"Persistence" close to done, and a new project

 

I am close to finishing "Persistence," the large piece (about 55x90") that originated in my experience of the neolithic standing stones in the alignments of Carnac. Thousands of stitches have been put into the cloth, which was colored with earth pigments. I'm still finalizing plans on how to hang the piece. I didn't want to finish the edges with any of the bindings typical of a quilt, and this has implications for how to hang the quilt. I'm thinking I will just turn the top edge over to make a channel, and hang it with the help of a long branch I found in my back yard. I'll post a photo of the finished piece once I've figured this out.

This spring and summer, I also started working on a new project. I have an established perennial garden, and each spring I am thrilled by three flowers that come into bloom at the same time: baptisia (also known as wild indigo, deep blue-purple), poppies (pale coral), and peonies (dark pink/magenta). I am in awe of their beauty.

I've done homage before to the baptisia, with this watercolor: 

But now I'd like to work on a textile project that is about all three. This will be very different subject matter for my textile work. I have no clear ideas about what the composition will be. Rather than working on sketches for a design, I'd like to work it out through making small maquettes with fabrics, so I've been dyeing fabrics this summer, looking to get the specific colors I want. It's really the colors I'm interested in rather than the specific forms of the flowers, though it's possible those will eventually come into play. Here's a pile of the fabrics I've dyed so far; the pile includes green, in case I want to reference leaves as well. The colors include some that are on target, though the blue needs a darker value and the green needs more blue. 

Here's a photo annotated with some information about the various trials (click on any photo to enlarge):

 

And a shout out to Carol Soderlund, who teaches a method for dyeing fabric that enables one to get precise colors (among many other aspects of working with fabric dyes). For some of my work, often the work that has the most personal meaning to me, there's a connection to a very specific color--either in the natural/material world or in my mind. Getting a specific color from dye is more challenging than from paint, so I'm grateful for the work Carol has done in this field. And she is such a great teacher!

 

 

Catching up: face masks

For most of the past year, I focused my blog posts on the making of Jeremy's wedding quilt. The last post where I talked about other projects was back in September, 2019. I've been working on several other things in these months, and every once in a while, I would title and save a blog post, to remind myself to come back and write about them; there are a half-dozen of these lined up. But I wanted to focus my attention on thinking through and working on the wedding quilt project, so I didn't write up blog posts about other things.  Since I finished that quilt, I've turned my attention to another big project, one I've been thinking about and making forays into since about 2006. I'm getting closer to having something to write about this, but not yet.  So, it's a good time to catch up on the other things I've been doing over the last year, mostly smaller craft work, but also a couple of art pieces.

I'll start with a recent craft project. Along with most everyone with a sewing machine, I've been making cloth face masks for a few months. 

I use a pattern given in the New York Times at the end of March. Soon after I started making them (in early April), the local natural foods store asked if I would be willing to supply them with masks, since people had been asking for them. I wasn't interested in making money on the masks, and I also didn't want to be spending more than a few hours a week sewing masks, so we came up with this idea:  I supply the store with about ten masks a week, at no cost. They have them on display, with a sign explaining that the masks are available in exchange for a donation to local food relief groups. Suggested donation is $10, but anything smaller is also happily accepted. So far, this has generated about $600 in donations. This definitely helps motivate me to keep making masks! I thought the masks might stop selling at this point, since they are now readily available in stores, but apparently not--people like the style, and they like that the money is going to a good cause.

