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Archive for the ‘Art Cloth’ Category

Let’s Celebrate 10 Years of Blogging!!

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2015

greensilk2

Believe it or not, I have hung in here for 10 years, blabbing away about my life and my art. To celebrate, I am giving one of my small mounted aspen pieces to one of you, if you leave me a comment.

First, I want to tell you about my great day. I finally started painting the silk fabric for my solo show. I am doing six different 6+ foot pieces. I was able to get a set-up in my little studio where I could paint fabric that long.

silkpaintingsetup

I putted a long padded surface over my stainless steel printing table and my cutting table. I also have a couple of smaller tables on which I have my paint and brushes. It is a tight squeeze, but very doable.

I first painted a small sample with the colors I wanted to use.

I cut a length of silk about 6 1/2 feet. It is folded in half and pinned around the edges with small t-pins.

stretchingsilk

I started painting with foam brushes and Jacquard Dyna-flow paint.

greensilk1

I sprinkled some salt on the blue area.

greensilksalted

I left it to dry and will go back tomorrow. My plan is to do 6 colorways: green, blue, yellow, orange, red, purple. I will cut each piece in half lengthwise. I will do some more surface design on these fabrics. One half will be cut up and turned into small pieces mounted on gallery frames. The remaining long piece will hang as art cloth as a center piece for each color. I have been dreaming and scheming about this for so long. It is exciting to get started.

OK, if you made it to the end of this, don’t forget to leave me a comment and I will use the random number generator and one of you will get this little piece.

Aspen8inch

 

Fabric Printing at Home

Thursday, November 6th, 2014

juliesbook

Julie Booth, one of the members of The Printed Fabric Bee has written a wonderful book about printing on fabric at home. She uses every thing but the kitchen sink – on second thought, I think she probably uses the kitchen sink!! As a surface designer, I always enjoy looking at books with fresh ideas. I really enjoyed going through Julie’s book. It is packed with good information and beautiful photos.

She starts the book with very excellent information about setting up a home printing area and gathering the needed supplies – brushes, paints, and other tools. Scattered through the book are highlighted areas with extra information, tips and photos such as this one on how to make a portable padded print board.

juliepprintpad

Julie provides a plethora of ideas for using found items and stuff you will find in your kitchen cabinets for resists and printing – such as flour, sugar, veggies, foil. You can also find ways to use things you might normally throw in the trash or recycle bin to print gorgeous fabric.

juliefabric3

I especially like this trio of fabrics printed with blocks embellished with rubber bands, twist ties and string or twine. Click on any photo to see it larger,

juliefabric1

This piece has a nice textured background that has been over printed using veggies.

juliefabric2

You can pre-order the book from Amazon HERE.  Photos are used with permission from Quarry Books.

Fabric Printing Day Two

Saturday, September 13th, 2014

printedfabric2

Whew, I am exhausted from my week of hosting Rayna and the two days of workshop. I totally crashed last night – I might as well have been in a coma. I took Rayna to the airport this morning and then we went to the farmer’s market. I spent the afternoon dozing and working on SDA membership stuff.

I came away from the workshop with a few pretty good pieces. The piece up at the top was transformed from this. It was first printed with newspaper resist on a screen. Then I added yellow orange circles and some black marks made with a mesh type of ribbon. Finally, I used a syringe to add the squiggly lines.

periwinkleblueandolivegreen

Here is a detail:

printedfabric2detail

This was another silk scarf that had some very pale marks when I used an anemic black dye for printing. I used the newspaper resist screen and olive green ink followed by purple lines using one of my favorite Stencil Girl stencils.

renewedscarf

This piece was started with newspaper resist and then I used the school glue screen with mix of orange and yellow. The screen was starting to break down and I love how it turned out.

 

fabricprint

Here is a detail:

redorangeturquoisedetail

This next piece started as a piece of muslin that I was using for test prints.

printedfabric3

I kept printing on it and then painted the whole thing with Dynaflow chartreuse paint.

The next piece was something I  had in my stash. You can see the bottom section. I am not sure what I did to get those circles and marks. I printed over it with the glue resist screen of circles using purple paint. Not excited about it, but who knows what use I might find for it.

purplegluescreen

Lastly, here is my printing surface after a lot of printing. I always love how the printing surface is so spontaneous looking.

printsurface

All in all, it was a great week. I am not looking forward to Monday. I am having 4 hours of dental work as they remove the disintegrating bridge from my upper right side. I will get a temporary put in and hope I don’t have to wait to long for the final fix.

Rayna is Here and 50th Wrap-UP

Thursday, September 11th, 2014

constfence

Rayna Gillman, long time internet friend, is here in Portland. She lectured at our guild meeting Wednesday and is teaching screen printing techniques today and tomorrow. She arrived on Monday night and so we had a fun day on Tuesday taking the street car downtown to shop and have lunch.

I was hoping that her workshop would get me back in the creative mood and it is working. That piece up there has a background done with torn masking tape and then construction fence resist over that. The yellow background is a hand dye. I am planning to do a black print on top of this, not sure what, yet.

This piece is the start of something. I used a newspaper resist to print these lines on a pale olive cotton.

newspaperresistprint

I took some unsuccessful silk scarves that I hope to rescue. Here is the first one.

blahsilkscarf

I used a turquoise printing ink and a squishy whisk. I think it has been transformed.

blahscarfrescue

I prepared a screen with a washable school glue resist for using tomorrow.

glueresist

There are 22 people in the worship and they are all doing some fantastic work. I will try to get some photos tomorrow.

On Sunday, we celebrated our 50th anniversary at Trinity. Our friend, Heidi Rose, made 300 macarons and created a tower for the coffee hour after church.

macarons

She put two of each flavor in a box for us to take home.

macaronbox

 

Today, Lisa sent me photos that were taken at our celebration in California. You have to love this one of little Miss Paige photo-bombing the family.

Paigecameahog

Lisa selected two photos of the whole family:

famdamily1

famdamily2

I really love this one of Mr C and I.

SteveandGerrie50yrs

So that is a little bit of what has been happening in my life. It has been especially fun to hang out with Rayna. Tonight we went out for sushi and ice cream.

Super Saturday

Saturday, September 29th, 2012

Late this morning Mr C and I headed down to Newburg and had lunch at our favorite Oregon fast food restaurant, Burgerville. Then, he dropped me off at the Chehalem Arts Center for Regina Benson’s exhibit and lecture. He headed off for the Erath Vineyards to pick up our wine club edition for the fall.

Regina’s work is really breathtaking in its size and the detail she puts in to each piece.

I love the pieces that are hung on molded aluminum bars.

Her lecture was a slide show of photos showing how she does the discharge  and rusting on such large pieces. It was really educational. She was very generous with her information and gave each of us two swatches of fabric that had been discharged and rusted.

Here she is explaining to us how whe creates these tubes wrapped with shibori discharged silk.

Two views of discharged pieces hanging from the ceiling.

Tonight, Mr C and I had dinner with some old and new friends who were all connected via the old GE days. It was lots of fun.

Terry had an extra copy of Quilting Arts and so I have gotten to see my Rituals quilt of Scooter and Mr C in the magazine. It looks really great!!

I even found some time in the studio this afternoon and got some quilting done on the maverick piece. And did today’s 3 x3.

There are 3 months left in the year and I have yellow-green, blue-purple and yellow orange left to do. I am thinking I will go to the cool side next.