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! 

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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!

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.)

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!

What Was I Thinking?

A few days ago I told a fellow blogger in email that I had taken a forced vacation from art. I must have been out of my mind. I strolled into the studio this morning to be sure it was in readiness for the launch of a new work week (and year!) tomorrow, and realized that I had evidently spent much more time immersed in creative pursuits during my "vacation" than I was willing to admit to myself.

For instance, I took this perfectly respectable, small-scale commercial fabric that I think is pretty but would never actually use as it is...

and turned it into this:

That was so much fun that I whacked another piece off and did this to it:

 

(And while I'm at it, I might as well own up to the fact that I broke my own rule and used a stamp I didn't design and carve myself. This one's a commercial stamp.)

I started a tutorial for transforming ugly fabrics but then I realized that most of the folks reading this blog probably already have that skill in their arsenal. However, as stated in a previous post, I'd be happy to finish writing that tutorial if there's any interest in it.

Also during my "self-imposed vacation" from art (it sounds so important when it's said like that, doesn't it?), I dyed fabrics. These little beauties, to be specific, or rather, the top eight pieces, anyway:

Are we seeing a pattern here? Yeah, not only do I live in a state of denial about exactly how much time I really spend in the studio (way, way too much, I'm starting to suspect), but also, that sometimes I can't seem to get away from a specific color palette. Apparently, I had violet on my mind last week, and everything wound up influenced by it.

Like these lovely papers:

From top to bottom we have Yupo painted with Dye-Na_Flow. Yupo is a thin plastic that behaves much like watercolor paper except that you have the ability to lift the color all the way back to white with the application of a wet brush, if you choose. This allows for some pretty cool effects. It comes in a pad of sheets just like watercolor paper. This sample was actually painted several years ago, but the colors were weak and uninteresting. This past week, I dug it out and gave it a light wash of violet. When it dried, I sanded some areas back to white.

The middle sheet is cold-press watercolor paper (which I prefer to hot-press for its' more textured surface) and the bottom piece is a large sheet of Bristol velum. The Bristol was painted with the off-loaded pigments from the other projects I was painting and puttering with. The artist Sherrill Kahn aptly names these bits of painted work, "serendipity pieces".

And speaking of off-loading pigments, I also keep baby wipes on my desk to mop up all that color I willy-nilly splash around. Once dry, I reward their hard service by giving them some character with a little paint and stamping.

They're now ready to be stitched or glued onto a future project. I used these hand-made stamps...

Do you make your own stamps? If not, would you like to learn how? Let me know... it could be another tutorial in the making!

Finally, in my obsessiveness this week with stamping, making stamps, painting,  dyeing, and violet- all that stuff I convinced myself I was on vacation from- my stamping board took on an interesting character...

This board was made by covering a piece of masonite with an old towel, turning a length of ugly fabric to its back side and wrapping the board/towel in it, and then painting it with several coats of Gesso. I may soon have to pull this cherished tool apart to use this now not-so-ugly fabric in a quilt!

It's a new work week, and it's a new year. There are so many things to get to this year that I'm bursting with energy.

In the first few months of this year I will:

~ Take myself slowly and carefully through the book Experimental Textiles, by Kim Thittichai. Kim was a Cities & Guilds instructor in England and taught this class for years until her retirement. There was such an outcry that her cirruculum might be lost, that she recorded it in this book. The first half of the book are exercises I am very familiar with, so I will skip those after a careful reading (it never hurts to brush up on familiar subjects) and then move on to the lessons I have yet to learn.

~ Take myself slowly and carefully through Gloria Hansen's book, Digital Essentials.

~ Using Gloria's book, I will teach myself how to use the new copy of Photoshop Elements I just installed on my machine.

~ I will complete my client's art installation.

The garage studio remodel is coming along beautifully. The AC/Heating unit has been plumbed and wired, the drywall has been repaired and the electricians have begun running wiring into the attic. Next, the sink, the track lighting, the insulated garage door and the new electrical outlets will be installed. It's possible that most of this work will be completed by the end of the week! I'll post before and after photos when it's all complete and put back together.

Until then, happy creating!