Until recently, I made the masks with one layer of batik (recommended because of its tight fabric weave) and one layer of printed quilter's cotton, all from my stash of fabric. When I ran out of batik, I bought a couple of half-yards from a local shop. But rather than continue to buy fabric, I realized I could do some hand-dyeing on a bolt of fabric I rarely use, because it is so tightly woven that I can't hand-stitch into it (Testfabrics 419).  It's perfect for this use!  And it gives me the chance to do a fun kind of dyeing that I rarely use--mixing two or three different colors in a random pattern. (The dyeing I do for my quilts is almost all one-color solids or near-solids.) Below are six different strips I've dyed in the last couple of weeks. For any dyers reading, these are all with Procion MX dyes, color names noted on the photos. The "indigo" is a premixed dye from Dharma Trading; the rest are from Pro Chemical and Dye. For ease of use, I went with either primaries or pre-mixed colors. Now that I've got a method down, I'll probably mix some of my own colors, and extend the range. 

It's always fun to look up close at a smaller section of the fabric (click on photos to enlarge):

I took another photo with the four 13" panels placed right next to each other.  Hmm, something like this might be nice as a simple quilt top, maybe separated by narrow strips of solid fabric. . .

And here's the other side of the masks, showing the commercial cotton fabric I used:

Trimmed edges put to use

I recently trimmed off the edges on some fabric I'd printed up for napkins. Put the strips in the wastebasket, but then pulled them out. Cut some 1.5" squares and made up a 4" coaster.  I've made coasters like this before from commercial fabric I have on hand.

Not surprisingly, the coaster made from screen-printed leftovers is even nicer. . .

A new sink for the dyeing studio

No pretty pictures in this post, but if you dye fabric yourself or are interested in how it's done, here's a behind-the-scenes look at one key element of the process: the sink.

I'm lucky to have a large space available in my basement where I can do everything connected with dyeing fabric--my "wet studio." The basement has always had the double laundry sink shown in the photo on the left below. The sink was large enough to accommodate two large buckets (I often rinse in one bucket and soak in another), while also giving me the necessary space to wash out all the various containers and equipment that one uses. To the right of the sink, I have a large table with a waterproof covering.  This is where I mix up my dye solutions; there's also a dish rack for the containers/tools that I've washed out. All good, but you can see one problem in the photo below: the difference in height between the table (which is at a good working height) and the sink, which is low and deep, so I was always bending over when using it--not good for my back. Another inconvenience is that the faucets for hot and cold water were separate, so getting just the right temperatures for mixing dye solutions was always an awkward process of having to adjust from two taps. So, several months ago, after a particularly long (and painful) stretch of dyeing and printing napkins, I decided to treat myself to a new sink, shown below on the right.

old sink

new sink

  

The height of the sink is now even with the table, and the sink itself is less deep, so no need to bend over. The new sink is not as wide as the double sink, but because there's no divider, it didn't need to be. I saved some money by purchasing a less wide unit, but one still big enough to fit two large buckets.

I wanted two faucets so that I could easily fill up two buckets side by side. The faucet on the right (photo below) has a pull-down sprayer, with an easy toggle between a stream of water and a spray.  The faucet on the left is a simple gooseneck faucet. Both of these swing to the side if I need to move them out of the way. The spray faucet is helpful for washing some utensils, and great for washing out silk screens. I've included links above to the specific models, in case someone is considering a new sink of their own. (Ignore the white plastic pipe coming into the sink on the right; that's a drain from something else in the house that needed an exit point.)

Now, I am satisfied with sink as it worked out, but I made some mistakes along the way. Here are the things I didn't anticipate:

• I ordered a 33" wide sink, thinking that was the measurement of the well of the sink (which is what it looked like on the drawing the plumber made for me). But it turns out that 33" is the measurement from edge to edge, including the rim, so the well of the sink is only about 27" wide.  The base unit had already been constructed, and holes cut in the sink for the faucets, so returning the sink wasn't an option. It turns out that it is still wide enough for my two large buckets, so I'm OK, but I would have liked another few inches. 
• The water pressure in the spray faucet is not as strong as I had expected; it's less than in the simple faucet. I didn't know that there was variation in this from faucet to faucet; perhaps there was a different one that would have been better on this score. Again, it's workable as is--just takes a little longer to fill a bucket. 
• The faucet on the left is cold water only; I didn't realize that this is what "single supply" meant in the description. This still works for me, since the main thing I do on the left is fill a bucket with cold water for soaking just-dyed fabrics. But if I'd realized it, I probably would have looked for a faucet with both cold and hot supply.
• In designing the base, we didn't take into account that there's an input pipe coming out of the back wall, extending about 8 inches, so the unit stands away from the wall.  It's still perfectly functional, just means that soap bottles or sponges put on the back area are more likely to fall off onto the floor.

