later than I was hoping- if you don't see it here tomorrow, look for it a little later in the week. Mom arrives tomorrow to stay for a few days and we're going to experiment with some silk dyeing, so it may take me away from finishing it up by tomorrow evening. I even hope to offer the tutorial in a clickable .pdf format for free download. Wish me luck figuring out how to do that. (Hubby says it's easy.)

Until then, happy creating!