As I mentioned earlier, we began our five-day workshop with Carol Soderlund working with thickened dyes and resists. As with textile paints, you can apply color to cloth with stamps, paintbrushes, rubbings (put stuff underneath and rub over it to get a relief, like a gravestone or temple rubbing), paint rollers (sometimes textured by wrapping with rubber bands or scored with a knife), mono-printing and more. Carol invited us to bring previously dyed cloth to over dye and print, so I selected a couple of fabrics known to dyers as “dogs.” Bleah. My first dog was a pale peach that was nearly solid and totally boring. I had yards of it. Ick. I tore the cloth into several pieces and started playing.

This first photo shows three of my pieces in progress. On the left is a cloth with Elmer’s blue washable school glue used as a resist (more on the blues and greens in a following blogpost). The bleah peach is in the center, with the first monoprint on it, and a fairly yucky monoprint on the right on white PFD (Prepared For Dyeing) fabric. PFD is cloth that does not have optical brighteners or other chemical treatments on it, so that it is ready to accept dye without “scrubbing” or washing.

The monoprinting was the one technique I hadn’t tried with paints, and I especially liked the visual texture created when you take a print paste mix, a gelatinous mix to which you add dye concentrate or dye powders and a dye activator (the latter added at the last possible moment), smear it on heavy vinyl (think the stuff old biddies used to use to cover and protect the sofa), wait for the goo to separate into blobs, then place a cloth on top. Carefully pat the fabric onto the gel, then lift the cloth off and “batch” it. Batching is when you allow the damp fiber-reactive dye react and form a chemical bond with the cotton cloth, usually for a period of 4-24 hours.

This photo shows four diferent pieces of cloth, all of which began as the same ugly peach (visible at the bottom of the piece on the left):

The one on the far left is my favorite… I love the way the blue print paste mix made a network of fine bubbles. Since I didn’t care about what happened to these fabrics, I think I did about three separate monoprints on this one chunk of fabric. Here’s a close-up:

The darkest piece in the 4-piece photo (the picture above the photo immediately preceeding this sentence) was first rollered with a paint roller wrapped with rubber bands, then dipped in thickened dye. Next I did what Carol calls “black work”, where thickened black dye is put into a squeeze bottle with a fine tip. Since I was tired that day, I opted for the ever-easy and always-usable “tree bark”. Finally, I overdyed the whole thing to make it deep brown. Here is a picture of Carol showing a cheery and bright piece on which she did some black work:

And as always, the “dye rag” often ends up being the best piece of cloth. I made a warms and a cools rag, and this ochre-leaf color will get used!

I’m totally NOT into surface design, but I did have fun, and the next post will show some of the better pieces I made. They are blues and greens for a challenge piece that (eek, gasp, gulp) needs to be DONE by December 1! Fortunately, I have the idea done, the first sketch begun, and the fabric assembled, dyed, etc, so I can do it. So Larkin, if you are reading this, don’t panic. It WILL be ready!

Stay tuned for more pictures from this workshop, but in the next couple of days I have a few other things to share first……

Looking at this old mill building, you’d not realize that a glory of color happens inside! This is the home to dye-provisioner Pro Chemical and Dye….known to quilters and dyers as “ProChem.”

Earlier this month I was fortunate to take a second workshop with Carol Soderlund, Color Mixing for Dyers II. This workshop builds on what we learned in part 1, which I took last year. It was fun as several women returned from last year, so it was great to see familiar faces, meet new folks, AND meet Wil Opio Oguta, from the Netherlands, whom I had “met” online through the Fabled Fibers challenge. If you click on Wil’s name, you’ll go to her blog and can see some of her pieces form the workshop, too.

Here’s our “class picture,” with many of us holding something we had made during the five days.  We had folks not only from across the US, but also from Denmark, the Netherlands and France! Carol is in the plum tie-dye shirt in the center, I’m just to the right of her.

