Ice Dyeing (or the dyeing you can do during hot flash season)

In the current issue of Quilting Arts magazine (Aug/Sept 2011, #52) there's an article by Lynda Heines about "ice dyeing."  When I read the issue, I read the article and thought, "That looks fun, I'll have to try that some day."  And I promptly forgot all about it.

But then about a week later, I went to my monthly Practical Design group, and two of the women there showed fabric they'd dyed using the Ice Dyeing technique.  It was gorgeous, just gorgeous.  And they bubbled on about how easy it was -- so I was inspired to go home and get it going the very next day.

Here's the thing about this method:  you don't have to mix dye solution ahead of time.  Now, I know that's not a huge task, and of course once you mix the dyes they keep for a while.  Still, when I'm in the mood to play with dyeing, I want to get to the dyeing and having to do all that advance preparation discourages me some.  Silly, I know, but there you have it.

At any rate, the beauty of this method is that you don't pre-mix dyes. (It also means that you have to be MORE careful about wearing a mask and not exposing yourself to dye powder carelessly.)  But basically, the method is this:  You set up a rack over a tray or tub, put soda-soaked fabric in a flattened wad (or folded bundle) on the rack, put ice cubes on the fabric, and then sprinkle a bit of dye powder onto the ice.  As the ice melts, the dye powder dissolves and contacts the fabric.  You let it sit for 24 hours, then wash it all out. The specific details and instructions are illustrated beautifully Lynda Heines' article.

So away I went.  And the results have been exciting and very fun.

In fact, this is so fun and easy it's hard to stop.

So far I've dyed half-yard pieces.  Today I'm going to try a bigger piece and see what happens.  But I highly recommend experimenting with this -- it's very  fun.

Print Play

I'm rather a novice in the surface design department.  Sure, I've bought a lot of books, and I've got a lot of supplies -- but I don't get in there and actually DO it all that often. I chalk that up to laziness, really:  I don't have a convenient set up, so I have to store everything in the garage, then pull it all through the house outside to the back patio when I want to experiment.  So the spontaneous "I'll just print up a quick piece of cloth" doesn't happen around here.

(And yes, I KNOW there are industrious artists who are making exquisite pieces of cloth in their bathroom sinks with 4 square inches of counter space.  So I am glad to have the patio, even if it means that a few garden plants take on the cast of whatever colors I'm working with for a few days.)

So.  Last week at Festival of Quilts (just last week!) I bought a few thermofax screens for screen printing.  I've done that once, and it was, as they say, dead easy.  And I've got this orange quilt to make for Twelve by Twelve, and I'd been thinking about background fabric, and it dawned on me that I could PRINT the background fabric... et, voila!

I was experimenting with printing a big-textured screen and then over printing with a small textured screen.  It looks weird here as a piece of cloth but I think it could have interesting possibilities cut up.

My happiest surprises involved printing on fabric I'd dyed previously and hadn't liked all that much.  I had a batch of weird maroon-ish shades and I screened some Decolourant on that, then set it out in the sun for the afternoon ... and I really like the result.

They are still not colors I'd be inclined to use, but at least they are now in the category of "might use" instead of "Yuck - never." 

I even discharged onto some old dye prints I'd done last summer, and they turned out well, too.  (The only one I photographed looks a little weird, but you get the idea....)

All in all, it was worth the hauling stuff back and forth.  And it might even make me want to do it again.

In the Works

Oh, I have so many things in the works and I am pulled in all sorts of directions.  How I am longing for a week -- even one entire day! -- with nothing to do but play with fabric.  Perhaps I can squeeze it into the schedule this weekend.  Meanwhile, here's one of the projects I am excited about.

I made this fabric by drawing the lines with a tjanting tool and acrylic paint, then added color with diluted acrylic paint.  I tell you, just the drawing process is meditative and mesmerizing.

Then these fellows were added with a stencil...

So I am eager to keep going but real work and family matters distract me.  Darn.  You'll have to tune back in to see where this goes.

Rayna was Right

We are trying to enjoy the last few days of summer vacation (school starts this coming wednesday) so Caroline and I decided to have an art/play day. We broke out Rayna Gillman's book and went to work making gelatin prints. The picture above shows the pieces we made laid out on the patio table to dry.

Yep, this is the very technique that sounded too bizarre and icky to me to want to try, until I read Rayna's book. And it really did seem like the very tactile sort of art that Caroline loves. So last night I mixed up two pans of gelatin per Rayna's instructions (which took all of two minutes), and this morning we were good to go.



