Gifts for the Frayed Edges were home-made and recycled this year… the best kind! I had found some gorgeous ribbon at Rock Paper Scissors, a store in Wiscasset. Deborah always loved to stop at Smitten, owned by the same person, and I had never been despite the fact that I drive through Wiscasset at least twice a month on my way to and from Frayed Edges meetings. So one time, on the way home, I finally stopped. And bought YARDS of this gorgeous ribbon, with the idea of making a gift for my fellow Frayeds. As Christmas approached, I thought…do they really need ANOTHER bag with this ribbon on it? Why not let them make something they like/want instead? That led to the decision to dye fabric.

I got home from Mom’s in California on Dec. 11th. Over the next couple of days I dyed about 16 yards of fabric! I did two yards each of five colors (one for each of the other Frayed Edges and one for Marie. Each person received a half yard of “their” color plus a fat quarter yard of the other four colors. While I was at it, I decided to also dye some wonderful PFD (prepared for dyeing) fabrics Marie gave me for Christmas last year: silk organdy, gauze, lawn… plus some cheesecloth and also some silks. Oh MY!

I moved my “table” (two old cabinets plus styrofoam insulation and a 4×4 piece of scratched up shower board) over by the basement windows. A vast improvement to being on the other side of the basement. Still no sink downstairs (I had a plumber give an estimate….$1200 not including sink, counter, faucet…to install….not gonna happen), so am hauling water, but at least it is space and I don’t need to worry about dye or soda ash splattering on the cement walls and floor. The shelving on the left is new and wonderful! All my dyes, auxiliaries and pots and beakers and whatnot in ONE place!

Batching and just rinsed fabrics look so wonderful (too see larger, click on the photo):

Then…. I took some raspberry syrup jars and painted them with glass paint. I used Pebeo Vitrea 160 (available here at Dick Blick) . I picked colors and a motif for each person….green for Marie, sea blues for Kathy, purple for Deborah, green for Kate, and deep coral for Hannah. The purple one for Deborah, for example, has the stalk with buds on it which she has used so often in her work, Kath’s has waves for the sea. I used contact paper cut into shapes and stuck on the bottles, then painted, allowed paint to dry. Paint is supposed to cure 24 hours (I cut it a little close on a few! as usual ran late on time) before baking. You put the glass in a cold oven, turn on the temp to 325. When the oven reaches 325 you “bake” for 40 minutes, then allow to cool inside the oven. It worked! Wouldn’t these look great in a window? I think we need to have more raspberry syrup on our waffles so I can make some for us!

Finally, I wrapped everything up…. the bottle got wrapped with a pair of hand-dyed socks, which got wrapped with the 1 1/2 yards of hand-dyed , which got rolled with that ribbon from Rock Paper Scissors!

In the interest of having good materials to work with for my art quilting, I dyed a lot of fabric… I’ll have more to share over the next week or two.

A bit over a year ago, I was dumbfounded and elated when Larkin Van Horn invited me to participte in an art quilt show she is curating to be titled “It’s Good to be Green.” All quilts are to be 18×45 inches, and please, no Kermit the frogs, she said. Almost instantly I had an idea to do a quilt about the water spirits that inhabit the streams and lakes. My first thought was the ruselka from Russian mythology, but after doing a bit of research, learned they aren’t such nice creatures, so I amended that to Naiads.

The show will open in March (In Tillamook, Oregon, I think), and we’ve been asked not to share the finished products until after the show opens. Best of all, Larkin will be producing a CD catalog of the show so you can all go see it, even if just “virtually.” However, Larkin did say it would be OK to share pictures of in progress, so here you go. This first picture is of a very rough sketch for the overall piece (the left white paper—use medical exam table paper!), some sketches for the naiads, batting cut a bit larger than finished size in the center with an extra bit of batting on the left for the tree, and on the right, possible fabrics for the background:

It’s kind of interesting since I initially thought the entire quilt would be green…green ladies (remember the “green naked ladies” from my Tree Spirits 2 quilt?), green hair, green water, green sky. But after having made Windows of Hope for my Journal quilt this year, I felt the need to add color! I also decided not to crop out the sides of my design wall…I’m always curious bout other people’s studios, so thought this would be “honesty in blogging”…teeheee… lots of stuff gets stuck up there!

