Wax and Collage

No name for these yet….Paper collaged on cradled wood, then coated with beeswax/damar resin mix, then I “drew” in the wax and colored with paintstiks.  Then I used a tracing paper to make marks.  Love this whole process.

Catching Up

Here are photos of my booth in Bloomington, IN along with my friend Cynthia who was my helper for  2 days.  I think she enjoyed getting out with people for awhile.

We demo-ed painting with Tsukineko inks in the bottle.  They are wonderful to paint with!  They don’t change the hand of the fabric like acrylic fabric paints do.  If you mix them with aloe vera gel to paint with like we do, you have the ability to spread them and blend them.

First Strathmore Workshop

Strathmore is hosting more workshops this year.  The first one is being taught by Traci Bautista.  Here is my first week’s work…er…play.

There are layers of stuff on here…Smooch Spritz inks sprayed over resists and plastic canvas, acrylic paints, acrylic inks, markers of all kinds, white-out pen, and oil pastels last.  The neat thing about these workshops for me is they help me get acquainted with different products that I have not used before.

At The Gallery Part 2

Here’s a couple more pieces of my exhibit that have not been seen on my blog before.

Sticks and Stones #3

Rust dyed cotton sateen, silk screening, stenciling, applique, hand writing, paint, ink, dyes, stitching with polyester thread.

Sticks and Stones #4

Rust dyed feed sack, discharge dyed cotton sateen, silk screened, stenciled and stamped, paint, dyes and automatic dish washing liquid and other discharging products, hand writing, inks, stitching with polyester thread.

Sketching And Gouache

I recently participated (somewhat) in an online journalling class with Roz Stendahl.  It was sponsored by Strathmore.  See Roz’ blog here.  She encouraged me to sketch in this workshop, even though I’m not a big sketcher of real items.  I’m more of a…doodler.  I do appreciate seeing someone else’s work of sketching and the fact that Roz painted her sketches was interesting.  But for me to do it…not so much.

I was out mowing the yard on Monday when I saw dried seed pods on our Golden Raintree trees.  I knew I had to grab that twig with pods and sketch it.  There was something so simple about it…and it was old, from last years pods, and dried out.

I did sketch it, then yesterday I decided to paint the page with gouache, which is a watercolor paint that Roz highly recommends.  I purchased some specifically to try it out.  I sort of like the process.  I don’t know that this will make me become an avid sketcher, but I’m warming to it.  Roz would be so proud.  (And I have enough gouache to last me to my nineties.  I only ordered 3 tubes, but the amount of paint this took is so minimal.)

Pods

I’m even thinking of adding some photo transfer to this page.  The Golden Raintree trees are now in bloom, preparing to launch their thousands of new seed pods.  I took photos yesterday.

Tuesday

Well, I guess Mondays are lining up to be my “domestic” day.  After making Mounds balls,  I also made biscuits for supper later in the afternoon yesterday.  Did some laundry and cleaning up a bit too.  My husband hates to see things laying around and me…well, if I can’t see it, I forget about it and there are some things I want to remember I have to work on or at least think about so I can make a decision! (I recently found my Indiana sales tax form somewhere it should not have been…out of sight, out of mind.  Luckily, I still could meet the deadline.) My “studio”, aka, the shrinking 9′x 9′ extra bedroom, does not give me the space to leave things out where I can see them and think about them.  I pretty much use the whole house!

The thread came yesterday, so today I will again start stitching on a piece I am working on for my show.  I should be doing that now, but well, here I am.  I wanted to post some of the deconstructed results from last week, and I now have the photos loaded onto the computer.

I used different sized screens and some of these are overprinted…and may still need some more overprinting.  And they have not been washed yet, but you get the idea.  I really really love the breakdown look of this kind of printing.

The reason this whole piece of cloth is not printed is because I am pondering using these  as 4 separate prints for wall pieces.  We’ll see.  They might need more printing on them.

What I’ve Been Up To

Last week, I ran out of thread on a piece of art I was stitching on.  Rather than take a whole day and drive an hour away to buy thread, I opted for an internet order instead.  Of course! the company only had one spool of a color I needed, I found out later, and of course, I need more than one, so yes, I will be making that 1 hour trek in a couple of weeks, but I made a lunch and outing date with a friend, so driving an hour for thread won’t be all that I am doing that day.  Oh, the down side of rural living…even if I do love it!

In the meantime, there is plenty for me to do while I wait for the thread….so I got started on making some prints on cloth.  These will be deconstructed prints.  First I had to create the screens.  I smeared a few colors of dye paint onto the back of blank silk screens, then pushed objects that will create designs and texture into the paint.  Then let dry for however long it takes.  Purchased screens or homemade screens using framing wood pieces that lock together…it’s all good.  I have learned something about making the homemade screens though.  Do not use polyester sheers…they STRETCH!  And you won’t like it.  Use nylon material to avoid this. I am going to have to re-do some of my screens.

While I had the dye and the bubble wrap out, I decided to play.  I do that a lot…try something new…see what happens.  I laid my dry soda soaked cotton over the bubble wrap (to see how to soda soak cotton, see my tutorial on the sidebar), then laid a blank screen over it and pulled prints.

This deposits quite a bit of paint on the cloth, hence the following “monoprint”.

Since these two pieces use the same colors, they can be used together in something, but there is variation in the cloth.

I still need to finish one piece of cloth before I put my stuff away…maybe today!

But right now, I am making Mounds balls. ;=)

My Great Find

Ever have a tool that you love to use and you really would like more of them, but you can NEVER find them in the stores and you’re too lazy to cruise a bunch of yard sales just hoping you will find some?  And you’ve been looking for a very long time?  I was telling my husband all about this dilemma just the other day as we stopped into a Rural King store and we were going by the kitchen gadget aisle.  I stopped to look at the gadgets and imagine my surprise to find exactly what I’ve been looking for. Holy cow!

These are mini-whips. I have a few of them, but have always wanted to have more on hand in my dyeing tool box.  What do I use them for, you ask?  I’m so glad you asked.  I use them to mix dye powder with print paste  to make the dye paints that I use on cotton and silk.  With mini-whips it makes it easier to mix any chunky dye particles with either water or the print paste.

I was so excited to find these…I could have done a jig.

Need Help Please

I went to the SAQA website today to post a plea on my Visioning page and while I’m there I am currently deleting 478 emails in my inbox.  Do you know how long that takes doing 20 at a time?  It’s taking a while.  So I decided while I’m doing that I will post a blog post here and ask for YOUR help too!

I have my first solo show in October this year.  I have a series of small (5″ x 7″-ish) works I will be mounting on deep 12″ x 12″ canvases.  I will be painting the canvases before I mount the fiber work.  I personally did not wish to paint the canvases a solid, flat color, but rather wanted to  do swipes of color that had movement, feeling that this was more in line with the fiber work.  But now my question is: what are others going to like?  I really want to sell at this show and am now wondering which method will make the work more sell-able.  Here is how the canvas looks at this point.  Sort of wispy, worn, like the side of an old barn.  But is this what people will want? Eeek!  I really need help with this.  And I know people can only give me their opinion and in the end, I still have to make the choice.  But I still want to hear from you.  And I will ponder any suggestions anyone has to make too.

And if you need a little distance….

Workshop #3, Week 2

I posted earlier some of the pages I painted with fluid acrylics as backgrounds for Roz Stendahl’s class I am taking online.  Here is the Week 2 reveal.  Since I’m not that much of a sketch-er, I decided to save time (at least at this point) and use cutouts from photography that I do.

Mum Garden