I’m almost there….ripping up photocopies gets a bit tiring. I want to have the whole collage done this weekend, so I have time to do one more before I leave for Madison WI mid-July. At this point, I’m really hoping the transfer onto silk organza will be successful; shredding paper by hand takes a lot of time, and I only have once chance to get the transfer right.
This photo of a Parry’s Penstemon in my backyard earlier this year is one of several I’m using for my new project, the third in a series of silk-paper lamination art quilts.
I traced some of the flower-shapes onto transparency plastic and used my trusty overhead projector to enlarge the design, so I could trace onto paper:
You can’t really see the traced design that well as it’s in pencil, but this is what it looks like on the dining room table, the transparency plastic is on the lower right-hand side:
Now I’m filling in the design with ripped up bits of photocopies of the photos of the Parry’s Penstemon, I think it’s looking OK so far:
More later. Back to ripping up paper and gluing it down. Too hot to do anything outside so might as well!
Some of you may remember this: my mitre saw, and my plan last spring to build stretcher bars and frames for some of my small art quilts:
Well….I was almost able to do it. I need more time (and patience) to learn how to do some basic woodworking. Not exactly impossible….but not practical now. So the other day I dyed some black/gray fabric for the quilt binding, and officially finished this 19″ x 22 1/2″ piece, called A Poppy Dance. I should point out that silk coated in acrylic gel medium is highly reflective, so there’s a bit of shine here from the camera flash:
Likewise, this same-sized art quilt, Prickly Pear Pieces, was treated the same way with a tidy binding; if I hadn’t decided to do so, this too would sit around waiting for my remedial woodworking skills to miraculously improve beyond what I remember from High School Shop class. And I don’t remember much, except building an ashtray (that dates me!):
I brought both to my parent’s restaurant yesterday, where they’ll be put on the wall: I hope they sell!
When it’s really hot, hibernation mode sets in here in Tucson. Not only has it been hot–normal for June–but unusually windy–not normal. I’ve been inside finishing the prickly pear piece and watching endless baseball games courtesy MLB Extra Innings, the satellite TV package which costs about $200 and which allows you to watch out-of-market games. I think baseball is the perfect counterpoint to sewing, personally.
Last time I posted, I was machine quilting; when the quilting was done, this is what the edge of the prickly pear piece looked like: a top, batting and muslin backing sandwich:
This piece will not have a traditional binding; once the quilting was done, I carefully cut around the prickly pear shape and zig-zagged with a greenish thread around the cut edge to keep the top, batting and muslin backing together:
This is how it looked after that:
I again used a zig-zag stitch, this time using polyester invisible thread, to couch the silk cord over the prickly pear pad shapes that were on the edge of the piece, this would be my “binding”:
Here’s what the finished edge looks like:
And, while you can’t see much difference between this shot of the whole piece and the one above, this is how it looks finished:
Complete measurements of Prckly Pear Jam: Yum! are 26″ x 26″. I’m just putting on a hanging sleeve today; I hope to have this hanging in my parent’s restaurant this week, along with a couple other pieces.
Just started quilting the prickly pear piece, it’s looking pretty good!
Got started sewing right after work and after picking Bearbear up from the vet; he got his teeth cleaned today under anesthesia. He’s a bit disoriented; but he smells like other dogs and people. Annie, our 14-year-old pit-bull-coyote mix friend, stayed overnight with us; she’s quite fond of Bearbear.
I’m looking ahead to a long hot summer here in Tucson; save for a week in July in Wisconsin, I’m here for the next 3 months of tedious non-stop heat.
So, given that I’ll be spending a lot of time indoors (sewing, what else) I ordered MLB Extra Innings from Direct TV, which means I can watch an insane amount of baseball while I sew. I really have a hard time just sitting down and watching TV; I generally need to be doing a task with the TV on. Only the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, a handful of great TV shows (The Wire, Rescue Me, Battlestar Gallactica, Big Love, Dead Like Me) and a few brilliant movies are an exception to this no-couch-potato-rule in my home.
Yesterday I was able to watch a Red Sox/Oakland from Fenway and a Giant’s/Rockies game. This is what I got done, shut in against the heat with the TV on and my pedal to the….sewing machine:
Everything is couched with yarn or silk cord. For a nice example of good couching technique check out this nice fiber-arts blog here.
This is a close up; I’m leaving some of the white from the glue-resist technique, I think it’s a nice effect, there’s not too much of it:
I just started peeling the stabilizer off the back; you can see all the knots I’ve tied!
Tomorrow night I’ll start quilting it; then I’ll cut it around the prickly-pear shaped edges, zig-zag it down around the edges, and finally put yarn or cord down over the zig-zag stitch for a different and unconventional binding.
Haven’t been very inclined to write due to a plantar fasciitis flare-up; if you’ve never had to deal with this, count yourself lucky.
Have made headway on the the prickly pear piece, the one that started as a sample to try out school glue as a resist. Here are the 2 panels; the one on the bottom has been couched with silk yarn and silk cord, to outline the prickly pear pads. The one on top still shows the white resist lines:
Here you can see the couching better: it’s just a zig-zag stitch using polyester transparent thread (nylon thread is also transparent, but will yellow with age) over either hand-dyed thick silk cord or silk/cotton yarn:
As explained in the previous post, the pink fruit-shapes are not couched with yarn, they were outlined with silk yarn using a bobbin-drawing. Here’s the back of the fabric, where I tied lots of knots–once zig-zagged down, the ends of the yarn or cord are brought to the back of the piece courtesy a nice big needle, the size of a darning needle, just sharper:
I sewed both panels together; once I’m done couching all the shapes, I’ll put some batting and backing underneath, quilt it, then trim so that there’s only prickly pear, no sky or anything. Then I’ll zig-zag around the edges, add silk cord where needed, and put on a sleeve. This will have a very non-traditional binding!