I make MANY different pieces, but will share this one with you today; it is a mix of several yellows (ranging from a cool lemon color to a warm, nearly tangerine, plus two reds, a cool fuchsia and a warmer basic mixing red).

Over the next week or so I’ll add several posts with different things I worked on during the workshop. The first two days were focussed on using thickened dyes (print paste mix), doing many techniques that were familiar to me, having used them with paints of various sorts. It was interesting, however, to do them with dye instead (I MUCH prefer the soft hand of fabric after it is dyed compared to even the most supple of paints).

We dyed a fourth “color family” using three new primaries over the course of the whole workshop, then the last three days we worked on layering and overdyeing for specific effects and our own personal projects. As with paint, some blues are warm (think turquoise), some are cool (think glacier blue), some yellows are cool (lemonade), some are warm (sunshine and buttercups). By using primaries with different properties, you can get dramatically different shades of color: a warm yellow, warm red, and shaded/toned blue produce a completely different palette thank a cool yellow, cool red and warm blue. I’ll share a few photos later on of my color swatchbook just to tempt you, but first I have to cut and paste up my swatches from this session!

As usual, it was another wonderful day! Despite the look of autumn all around us, like the photo above which is just a mile or so down the road from Hannah’s house (on the peninsula south of Brunswick / Harpswell), it was a mild and balmy day fit for t-shirts…a last gasp of warm summer air. We had fun sharing, food (of course!), gifts and projects before flying to the winds as kid-duties called us home in the afternoon.

Hannah’s b-day is late September and mine (something like 15-17 years earlier!) in early October both happened since we last met, so we had a double celebration. Deborah sent goodies from Texas, and we exchanged gifts and grins and thank you’s. It is so wonderful to have creative friends!!!! Here is Hannah enjoying some hand-dyed fabric from my recent workshop (I promise, those posts are coming!)… but I had to tell her to keep unrolling to find the socks in the center–she told me she had been lusting after my bright socks and was having a hard time keeping quiet, so it was perfect!

And here is my loot… from Deborah’s lovely sprigs and twigs (and LOVE the way it is mounted! off to find a frame!), to Kate’s damask table cloth (ready to dye, of course, from a small treasure trove of old linens she lucked into recently) and batik, to the Japanese desk Calendar (I LOVE and am so inpsired by Japanese woodblocks) from Kath to Hannah’s happy, crazy, jump-roping girl made from found beach glass (near her home) and beads she bought in China when adopting Nina. The crazy lime hair is perfect for my state of life these days!

I shared my hand-dyes, and Kathy treated us to an in progress visual FEAST. She is making a bed quilt as a commission for some friends, interpreting their vacation photos from over the years. I SO WANT THIS. Aw heck, I want to be Kathy! I want her creativity and vision and color sense and style. But since I can’t have them, I will be more than content to sit and look and learn and enjoy and be thankful she is my friend. She is constructing the quilt in panels and quilting them, then will join them together. Here is one panel:

And another:

And LOOK at this quilting on the back….she’s as nutso as I am about quilting!

SIGH. I also REALLY like the way Kathy combined low-contrast deep-dark batiks in squares for setting the “photos.” Will keep that in mind for the future…. plus it’s a great excuse to buy more batiks… grin!

For lunch, we had calzones made by Bart the wonderful (aka Hannah’s hubby), one tomato-y and sausage and veggies, the other spinach and riccotta (which I’m going to try to duplicate tonight), followed by a true Maine treat: Whoopie Pie. However, this may be the largest whoopie pie on the planet, found and brought by Kathy:

The “cookie” is a dense chocolate cake, the filling is more like frosting, and it is super rich. Oprah loves these, and her endorsement sent the maker from a mom making whoopie pies at home and then commercially for her friends from local to stratosphere / nationwide. Another Maine mom makes good! So we indulged. Here are the birthday girls with Kathy (Hannah on the left, Kathy plus Whoopie Pie, and me in a shirt I dyed at the workshop).