I will never be doing this again, but perhaps someone else can learn from my mistakes!  If I realized how much I didn't know (and how much the plumber didn't know--I later found out this was the first custom unit like this he had designed), I would have brought in a designer/contractor at the outset to help me think through everything.

If you're thinking of something like this and would like to know how much it cost, send me an e-mail and I'll be happy to let you know: pgold at knox dot edu

In clover

I've been continuing to print napkins, and am especially happy with a new screen I made that's based on an old drawing of mine of a clover flower. This encourages me to work further with elements from some of my drawings. I think the two-tone turquoise with dark blue is especially nice, though the two-tone base was the result of serendipity:  I had made a napkin with a light turquoise base fabric and printed my bowl pattern on in a darker turquoise.  There was not enough of a contrast to make it a successful print, so I printed the clover design over the top of it with dark blue.  Maybe I should do more like this on purpose. . .  

the original drawing, 2012

Choosing favorites

Here are my 13 favorites from the 40 or so napkins I've printed in my latest print runs. I like the colors as well as the printed designs. I have more playing around to do with color combinations, but I find I like both the high contrast of black/lighter color as well as the lower contrast of two shades of the same color (turquoise in upper right, rust in center of the bottom row).

I mentioned in the last post that I was going to try making a second screen from a screen, in order to get more of a line drawing effect. I did this with the screen on which I'd written text, and I'm happy with how it turned out.  The original screen was used for the navy napkin on the right, below. The lettering drawn on the screen with matte medium served as a resist, so the text appears in the light blue of the original fabric; the added dye becomes the background.  I printed this twice, first with dark blue, then turned the screen 90 degrees and printed with medium blue, which is why you see three shades of blue on the napkin.  Then I used that screen as a "stencil," pulling matte medium through it onto another screen.  That makes a new screen where the background is coated with the resist, and the letters are clear for the dye to be pulled through.  For the napkin on the left, I started with magenta fabric, and did two pulls with black dye.  I like that it looks kind of like an ancient inscription, somewhat worn away.

Out of the 40 napkins, there are 34 I like well enough to either use myself or give them away.  Here they all are. You'll see that I also tried out a red-white combination that didn't make it into my "favorites" group. I really like the idea of red/white, but there was back-staining of the red dye onto the white fabric, so the results are more like red and pale-pink.  I think I'll probably overdye them a light rust color, to get rid of the pink.  If I had thought ahead, I might have avoided the backstaining, but the process to do that involves soaking twice with lots of ice cubes, which I don't want to have to build into my routine.

In the top row on the left are two napkins where the bowl design was pulled once; on the right it was pulled twice.  In the end, I prefer it pulled once--which conveniently is less work for me.

I will be taking a break from this for a while, to finish my online Photoshop course, where I hope to come up with some additional screen designs.  I like all of these, but found I got a little bored repeating just these half-dozen screen.

Seven of 32 printed

I pulled screens on 7 napkins last Wednesday.  I can layout fabric for eight napkins on my large print table. I have six screens that I'm happy enough with to use.

I can re-use a screen in one session if I'm printing with the same color, which worked for the 7th (turquoise) napkin. It took about 2 hours to do the printing. So, it will take me a while to print all the fabric that I've readied for printing (32 napkins total). I may also try making a couple more screens.

