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.

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.

What I’m Getting Done

Some days it’s not so much, except for a visit to Curves and errands. I finally got my life arranged where I could start doing some printing this week.  I need to print several yards of cloth…how much I’m not so sure.  I guess I’ll know when I get there.  Thursday I got dye paint mixed and then yesterday I got 4 yards printed.  I have 3 weeks before I vend at my next quilt show, so I need to make good use of the time I have between now and then.  After printing the cloth, then there is sewing it up into items for the home.

I call this a VERY improvisational screen printing technique…basically, I just paint circles and drips on the screen and immediately print it.

I made table napkins from the other colorway I previously printed.

There will be matching tablerunners also.

Someone on my blogroll has now turned me on to what a “potato chip” scarf is.  Today has seen me online hunting up a pattern and yarns.  And ordering.  Since I don’t really knit yet, I will crochet it with a big hook.  My nieces may get these cool scarves for Christmas….we’ll see how I get along.  I also got my new printed fabrics ironed.

From the Lion Brand yarn website, the double boa ruffled scarf…

My plan is to do three colorways for Select Collections.  I will print black and white as well as more of the amethyst, curry, and turkey red colors.  That’s all I’m gonna do. Ideas need to percolate too.  It takes about an hour to print two yards of fabric in this manner.  I can’t do it all in one piece as my set up won’t handle it at the moment, so I do one yard at a time.

I now have sets of inks for sale…I have the Mini Stations for painted faces and the Basic colors Mini Station.  Contact me if you’re interested.  These are very nice inks to work with if you like to do detail work. They look wonderful on the cloth I dye on which is a 76 x 74 thread count.  I won’t use Setacolors on this cloth…it just looks better on Pimatex cotton, but these inks paint well on this pfd cotton, which I like about them.  Each mini-station comes with a helpful dvd, and there are tutorials on the internet to help you learn to use them too.

Preparing a Screen

A silk screen prepared and drying.  I painted dye paint over the back of the screen, then embedded objects in it to create patterns.

Screen is now dried and ready for printing.

Progress!

Working out in the patio yesterday, I dyed 10 of these…Sweet little onesies for sweet little babies.

Between Monday and Tuesday, I finished 8 new silk scarves and have 3 more waiting to finish.  I need some time to decide how to finish them.  I want to do more wax designs.  There is only one in this group using my new “BIG sponge” stamp. I love the BIG sponge.

Working, Working, Working

Last week I took advantage of the wonderfully mild weather to get out in the patio and work on silk scarves.  I screened on most of them.  I used deconstructed screen designs, glue designs, and paper resist designs.  Some of my breakdown screens didn’t print very long.  The new silk screens that Julia and I made worked well, but I see mine are starting to stretch a little.  Perhaps that is because I didn’t review Kerr Grabowski’s instructions before we  made them!  This throw together scarf design turned out to be my favorite.  Since I ran out of good breakdown prints, I used other screens and partial designs on it.  Another idea has emerged for me to use for future screening.  I love the contrast of a large bold design over smaller prints.

The other side of this scarf is a bit different, just because with printing by hand you can get lots of variety. This scarf was printed using all three of the types of printing I mentioned earlier. I’m having a great love affair with chartreuse and turquoise this summer, as well as all the blends in between the two that happen when one does not wash the screens between printing.  This scarf is printed on silk charmeuse.

Work Day…Seriously!

Yesterday an artist friend drove over to spend the day with me out in my “wet studio”, commonly known as the patio. I have a delicious screened-in place out back 19 feet long by 13 feet wide or so. She was wanting to learn some silk screening techniques so we went at it. We did soy wax designs and blue gel glue designs on the screens. We did paper resist screening and we did deconstructed screening. The “flavors” (dye colors) of the day were: terra cotta, chartreuse, eggplant, and turquoise.

The sun was so hot yesterday that we could literally “bake” the deconstructed designs on the screen in fairly short time. Then, if the dye pooled at all, it took many pulls to get it all out of the screen.  In this photo Julia is contemplating the screen design before printing.

This one made some awesome prints. This is just one of the many.

For patterns, this screen used a latex glove, wide rubber bands (our new love!), and large bubble wrap.  She got a lot of prints off of it and then I also printed to try and get the dried up paint designs off of it.

Here are some of my completed pieces.  These are all fat quarter size.

This one is just about my favorite.  Colors: turquoise and terra cotta, dirty print paste mixed with golden yellow.  Technique:  I used a glue screen.  I’ve been using this one for awhile and the glue is amazingly resilient.  It is breaking down in areas and could be touched up with more glue, but I used it as is.  Curiously, I planned on using a plain screen with no design, but didn’t have any available!  So I was stuck using this one!  I am SO glad I did.  I cut out some freezer paper curlie-q’s to mask out areas.  First printing with the turquoise, let dry a little bit, then I came back with the terra cotta, laid the screen down differently to get this layered, collage look.  I love the layered look, and the screen with glue curlie-q’s  is a perfect background pattern for my larger freezer paper curlie-q’s (I actually didn’t plan that).  At the end of the day, Julia was using a syringe to add some detail designs onto her cloth…I monoprinted the yellow bits that you see off of her golden yellow circles.

This piece: same technique…colors: terra cotta first, then chartreuse.

This one started life as “the dropcloth”.  Using turquoise and chartreuse I screened some of the pattern onto it, then came back later with eggplant and a syringe and outlined some of the curlie-q’s.  Later, as above, I did some monoprinting off of Julia’s circles with the golden yellow.  It needed that color.

This was a white piece of cloth stamped with melted soy wax.  Then it was cracked and I brushed chartreuse and terra cotta dye paint on it…this is the BEFORE picture….and following is the after picture…

The white areas are really white…I expect I will go in with either dye or paint and tone them babies down!

These are a few more pulls off of Julia’s lovely screen.

This one is at the end of the day…it got everything thrown at it.  Julia made a gel glue screen which is the repeated design you see.  I printed it over some stripes and then in the bottom row, we made an interesting find….I laid small bubble wrap under the cloth, then laid the glue screen on top and made a pull.  On the far right is that image…the cloth shows some of the bubble wrap pattern.  The middle image is the most fascinating one.  As I made the first pull with the bubble wrap beneath the cloth, the bubble wrap pattern shows up on the screen.  I removed the bubble wrap, made a print and the middle one is the result.  You only really get one good print using this temporary technique, but there was still a bit of the patterning left in the next pull (the far left print). That was an interesting discovery…I am not sure if I have seen others do that or not.  The random chartreuse pattern that you see is from rolling dye paint onto the pebbly texture of a liner for a paint pan.  The roller picks up that texture and you can print it right off the roller.

It was totally exhausting standing out  on the concrete all day, but we had  a really fun time exploring printing. I kind of want to keep going today…everything is still out there in the patio!

Finished Cloth

Printed and dye painted, washed and ironed cloth from prior post. Screenprinted with white printing ink, then rolled Palomino gold dye paint over the whole thing.