What fun this was! The picture above shows my very first print, with the fabric laying on the gelatin after I'd laid it on the painted and textured slab of gelatin. The front side came out darker but I really love the back side. I used a baby's bath cup and the lid from a can of shaving gel to make the texture.



Caroline did this rainbow one, blending colors and texturing with a flower-shaped hairclip and a plastic fork. I just love this one.



As Rayna explained would happen, the gelatin started developing cracks and softening (because of the heat, maybe -- it's HOT HOT HOT here today) but that just added to the texture. This print resulted after I rolled on black paint, stamped all over with a finger-print textured rubber stamp, pulled a print, then stamped the stamp AGAIN onto the gelatin.



And as we were tearing fabric squares, I had lots of thread ends that I dragged through green and yellow paint and then laid on the gelatin which had been painted with dark blue paint. I really got into these thread-mess prints and made a bunch of them. (Hint: do not try to roller paint on tOP of the thread -- as that leads to getting thread wound all around your brayer.)

It was pretty fascinating to work with the gelatin, I have to admit, and not as weird as I thought it would be. It was quite firm, but soft enough to take pressure in an interesting way. I was surprised at how easy it was to wipe it down with a damp paper towel to change colors, too. At the end of the process, Caroline gathered up her gelatin hunks and went outside to fling them on the driveway (I'm guessing that's what Rayna has her students do after her workshops, don't you think?) to watch them explode and then dissolve when it was all hosed down.

So, a good time was had by all and now I've got some very fun fabric to play with.

Thanks, Rayna!

Book Review: Create Your Own Handprinted Cloth

I've long had the same feeling about the idea of creating my own fabrics with various surface design techniques that I had about learning to dye fabric: I was afraid to start down that road out of the fear that I'd get so entranced with even MORE ways to add fabric to my already-stuffed shelves that I'd never get anything finished. So, while I read Rayna Gillman's blog regularly, I've avoided getting very involved with printing, screen printing, and other surface design techniques.

But earlier this week, a copy of Rayna's new book Create Your Own Hand-Printed Cloth (C&T Pub. 2008) landed in my mailbox, around the same time I'd been laid low with a nasty sinus infection. I retreated to bed with my antibiotics and this book.
And, I'm afraid to say, I was smitten. Dang it, I knew this would happen. I really want to try some of these techniques.
First, the book itself is really pretty to look at. There are tons of vibrant pictures. Each page has great visual appeal, so it's a pleasure to read this book even if you're not going to rush off to paint fabric right away. I'm much more likely to want to use a book if the pictures are vivid and interesting (shallow, I know, but what can I say?) and this one definitely fulfills my visual criteria.
But for someone like me, who doesn't like making an enormous mess and who doesn't have a dedicated "wet" studio area (I'm left to the kitchen and the patio) Rayna's instructions make these techniques seem feasible. I'm leery of melting wax to try batiking, and I tend to think of screen printing as something complex that trained artists need big expensive equipment to do. I'm impressed at how Rayna explains how these techniques are accessible and easily achievable with relatively inexpensive and/or found items. It's a small thing, I know, but I really liked that Rayna explained how to make a portable work surface to use when trying these techniques. That's the sort of basic information I need.
A lot of different surface design techniques are covered here -- stamping and stenciling with found objects, "random" screenprinting, gelatin plate printing, discharge printing, soy wax batik, and more. And as I read each section, I not only could see myself trying the techniques I'd not yet used, I actually wanted to try them. Rayna's text is very encouraging and she takes a lot of pleasure in the simple concept of experimenting. I've had people tell me about gelatin printing, for example, and the idea of printing with "jello" sort of grossed me out. But Rayna's instructions and pictures made me think again. I really want to give this a try, and I figure it'll be a good mom-and-daughter project one of these days.
One of the parts I like the best in this book is "Can This Fabric Be Saved?," where Rayna shows some examples of pieces she made that she didn't like, and how she changed them with additional surface design treatments to make them better. That was encouraging too for the non-confident among us.
Scattered throughout the book are pictures of art quilts made with various personally-created fabric, by Rayna and others. I would have liked to see more, but of course I realize that the point of the book is simply making the fabric ... once made, it's like any other fabric in terms of how a quilt artist chooses to use it.
I'll confess that that leads to my other vague discomfort about getting on the "surface design" bandwagon. I have the impression that, as surface design techniques are being taught and used more widely, more people are making cloth, adding quilting to it, and calling it "art." I feel like I'm seeing more and more pieces made to simply show hunks of hand-created fabric, without (to my eye) good composition, thought to artistic principles such as balance, focal point, etc. Wrongly or not, I've concluded that a lot of people who delve into surface design end up falling in love with the fabric they make and then can't bear to treat it as actual cloth to cut up and integrate into anything. I can see that making the cloth is an artistic process, but to me, that doesn't necessarily make the resulting cloth "art" in and of itself. I appreciated that the title "Create Your Own Hand-Printed Cloth" makes clear that it's about making the cloth, and then you're left to use that cloth an element in your art. But I'm digressing. That's my own pet peeve about the subject.
In short, I'm very impressed with this book and how accessible Rayna makes these techniques. I think I'm going to give a few of them a try ... I guess I'd better make a bit more room on my fabric shelves!

