Using the last bits

I had stamped several bowls on white linen instead of natural, and decided to make a few cards from them, no stitching added. These needed a black or gray background instead of cream.

Then I did some improvisational work, using the scraps generated from trimming the abstract compositions shown in the last post. This piece is about 6x11 inches.

I enjoyed working on this, playing around with what can be made from a variety of related shapes. The fact that the bowl shape includes both straight and curved lines makes for interest in the cropped forms. I think I will leave this as is, without trimming the edges further.

I only have a few small scraps left. Not much variation of mark/texture in what's left, so I'll stop here.

More work with printed and stitched bowls

I've continued to work with the bowls stamped on linen, using up all the imagges already stamped.  The photo above shows the first 3 stitched bowls in front, not mounted on cards. These are still my favorites, which I think I'll mount together in a frame. (Thanks to Beth for this suggestion.) Four more stitched bowls, mounted on cards, are along the right side.  The remaining 11 (center and left) are cropped pieces that I got out of the overlaid stamping below.

I enjoy cropping to get new images. This one makes me thinks of two canoes tied up on the shore:

And when I looked at the bowls upside down, I got this, one of my favorites:

This one makes me think of a camping tent:

But I like it better turned 90 degrees, for a still life of a wedge of cheese and a bottle of wine. Click on any image for a close-up view that allows you to see the complex texture in some of these.

Here are a few photos to show how I make the crops. The first photo shows the cardstock window over the fabric, the window cut to the 3 x 5.5" size that I know will work well on the Fabriano cards that I use.

Then, holding the top of the window in place, I slip a quilter's ruler underneath, lining up two of its edges with the top and right side of the window. Then I remove the window, cut those two edges with a rotary cutter, and finish by rotating the ruler to cut the other two edges.

Here's the finished crop. The shape on the right reminds me of a goblet.

I love the complexity of shapes that can be drawn from simple repetition of one shape. And it interests me how difficult it is for the eye to accept something as abstract, but wants to see other objects in the cropped compositions.

These photos were taken before securing the cloth to the card, which I've now done with double-stick tape. The linen was also reinforced with a fusible stabilizer (some before stamping, some after), which makes the cut pieces easier to handle and keeps the edges from fraying. I also did one sample where I deliberately frayed the edges, but it's very difficult to get the composition lined up with the thread lines, making the fringe uneven, so I abandoned that.

I've bought more linen, some the natural color used here, and some white, which I could dye and/or hand-paint. But perhaps this is enough for now. I'll see what I feel moved to do next.

Printing, stamping, and writing with thickened dye

I recently came back from a five-day class at the Barn with Carol Soderlund.  The class was called "Visions and Revisions," and was aimed at experienced dyers.  Students let Carol know ahead of time the particular areas of dyeing that we wanted to work on, and then we worked independently with Carol's guidance.  There were only five of us in the class, so we got a lot of attention, and Carol was enormously generous with her time and knowledge.  I took my first class in fabric dyeing with Carol in the spring of 2009.  With the skills gained in that class, I have been able to successfully dye fabric for a number of quilts, but I felt I needed further help to go in some other directions, particularly in the use of thickened dye as "paint" that one can use to print, stamp, paint, and write with. 

Knowing that I would like to create more fabric with the texture and/or color of stones, I worked with a limited palette of neutrals the whole week.  (For an example of my previous work about stones, done with paint rather than dye, click here.)  With a set limited palette, I could focus on learning techniques, and just use the array of five or six colors that I had mixed up.

I worked on over 30 pieces of fabric over the week, some about a yard long, others just small rectangles.  My favorite piece is the one at the top of the post, especially the top gray tier (click on any photo to bring up a larger image).  This is a silk screen print, using corn husks to mask the screen:  husks torn and arranged on top of white fabric, silk screen laid on top, and then gray dye pulled through--dye goes to the spaces between the shapes of the corn husks.  I printed the screen (about 12x18") several times across the width of the fabric, and then I turned it 90 degrees and printed over the first series.  In the tier printed with tan, I used leaves as well as corn husks; you can see some of those shapes maintained, even though I again did both vertical and horizontal printing.  Here's a detail of the gray tier:

OK, less detail on the rest!  Here are the pieces I did that I am most likely to follow up on in one way or another.  The next one is done with a stamp, stamped in a vertical position with gray dye and then horizontally with tan.

Here's the stamp I made for the piece--very easy to make, cutting shapes out of "Fun Foam" and sticking them on a piece of foam core as the base:

Another kind of printing is done with a thermofax screen, a technique that allows you to burn a line drawing into a screen.  Here I tried out screens made from the drawings I've been doing since the summer:

Here I took the screen for the enlarged detail of salvia (on the right above), and I printed it multiple times.  then I painted grey dye over one bunch to see what it would look like on colored fabric:

And here's one done from laying double-pointed knitting needles on a photocopy machine.  The screen was done with the needles all parallel to each other; the print was done by multiple pulls on the same screen.  This was printed on fabric previously dyed tan.

I like this next piece a lot.  I started with gray fabric, wet it and scrunched it up, and then dabbed gray and tan paint on it.

And a detail--cut up, this would work well as fabric for stones.

I also made some stamps in the shapes of stones.  First I used gray dye and a foam roller for applying the dye:

Then I used more colors, and I used a foam brush to apply the dye, which gave more texture to the stones.

Here's a piece with good potential for stone texture (rather than shape).  It was done using a paint roller, the kind with a very rough foam roller, meant for texturizing paint application.  I rolled over white fabric with grey paint.  I can put another layer or two on, to have less white.  Or if do another piece like this, I would probably start with an already-dyed piece of fabric and then roll over it with one layer.

I was also interested in writing with dye on fabric.  I wanted to obscure the actual text, so this version was done by monoprinting:  I wrote on a plastic-covered table with the dye, then laid the fabric on top of it--so the writing comes out backwards.

Here are a couple of images from fabric I printed using a "deconstructed screen"--a different (and more complicated) process than regular printing with the silk screen, and not one I'm likely to do again, but I can cut some good "stones" out of these pieces.  The base of this screen was twine laid down on the screen in somewhat snaky parallel lines.

Finally, here's a photo of the wall where some of my work was hung up.  A very productive week, with a lot to process in its wake. . .  I am happy with the range of techniques I learned; now I need to look over the work I produced and decide which techniques I'd like to pursue further.  I did not intend to create "finished" fabric at the workshop, so I'm glad to have even just a couple that I'm happy with as is.