Here's a review of the prints, and notes about how to proceed with the next prints. The two below were done with two different screens, but each of the screens was made in the same way. This may be difficult to understand without seeing it, but here goes:  I used 2" square piece of plexiglass to stamp rows of squares onto the screen. The stamping medium was matte medium, brushed on with a paint brush cut into so that uneven lines are painted on the stamp, rather than a fully covered surface. Where the matte medium, stamped, sticks to the screen, no dye can go through. I made the screen on the right first, one of the first screens I made.  Here I've used it to print black onto boysenberry fabric overprinted. There are many places on the screen where no matte medium stuck.  I made a second screen trying to improve on the first, used on the green fabric below (printed with dark blue dye). On this screen, so much matte medium stuck that only the unstamped margins between the squares let through the dye. I like both of these, but I may try making a third screen to get a look somewhere in between these.  By the way, the boysenberry/black piece is the only one in this batch where I just pulled the screen once.  For all others, I pulled once with the pattern vertical, and then a second time turning the screen 90 degrees.

The next two show the pieces where I did the first pull with a dark value thickened dye, but then diluted the dye by 3 for the second pull. I think these came out well. In both these cases, the color of the dye was simply a darker value of the base fabric.

A friend asked, "Can you do a thinner line for the patterning, so that the color of the fabric is more of the star?" I would definitely like to do this as well.  The most direct way to do this is to make the screen using a photo-emulsion process, where the drawn line will print (rather than these screens, line is a resist, and the background prints); I hope to have a chance to do that in December.  The other thing I could do is take one of these screens that are drawn lines (like the words on the left above, and the floral design on the right), and use that screen to "print" matte medium onto another piece of polyester screen. On that secondary screen, the background will have the resist on it, and the lines will print.  I may try that soon. . .

The next pair are both on boysenberry base fabric, printed with black on the left, and a burgundy color on the right (boysenberry dye with a little black added in).  I like both combinations.

The pair below both use lavender base fabric.  On the left, I used the burgundy color for printing, on the right a darker shade of lavender.  I think both work, but from personal preference, I don't think I'd use the burgundy again on lavender.

I've had other obligations keeping me busy since last Wednesday, but I look forward to trying out some other color combinations and maybe making some new screens too.

Playing with color choices in Photoshop

I've set aside Wednesday to go screen print more napkins. I've already experimented with dark blue on plain muslin fabric and dark brown over a lighter brown, reported on here. After the last session, I dyed up enough muslin for four napkins in each of eight colors, above. (The greens on left and right are a little different from each other.) Today I played around in Photoshop Elements, trying out different colors for the patterns that will be screened onto the fabric. I show the results below, lining them up so I can more easily see see what I'd like to try out. Some of these combinations will not work with dye, because the second color mixes with the first when overdyed in the printing process (unlike paint, which can go on as a separate opaque layer). This is why I've chosen mostly colors close to each other on the color wheel, where the combination will not be so problematic. I've put in bold the colors I'm most likely to try out when printing.

Boysenberry with black, indigo, and burgundy

Light bluish-green with darker shade of green, dark indigo blue, medium indigo blue, and black

Light yellow-green with dark indigo blue, black, dark lavender, darker shade of green (I like the lavender and green, but I can't get there through starting with green and overdyeing.)

Light indigo blue with black, dark indigo, and gray.

Gray with indigo, black, and burgundy.

Lavender with indigo, black, darker lavender, burgundy. 

Light rust with black, charcoal, indigo, burgundy, and darker rust. 

Turquoise with black, charcoal, indigo, darker turquoise, and rust. The turquoise and rust is lovely, but this is another combination that won't work with an overdye process--the print would come out a muddy grown/gray.

So, you can see that I'm drawn to black with anything, with a second choice of dark indigo, but it will be fun to try other colors also. I've made a chart of these choices, and counted up how many napkins will be screened with each color, which tells me how much thickened dye to mix up tomorrow. I'll be interested to see how long it takes me to print all 32 napkins. For most of them, I'll be pulling the screen twice, with the second time turned 90 degrees, so this will take a while.  Although all the photos above use an image from one screen, I'll be using six different screens in the printing.