A while ago, artist and art quilter Thelma Smith surprised me with a box of manna from heaven, aka hand-dyed fabrics! I was so thrilled! This glorious piece had a perfect spot for the banks of the river (that’s the part that is missing), but before I cut it further, I wanted to take a photo. Isn’t this a glorious piece of cloth? Thanks Thelma!!!!!

I got the background together, fused to the batting; the stuff pinned to the lower right and left are sheers that will go on top of the water, which is made from the fabrics I worked on during the dye workshop with Carol Soderlund (check my blog entries for October 2007):

I’ll post about the naiad figures in my next entry on this piece….

In the grand tradition of saving the best for last, here are pictures from our final day when we got to share our work. Some of these pieces (not mine alas) easily qualify as art cloth; others, like mine, will wend their way into art quilts.

On days three and four, we did an exercise with four (or more) pieces of cloth. In all four cases, we used the same dye mixture–in my case a plum-magenta-ish color. Your color needed to be one that used at least a tiny bit of each of three primaries in a color family (i.e. you had yellow, red and blue in the dye-mix). The first piece of cloth in this sequence was dyed with the complete mix of the color. First you needed to manipulate your fabric (I pleated mine simply by making tucks along the bias), then coil it up in a plastic container, then apply the dye.

For the second piece in the series, you selected a highlight color. You then applied the highlight to the cloth first, let it set a spell and then add dye activator, then add the final color(s). The next two manipulations were similar, with the fourth one using the color’s complement as the “highlight.” The photo above is of my four pieces. I also dyed two scraps of silk and a scrap of cotton using the poured off, activated dye from the various sequences. As expected, the color was pale to non-existent compared to the main samples. Here’s a closer view–the silks may be two of the ugliest pieces of cloth I’ve made in a long time, but there is always over-dye and paint!

Now that I know what Carol was after, I know I would choose my starting color differently, and it would be a LOT more like what Wil Opio Oguta and my table-make Lasha (from Denmark) did. Here is Wil’s sequence…heavenly!

And Wil holding up one of the pieces…luminescent!

Lasha dyed a large piece of lightweight china silk in addition to her cotton pieces; it is remarkable that the piece went home with her… I was sure it wanted to come home with me!

And here is Lasha’s sequence:

And finally, a close-up (can you tell I love the fracturing that happened?!):

One couple attended, both of whom weave and dye yarn. The same principles used to dye cotton cloth apply to any cellulose fiber, like yarn! Lew used a different colorway and manipulation that gives a very different effect:

Finally, here is one of Nancy’s pieces. She rolled the cloth from the corner, then twisted, then coiled and ended up with a wonderful wavy rolling texture. The more white area is from what was in the center of the roll. I can see doing this, perhaps on the lengthwise grain, to create a sea texture that shades from light to dark. You could do one round of dyeing to get the waves and coils and shading, then overdye the entire piece with a lighter value of the same (or a related) color to create a real “Seascape” for use in an art quilt. All it takes it time!

And, alas, I’m not sure whose pieces these are, but I wish they had jumped in my suitcase too!!!!  (Update…these are Beth  Polvino’s…  gorgeous!)

So you wanna go take a class with Carol? It is expensive…class fee, materials, kit fees, transportation, lodging, food, purchases of dyestuffs and auxiliaries you just can’t go home without, but my oh my is it worth it. I’m now trained for years…all I have to do is make time to put it into practice and begin to master the processes!

