Category: printmaking

New Stencils….

…from The Crafter’s Workshop….

well, they’re not all new…top row: Mums, Aborigine, Summer; bottom row: Wonky Circles (Julie Fei-Fan Balzer), Birds, Antiquities. Now I just need to get them loaded into my Etsy shop. I LOVE the Crafter’s Workshop stencils.

What To Do With Leftover Paint…

…make more fabric!

Almost everyone from the class sent home their leftover paint with me instead of taking it home with them…so because I hate anything to go to waste, I printed one morning.  It’s a good exercise because I get new ideas while I’m printing (oh boy, do I love that grid stuff that I think is for making rugs non-skid).  There is still some paint left…stay tuned…I’m going to make screens for breakdown printing next…

Spontaneous Screen Printing Class

Beth gets ready to print with a glue screen.
Beth’s freezer paper prints.
Laurie’s unique pumpkin prints
Mark tries adding color to his freezer paper prints.
I love how this one turned out.
Jan works on a piece of commercial cloth, adding more designs to it.
One of Jan’s paper designs.
This is another of Mark’s designs. It took him a while to paint this design on the screen, consequently some of the dye dried and when he printed it, it had a breakdown printing appearance to it.  Of course, I love that.
Susan paints some of the open areas of her prints.
Some of Suzy’s work.
A pretty cool freezer paper screen made by another Beth in the class. I really like this screen design.

 

The Very Busy Month Of June

As you can see I haven’t blogged for some time.  June was a really busy time for me.  I was creating two brand new classes…and then trying them out on my “guinea pigs”!  Postcard Panache was the first class. I had the actual idea for this class last summer, but like anything else, if there is no demand for something, my ideas may remain just that…ideas.  But in March this year, two ladies from Louisville put a demand on me for this class, so I worked hard to get samples made and get it prepared so they could have a full day of learning.  These two ladies came to my house for the day and seemed to thoroughly enjoy it.  Now I just have to get it up on my Lectures/Workshops page.  There is always something to do!

Postcard Panache is a class geared to teaching people how to use all of the new artsy products that are  on the market.  I sell all these products at quilt shows, but demos are important because people don’t quite know what to do with Angelina fibers  and other items.  So, in postcard format, I showed these ladies a number of ways they could use bottled inks, Smooch Spritz, Angelina fibers and film, BoNash bonding powder, foiling glue, foil, stencils, etc.  They had quite a play day and were very complimentary, which makes me feel happy that they were so pleased.

The second class I created is a screen printing class.  I finally settled on a name for it no one else has used, at least not that I know of…Spontaneous Screen Printing.  Several gals from the St. Louis area and other friends of mine signed up and declared that they  had a great time and learned a great deal, so I feel I have done my job.  It is a lot of work creating and planning a brand new class, then packing everything for it.  At the same time I was planning a demo on Friday for the artisans center where the class would be taught the following day.  Due to the extreme messiness of using dye paints to demo I opted to do something totally different!  Which made me even more work…what was I thinking?  Again, it was a project that had been in the back of my mind for some time, so in a way, by demo-ing gelatin printing using paints, I got some “work” done for future artwork…AND I got a commission out of it too, which was very unexpected, but welcome.

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.

New Series in Paper

Last week I was working on getting some things ready to sell.  I often do events in New Harmony, IN  and have a lot of photographs from that historic tourist town.  I decided to start a series of collages from photographs that might be appealing to visitors to the area.

Stories of New Harmony:  Brick, log cabins mixed with modernity.

Stories of New Harmony #1
Stories of New Harmony #2
Stories of New Harmony #3
Stories of New Harmony #4
Stories of New Harmony #5
Stories of New Harmony #6
Stories of New Harmony #7

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. ;=)

Various And Sundry Things

By my calculations, it’s almost 10 years since I started dyeing my own cloth. Ten years…sounds like such a long time!  Actually it’s the same amount of time we have been living here in southern Illinois.  It was 10 years ago this month or in April (can’t remember which), that I took a dyeing class…and it’s been uphill ever since.  Wow. 10 years.  I feel like such a pro!

What else have I been doing?  In between shows and teaching I do get to play around once in a while.  A couple of weeks ago I tried my hand at embossing black silk velvet. I used a rubber stamp with hand writing on it…cool, huh!

Naw…you’re not supposed to be able to read it!

At the Bloomington quilt show, my demo helper was a bit shy about trying to paint a face with Tsukineko inks, so I took the plunge.  It’s actually easier than I thought it would be.  I used a tracing of a face, so how hard is that?  Start with the lightest colors and work your way up.  She is actually not finished as I will do  more highlighting and shading on her and I haven’t painted the eyebrows yet, but I think she is a pretty cool redhead.  This was painted using aloe vera gel mixed with the inks, a trick from the ever cool Judy Coates Perez.

She has red sparkles in her hair too….I’m going to share how that was done in a minute.

Here is the fish I painted using Tsukineko inks.  At the Bloomington show, someone reminded me of something I had wanted to make a sample of…I simply added it to my fish sample…

Bo-Nash bonding agent is a fusible that comes in a can and you sprinkle it like salt.  It even looks like salt!  So I sprinkled it in some places on the water and in the redhead’s hair, then laid some foil over it, heated it with an iron…and voila!  Sparkling sprinkles!  This is very fun.  And I sell the Bo-Nash fusible and the foil, so call me or email if you want some. I think I will start putting sparkles on lots of stuff now…this is just way too easy.