Flirting with Diamonds

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Dream Project May

I cut out all the pieces, from my hand dyed fabrics,using my freezer paper pattern and fused them onto a stiff but very thin piece of interfacing. I then did a bit of thread painting before backing with a thin batt. I continued to thread paint more extensively as you see in the progression of photos. As this is the first time I've attempted anything like this I think I would do more thread painting before adding a batt if there is a next time. Click on over to Vicki's to see what everyone else's dream project looks like.

Series Work

Unfortunately, life has gotten in the way and not much has been happening on this front. My wet area, dye/paint space has been taken over with tools, designs, cement, painted posts and all manner of stuff for re-landscaping our entire yard areas to make them less work. Right now they are lots of work! However, I did start doing a Shibori stitch resist in circles. The pictures show some of the stitching done but not gathered up yet.

Click on over the Vicki's to see what others are working on in a series.

Dream Project

My Dream Project is to do a floral portrait. Here is my slightly altered picture I took a few years ago getting ready to tackle this idea.

I traced over the picture on regular 8.5 x 11 and took it to the copy shop and had it enlarged to the size I wanted. I then matched up some fabrics and put some snippets on the enlargement.

Next I put a plastic sheet overlay on top and traced around the pieces. This sheet will be used for placement of the fabric under it.

That's the basic prep work done, now on to cutting and placing fabrics.

Hook up to Vicki's to see what everyone else's dream looks like.

Working In A Series Base Fabric

I'm using Jane Dunnewold's 'Art Cloth' exploring surface design. I've dyed some base fabric and overdyed it in the same session. I first manipulated the fat quarter fabrics, more on that later, and dyed first in Marine Violet and second in Cerulean Blue.

Working left to right: this fabric was folded in squares and 2 canning lids were clamped on each side making a fabric sandwich. The blue, second dye, seemed to make no impression at all. The next piece was accordion folded and laid in a tray to dye, next one was also accordion folded but stood up in the tray and seems to have sucked up more dye than the one laying down. Last piece was scrunched in an onion bag, dyed purple, fixed, rescrunched, put back in the bag and dyed blue. Lots of texture in that last one.
These pieces will be the base for more techniques applied to them.
I also made up some markers for applying paint. Mostly legumes glued, dried and then painted over for protection. Bonus, legume drawer cleaned out! Also some glued down string and corks bundled together.
Discharging is one of the techniques coming up and I'm finding it difficult to find the product that stops the bleaching action. Can find the discharging stuff but not the stop so I'm not sure what I will do about that.

Click over to Vicki's to see what everyone else is working on.

Working in Series - Art Cloth - A Beginning

The first exercises are about dyeing fabric and over dyeing fabric with resists. You can get markedly different results with  the type of dye you use; either pure dye or compound dye. The compound dye is made up of several different pure dyes and they may strike at different rates. My first exercise was to find out what dyes are used in each of the compound dyes I have in my studio. In all my studying about dyes this has never been suggested and I think it is a great idea. You cut small pieces of PFD fabric, spray water on it and then sprinkle a tiny bit of dye powder and the different dyes that make up that particular colour will be revealed. I did have some difficulty with this as my dye powders were statically charged, making them hard to control. But here is the outcome of this exercise.














Next I need to choose which colour to use as my first dye bath and get my base colour dyed. Then these pieces will be used in the exercises that follow.
Pop over to Vicki's to see what everyone else is doing in their series.

Direction for the New Year

I'm joining the challenge, " Working in a Series" lead by Vicki Welsh. I've always been interested in working my way through a book's exercises in a subject I'm interested in. I've done this with a bread making recipe book on Cooks' Talk years ago where we all chose a book to cook our way through and reported on the recipes' successes and failures. It was fun and I got to love my book even more for the great recipes I wouldn't have tried otherwise.
So that is what I have chosen to do for working in a series, and Jane Dunnewold's book, "Art Cloth, a guide to surface design for fabric" is my choice. I purchased this book many years ago at a quilt show not knowing when I would get a chance to actually use it. Now is my chance. Let's have some fun.