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!

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!