Gerry Chase, Day 1

Oh, it was a fun day.

We started the class with Gerry Chase by watching her demonstrate a few techniques for applying liquid acrylic paint to fabric. Here's Gerry, demonstrating how to fix a tjanting that leaks.



A tjanting (pronounced "jaunting") is the tool traditionally used for applying wax for batik. Gerry uses them for applying acrylic paints and inks, and they're fun because the paint flows pretty fast through them and it forces you to work fast and freely.



Here's what they look like. You can buy them at Dharma Trading and other places that sell dyes and fabric paints and batik supplies.

Our goal today was -- as Gerry said emphatically -- NOT to create anything beautiful. We were just to work spontaneously and freely and experiment with the ink and paints to see what they did. Letting go of the "I have to make something attractive" concept was quite liberating.

Here's my friend and table-mate Marjorie preparing her fabric.



Maureen is loading plastic syringe in this picture, getting ready to load the tjanting or just squirt the paint onto the fabric. When I said spontaneous and free, I meant it.



Here, Judy's been applying paint over some fun doodly drawing she did with black paint in the tjanting.



And you can just tell that Pam is having fun here with this gorgeous fabric. See that orange paint-filled bowl she's holding? Just after I snapped this picture, she whacked the bowl down on the fabric to start making orange circles on the fabric. Very cool.



More similar fun tomorrow, and at some point we will start tearing and cutting up our fabric to assemble into art.

Meanwhile, I've got to go clean the paint spatters off my glasses. This is not a tidy process, at least the way I do it.