After our visit to the Botanical Gardens last month, we stopped at On Board Fabrics in Edgecomb and all purchased canvas to make floor cloths or something similar. In a nutshell, you buy heavy canvas, paint it, goop on (Mod-Podge, fusible, glue, whatever) fabric, then polyurethane the daylights out of it. Finally, hem the edges, put non-skid stuff on the back, and have a colorful floor. Well, I figured in my house that’s one more thing to collect or trap cat or dog hair, so mine will be washable placemats (a surprise for the family for Christmas, unless Joshua reads my blog while internet surfing at school when he is supposed to be studying….ahem, sport!). Kate was better prepared than the rest of us and got the most done. Here is a blank green-painted canvas to make a runner, plus that glorious mango color runner on top of it, with some Kaffe Fassett prints on top. Isn’t that enough to just make you smile when you look down at your floor?

Finally, on the way home, I actually got stopped for a train (!!!!) at the edge of the Wiscasset bridge and had the chance to snap this picture of the ready-for winter tree and the still-summery screaming blue sky:

Today I have, alas, no pictures to share, but boy do I have two AWESOME links to share that are art quilt and textile related!  The first is about antique indigo…the actual indigo!  The second is about katazome artist Karen Miller.

First, Isabella Whitworth makes incredible silk pieces in the UK which you can see on her website, here. On a recent post to the Dyers’ List (a listserv for folks interested in dyeing fibers, both cellulose like cotton and protein like wool–to sign up visit this site). She mentioned that she had recently been to an indigo symposium in the UK and was able to see some pieces of contemporary cloth and yarn dyed with indigo that is over 360 years old!!!!!! The indigo was retrieved by divers from a shipwreck that dates to 1641; one expert was given some, and dyed the pieces. Totally flippin’ amazing! Click HERE to go to that particular part of Isabella’s website.  And after you’ve done that, be sure to check out Isabella’s gallery pages….sigh….lust for cloth…..inspiration!

The second treat is thanks to Gerrie Congdon, who is an artquilter, dyer of cloth, awesome gramma, and many other things besides, and relates to Karen Miller. Karen Miller is a West Coast artist who specializes in katazome, a dyeing-out-but-not-if-she-can-help-it art from Japan which in one cuts stencils (meticulously, using many, MANY hours) by hand, applies rice paste, then dyes / prints fabric. Karen was recently profiled on an Oregon PBS program which you can find (thanks for the link Gerrie!) at Oregon Art Beat.

For my Friday Harbor and West Coast readers, you may be intrigued to know that not only is Karen a marine biologist / scientist by training, but her parents (or was it her grandparents? I met her at the Assn of Pacific Northwest Quilters show years ago and the details are a bit fuzzy now) helped establish and get-going the U. of Washington Marine Labs at the edge of the harbor that lends its name to the town of Friday Harbor in San Juan Island, Washington. Way cool! I think she sometimes teaches at Coupeville Arts Center on Whidbey… if I were still on the island, I’d be there for a workshop!

If you love learning about fiber, old fiber arts, and contemporary artists, treat yourself to some websurfing and visit all of these links. I’m going back, and I could watch Karen’s segment on Oregon Art Beat many times (as soon as it was over the first time–all 6+ minutes– I immediately hit play again!).

October 9-13 I took Carol Soderlund‘s Color Mixing for Dyers II at ProChem in Fall River, Massachusetts. Long time readers may remember that I took Week 1 last year and blogged about it here (1), here (2) and here (3). The large square in the last blogpost actually ended up being the focal fabric on Side 2 of Koi! (Here for that link.). Well, here is a tease from our second day: color wonderfulness, a.k.a. fabric in the washer:

And here is a full shot of the washer:

I am getting ready to lecture and teach in Manchester, NH, on Friday and Saturday, so will leave the “full” blogging about this wonderful week until next week, but will have more goodies and eye candy for you in a couple of days. Until then, hope you enjoy the color.

Keep on sewing!