Here’s a better view of the overlap between the 2 panels, you can see where I top-stitched them together.
Hope to get more done soon! I’ll have one foot in a bucket of ice and the other on my sewing machine pedal. Of course, if I get things confused I’ll risk electrocution….for the sake of art I suppose I’d be willing to make that sacrifice. It would at least be a good story! Told posthumously, but still good.
I dyed some more yarn and organized it in an old condiment storage bin from my parent’s restaurant; here’s the yarn with the recent glue-resist project of prickly pear cactus:
Here, I put tearaway stabilizer on the back of the prickly pear, and outlined the pink fruit shapes so I could see them; then I simply sewed over the line I’d drawn around the fruit…..
…knowing that my bobbin thread underneath was actually yarn. It’s a silk/cotton yarn, so it’s fingerling weight, but I doubt I could get anything heavier in the bobbin case. I have an extra bobbin case; I’ve adjusted the tension on it (very simple turn of the tiny screw with a tiny screw driver) and I use it for this technique called “bobbin drawing”.
So, while there’s just a simple thread outline of the fruit on the back of the piece, the bobbin thread–the yarn–is on the front.
I’ll bobbin-draw all the fruit, then couch yarn around the cactus shapes.
Experimented with the glue resist again. Each of the pieces above is approximately 18″x26″; the one in the middle had dye applied once, the one on top and the one on the bottom have been dyed twice. The one on the bottom is silk/rayon velvet, so the colors look richer; otherwise, the fabric is cotton.
I have some different ideas for these designs. One involves couching the prickly pear cactus shapes in dyed yarn. I’d like to layer these pieces so they flow into one another. We’ll see; conceptualizing is always easy, problem-solving a way to bring the idea into reality is another matter entirely!
School Glue (i.e. glue that kids can use because it washes out of everything) as a resist is something I’ve wanted to try for a while. Jane Dunnewold recommends it in several of her surface design books.
Just make sure you use school glue. I used Elmer’s School Glue.
I took a simple prickly pear cactus design I’ve used for other projects, reduced it and drew it onto a piece of transparency plastic, then used my overhead projector to draw the repeated design onto a piece of cotton sateen. I first gave the cotton a coat of Jacquard’s No-Flow, a starchy liquid you can put on fabric, which when dries allows you to apply thickened paint/dye with little or no bleeding.
I applied the glue with a dental syringe. I bought a case of syringes from a dental supply company; they have a curved tip, which makes it easier to apply paint/dye. Here’s the glue-as-resist before it dried:
Dried glue on cotton is visible once it’s dry; but I also did the same thing to a piece of rayon/silk velvet (I’ve never used this fabric before, wanted to give it a try), and the glue was practically invisible on that fabric once dried.
I then added some liquid dye concentrate I made from my Procion dye powders, then added a small amount of the liquid dye to print paste to which I added some soda ash….which automatically makes the dye ready to “fix” to whatever natural fiber to which the dye is applied.
There was little bleeding of dye, and this is how the cotton fabric looked once I’d painted it with thickened dye:
The yellow “sun” was unintentional, that was a blob of yellow dye that landed, luckily, in a convenient spot.
This is how the silk/rayon velvet looked:
Once washed in hot water, I lost about 50% of the color in the cotton piece, though it still looks pretty cool:
But I lost less with the silk/rayon:
The velvet had a somewhat frustrating nap to it, and I had to kind of push the pigment into the fabric…so I wound up applying more dye. I applied less dye to the cotton, as it had a smooth surface.
I think the combination of No-Flow AND a resist agent was a bit of over-kill. I think next time I’ll use one or the other, but not both.
I want to use less print paste next time, and thus get more dye–and less paste, which carries the dye but offers no pigment–into the fabric. Without the dye bleeding. Also, I may just soak the fabric in soda ash water ahead of time, pin it to a work surface, let it dry and then maybe apply a dilute solution of No-Flow with a sprayer.
I think dye sticks to fabric better when the fabric has already been treated with sodium carbonate. That’s usually how I dye fabric, when I’m applying dye to fabric to create an intentional design (as opposed to creating yardage, then my dyeing strategy is slightly different, or when I’m screen-printingt: in that case, there’s a lot of force applied to squeeze print paste onto fabric, much more force than a mere paint brush).
I find that when I apply dye to fabric already treated with sodium carbonate, my finished piece–once it’s out of a hot-water spin through my washing machine–has lost little of it’s original color.
Plus, when you add dye to print paste with sodium carbonate already in it, the dye starts “fixing” immediately, regardless of whether or not it’s been applied to fabric. So, if you dilly-dally, you might spend a lot of energy painting with thickened dye that’s exhausted.
This was my first time using glue as a resist. I like it. It held up well.
I plan to over-dye both of these pieces soon. I’ll try to use glue or No-Flow but not both. We’ll see!