Here is some flotsam and jetsam from the workshop. First, a photo of the loading dock which oh-so-conveniently backs onto the classroom area and has some clothesline trying areas:

One of the most valuable exercises for me during the entire five days was doing gradation tests on the same 5 percent dye concentrate when used in full immersion dye bath (well, as close as you can get with a 3×8 inch sample in a 16 ounce plastic cup), low-water immersion (ditto), and print paste mix. Here’s a photo of some of Carol’s samples:

And this photo is of the gradation sets Nancy and I did–the pale gray to nearly black runs on the left:

The bottom line is that print paste tends to come out about one step lighter than comparable pieces dyed in full and low-water immersion processes. What this means is that if one wants to dye-paint (like I want to do, and like Hollis Chatelain does with incredible skill and artistry), you can actually get predictable and repeatable results. Since fabric appears darker when wet, and since all dark dyes look black when wet, it is as if you were (literally) painting in a cave with no lights. By understanding and being able to predict your when-dry color, you can actually paint with the dye and get good results. Now, to finish writing my book so I can go TRY this for real!

On the first day of the workshop, Carol invited us to pick a color which would be our “base” color to play with. Since I knew I needed to make some fabric for an art quilt destined to an invitational exhibit, I knew I wanted blues and greens, so I selected a somewhat teal blue. Here are some of our pieces batching on a work table. Please don’t ask me WHY I had never thought of something as simple as this: just lay your pieces flat, layer with a plastic drop sheet, add more pieces on top, another piece of plastic, etc.

This piece is one where I tried a variety of techniques on a half-yard length:

Then we started playing with resists: Elmer’s washable blue-gel school glue, cold wax resist, and Presist.

The gel-glue has the virtue of being inexpensive and available just about everywhere. Since I wanted fabric for a pond and stream, I figured I’d make watery-shaped marks and blobs. The drawback to the gel-glue is that it takes a LONG time to dry: even though it was moderately warm (low 70s, which for Massachusetts in October is warm) and not oppresively humid, it took well over a day to dry fully. First I painted over the glue gel with a thickened print paste mix plus dye plus dye activator, and batched it. Then, I wanted to add more color and texture, so I scrunched the whole thing up in a plastic container and dumped on more dye. This partially dissolved the gel-glue which then migrated and formed the “rice” pattern on the cloth…cool!

Presist is a VERY thick gooey stuff that looks like molasses, except thicker. You pour (slowly) some of the gunk onto a plate or other flat, plasticky surface. You either dip your stamp into the Presist or use a small make-up sponge to daub the presist onto your chunky stamp. I did that in the wave area of the 1/2 yard length shown above. This photo (for some reason the color in the photo is hideous–color accuracy on the photo above is better) shows what it looked like after a couple of overdyes and some drips and drops from the cold wax (next item):

I love love LOVE the cold wax! The stuff is a milky white, in both color and consistency, and not inexpensive! You don’t have a lot of control with it but you can get these sweeping brush strokes for subtle overdyes. Here is a close-up of the upper section of the half-yard piece which shows some of the brushmarks and “water drops”. The color doesn’t photograph well (at least not with the time I spent setting up the shot!), plus it is very subtle to begin with. I would love to play with this medium more and see what I can do… I can see some awesome feathery-grass-like pieces in it. As with all wax (hot or cold!) you have to remove it; in this case, you can do the usual iron between newsprint or keep a plastic bucket (an old kitty litter bucket is perfect) for rinsing the wax out. The wax sticks to the side of the bucket instead of going down and coating your pvc water pipes in your house. That is a good thing!

Here is the print batching table once again, with three of my in progress pieces. As usual for wet cotton, the colors are deeper when wet.

The piece in the middle in the photo above is shown in detail below: although it is pretty unremarkable as a piece of manipulated cloth, it will be very useful: think forest pond!

I made a second “monoprint” from the same leftover blobbies plus some more greenish print paste mixto make this more textured piece; think algae on forest pond!

The piece on the bottom is one of my favorites. The blobbies are from using thickened print paste mix plus dye on vinyl, letting it separate into globs, taking a monoprint, then batching. After the piece was batched (to permit the chemical reaction between dye and cloth to happen), I allowed the piece to dry, then painted it with a thin wash of activated dye liquid, and here is the result:

Next assignment: make some art quilts out of the art cloth!