I will report results when I have them!

Back to screenprinting for cloth napkins

About a year ago, I did a surface design workshop with Claire Benn on "Lines and Rows"; I concentrated my efforts on figuring out designs that would work for cloth napkins, 18" square.  I came up with a couple of designs that I liked--squares and bowls, described here.  When I got home, I set to work on developing further designs, as I'd like to have at least four or six designs available for sets of napkins. I printed up six more designs, but wasn't satisfied with them.  I thought if I printed each one again, turning the screen 90 degrees, it was possible they would be more successful.  So I pinned the fabric back on the print table, but then left them for a while to go back to sewing.  And there they lay through the winter, spring, and summer.  A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that I had a container of thickened dye sitting on the back of my work table, and I decided to just go ahead and use it to pull the screens a second time.  Given that the dye had been unrefrigerated for nine months, I had no idea whether it would work at all, but it was so easy to use what was there, I thought I'd take a chance and experiment.  The results are above, with details below. The dark indigo-colored marks are from the first screening last October; the lighter marks are from the recent second pull of the screens, turned 90 degrees. (The detail images below are just a section of the print, not the whole 18.")  The cross-hatching image didn't work, but the other designs are not bad.  I'll probably leave them as is, though I could overdye with a very pale indigo, to take out the creamy white color of the muslin I'm using.

Torn bits of masking tape used as a resist on the screen.	Hand-drawn floral design, using matte medium as a resist.
Small plexi-glass square stamped on the screen with matte medium.	Text here is from Martin Buber: "One eats in holiness and the table becomes an altar."

I then did another batch of six napkins, some screens the same, some different.  I used a dark brown dye on this batch. The swipes of paler colors in the middle of the top and bottom rows are trials for what to use for dyeing the background; I think I'll go with one of the two palest values (top row).

Of these, here are details of my favorite four:

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bowls (done from stamping the screen)	cross--hatch
squares (same stamp as above, but a second screen, with quite a different result)	the Martin Buber quote, written out with matte medium.

After I finish the brown napkins, I'm going take time to develop more images.  Instead of using a resist on the screen, I'm pursuing development of images using Photoshop.  I'm finishing up the last lessons of a third Photoshop Elements class with Kris Sazaki and Deb Cashatt.  (Their online classes are excellent.)  This 3rd class includes instructions on making repeat designs, so I've been playing around with making images that might be suitable for napkins.  Here are a few that I've come up with so far.  I plan to keep experimenting on the computer, to generate a set of possibilities.  In December I'll have a chance to use a new photo emulsion printing set up that's recently been purchased by the college where I worked for many years.  Making a screen through a photo emulsion process allows you to transfer a black and white image with high accuracy, and to get a screen where the drawn line will be what prints.  So, for example, on the image below, if I use this with a photo emulsion process, the lines will print black (or whatever color I want to use).  If I were to draw the same image on a silk screen with matte medium (the process I used for the floral and text images above), it's the background that would print, not the lines.

Here's what the same screen might look like if I printed with purple onto a light blue cloth.

Here's how I came up with the scribble that was used for the repeat.  I started with a photo of a yucca plant, taken on a visit to my sister in Arizona last spring.  In preparation for a class with Paula Kovarik, we had been instructed to look for lines, and I loved the curly tendrils on this plant:

Using Photoshop, I traced the tendrils, and then copied the tracing into its own image file:

I used the tracing on the right as the basis for one of the stitching exercises in Paula's class:

For an image for screen printing, I went in two directions.  First I made a scribble based loosely on the yucca tracing; this scribble then served as the basis for the repeat design above:

Next, wanting to get back closer to the original tracing, I scribbled various elements, spreading them across an 18" space:

Explorations in Photoshop will continue. . .