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!

By Your Bootstraps- Part 2

On Tuesday, once the pieces I'd jar-dyed and blogged about yesterday had batched and were fully washed, dried and ironed, my next task was more difficult- creating interesting surface design on these already complex fabrics without destroying or obliterating what's intrinsically beautiful about them. 

For the rest of this week, I've been using the smaller of these pieces to try and develop a theme that I can carry forward and use on the three largest pieces. If any of those pieces are successful, I'd like to enter them into this contest: Fabric 2010: Handmade Designs In Fabric For Quiltmaking. The rules of the contest are simple: the hand must remain appropriate to the fabric, the pigments must be colorfast, and the fabric washable and sellable. 

I started with the least interesting fabrics and broke out all of my stamps, screens and stencils, as well as every textile paint and dye I could lay hands on. 

 

This piece got some stamping with textile inks, metallic fabric paint and matte fabric paint. 

 

Not bad, but a little too matchy-matchy and pastel for my taste. Plus, once I'd finished stamping, the fabric color became uninteresting to me. To spice it up, I painted it with a couple of different colors of diluted dye-na-flow, scrunched it vertically and left it to dry on a flat, non-porous surface. 

Now we're talking. The pigment, as expected, rose into the peaks and folds of the material to create a bold striped pattern, but it also deepened the overall value of the fabric as well. I heat set the pigments with a dry, hot iron, washed it once more on the soak cycle and ironed it again. I'm happy to report that the hand is still soft and supple and the color is well set. This is a good start towards my goal.

One of the fun things about hand-dyed fabrics is that they don't have a right or wrong side... both sides look equally beautiful. Here's the back side of the piece above.

Next I tried a darker fabric. My first thought was to break out the metallic oil sticks, but I decided that might almost be too obvious. Instead, I reached for the discharge paste and one of my old carved foam printing plates. I stamped the paste on in a few spots, waited for it to dry and then began ironing (which is how the discharge process is activated).**

Almost as soon as I began ironing I removed much more color from one area than I liked. That mistake frustrated me, but then I realized that I was in control of exactly how much dye I allowed the discharge paste to remove. I know that seems like such a no-brainer now, but it had never occurred to me before that I didn't have to just keep ironing until the process stopped. I could iron until I achieved the effect I wanted and then stop and launder the rest of the paste out of the fabric. 

I tried that with this piece, making sure I ran it through the machine twice on the soak cycle, and then to be sure I'd removed all of the excess paste, I ironed the piece once more. Just as I had hoped, no more color was removed. Now I had a subtle effect, but one glaring white-ish spot in the middle of the fabric. 

Out came the dye-na-flow once again, in violet. I wet the white spot, heavily watered down the paint on my brush, and lightly brushed the surface of the fabric, feathering the color outwards. After the fabric had dried again and was ironed for heat-setting, I could no longer even tell where I'd made the discharge mistake.


Next it got a little silk screen treatment with textile inks and it was finished... for now. I think.

26" x 39"

One more of the deeper violet/purple fabrics got the dye-na-flow treatment, but this time before any other media besides the dye had touched it. 

 

And once that was dried, ironed for color setting and run through the machine a couple of times with Synthrapol, it also was screen printed, only this time instead of straight fabric paints, I mixed the paints with discharge paste.  I knew the paste would remove the dyes but leave the dye-na-flow alone. Further, it would leave behind the fabric paints it was mixed with and give them a bright white background to really help them pop off the background color.

26" x 39"

This is by far my favorite piece and quite possibly the direction I will take the three large pieces that are waiting in the wings.

Next week, I'll use a flour paste resist to add a crackle finish to the boring green fabrics that came out of the top of the dye jar. I'll let you know how it goes.

Towards the end of the weekend or the beginning of next week, I'll be posting a step-by-step explanation of how I do jar dyeing.

In the meantime... oh you know, just be happy!

**(PLEASE NOTE: This is a toxic process... please use a respirator, saftey gloves and glasses and use only in a well-ventilated area. I'm not kidding about this.)

By Your Bootstraps- Part 1

Yep, I had a few bad weeks and then my computer went wonky for a while, but I'm back online (thanks, honey!) and I've been busy and want to tell you all about it, but it will take a couple of posts.

I was wandering through Target last week when I saw this beauty:

Two and a half gallon capacity, made of heavy glass with a mouth wide enough for me to put both my hands in at once (though why would I want to?), and topped with an airtight lid. Swoon. I admit that I snatched it greedily off the shelf as soon as I laid eyes on it. Best 20.00 I've spent all month!

So this week, naturally, I had to test it out with a new batch of parfait dyeing- nine pieces of cotton muslin. Six of the pieces are 26" x 39" and three of them are 42 & 1/2" x 55". I keep hearing the drum beat that extolls us to, "work larger, work larger..." and I am in agreement- to stretch myself, I must work larger and with a new wet studio, I don't have any more excuses not to.

But there's another reason for returning to what's become, for me, a fairly tried and true technique: there's a juried competition for fabric surface design on the Quilt Surface Design Symposium site that I very much want to enter.

So, you know the routine with parfait dyeing: layer dyes and fabrics in a jar; resist the powerful urge to yank the fabrics out when the liquid in the jar turns black (and it will, trust me); batch over night; wash out and ogle shamelessly at the beauty you made. 

(Of course, there's actually a lot more to it than that and because I always get a lot of questions about this technique when I mention it here, one of my next posts will be how I do jar dyeing, step-by-step. Please forgive me for not posting it here today but it isn't even nine o'clock and my head is drooping towards my chest already.)

The top two fabrics in the jar are often boring- they are only in contact with one or two dye colors and they generally aren't submerged in the dye bath, the way the bottom, and usually more interesting fabrics are. I haven't photographed those. I'm working on ways to repair that little foible, though, so please wish me luck. The rest of the pieces in the jar were more impressive.

 

26" x 39"

 

(detail)

  

42 & 1/2" x 55" (blurry, sorry about that)

 (detail)

  

26" x 39"

  

26" x 39"

 

  

42 & 1/2" x 55" 

  

42 & 1/2" x 55" 

 

(detail)

I found it a little spooky, but also kind of reassuring, that I almost perfectly matched the color combinations I'd achieved on my very first jar dyeing attempt. However, we all have our prefered color palette, I suppose, and this is mine- is it any real surprise that I keep reaching for the same dye colors?

Tomorrow I will finish this post and talk about what I spent the rest of the week doing with these fabrics and then perhaps over the weekend, I'll go into detail about parfait dyeing. In the meantime, happy creating!