Monoprinting on fabric results

Thought I'd post the results of my monoprinting on fabric with thickened dye. I think I mentioned earlier that to thicken the dye, I mixed sodium alginate (a thickener from Jacquard), some urea and water. Then I mixed procion dye powder straight in, and printed onto PFD fabric that I'd previously soaked in soda ash solution.



You can see the cool pattern made by the dye beading up on the plastic. I actually liked that pattern better than the various line experiments I was playing with.



So eventually, I just started painting fast strokes of dye on the plastic to get that pattern.



I cured these by stacking them up with plastic grocery bags between them so they'd stay moist, and left them overnight.



I wondered if the color would fade when I washed them out, but it's very strong color. Which I wanted.

I'm still not sure the mess was worth the result, though. I guess that's what experimenting is all about.

Monoprinting Monday

I celebrated the Monday holiday today by playing a bit with monoprinting. Funny, it's been an assigned task in a workshop I'm in but I've been putting it off because of the mess and just general uncertainty. And it seems that lately, everywhere I turn there is information about monoprinting... in the recent Quilting Arts magazine, in a gorgeous book I received recently (Print, Pattern and Color by Ruth Issett)... So, seeing as how it seemed that monoprinting was just going to jump into my face until I did it, that's what Caroline and I did this morning.


I started by playing with acrylic paints and printing onto white paper.



The exploration was supposed to be about "line," so that's what I fiddled with.



It was rather freeing, I must say, and very fast.



Then, I mixed up a batch of sodium alginate as dye thickener (yikes, what a lumpy mess), waited the appropriate time, then mixed dye powder in to try monoprinting with thickened dye onto fabric soaked in soda ash solution.

To my surprise, painting the dye onto the plastic resulted in the thickened dye just beading up, like so:



which made for lovely patterns, actually, but I wasn't prepared for that. Is that normal?

I've printed up a bunch of small fabric sheets but they're wrapped in plastic to cure overnight. It'll be interesting to see what those look like. So far, the thickened dye printing didn't catch my fancy, but maybe the results will be so stunning that I'll rethink.

Still playing with color

It was a gorgeous sunny day yesterday, so after I got some work out of the way, I decided to break out the dye and play a bit more with complementary colors. I dyed 3 separate trays, and in each one poured complementary colors on opposite sides and tried to smush the color into the middle. I got some very fun results and will be doing more of this, I can tell.

Here's yellow and violet...not an appealing combination in the pan...



But I love this result.



Here's orange and blue, creating a rather garish mix:



...which led to this result. Interesting how the green separated out, huh?



In the red and green dish, I smushed and smushed (that's the technical term) until I was afraid it was too muddy (this is before the smushing)



but apparently I didn't smush enough, as the colors didn't blend nearly as much as I thought they were.



This brought to mind the more scientific result we'd done with Carol Soderlund. There, we dyed up gradations of complementary colors, and with the end bits of dye mixed them together to see what color resulted when we mixed various complementary colors. Here's my page of dye swatches from that experiment. You can see the color gradations, and the last two swatches at the bottom of each color strip are the colors that result from mixing in a bit of the complementary color. Nice way to explore browns, mushroomy colors.

Another color exercise

It was such a warm sunny day yesterday that I thought I'd take a bit of time to work on another color exercise. I decided to break out my new digital scale, mix up some dye concentrates, and dye a color wheel. This is the first time I've had the chance to dye fabric since my workshop with Carol Soderlund, so I had to refresh my memory on how to adjust the dye powder and liquid amounts to the weight of the fabric.

Look, here's the scale in action!



I batched everything in the sunshine on the patio...



And by the end of the evening, I had this!



I threw in a bit of perle cotton thread with each piece of fabric, so I actually was able to make this.



I'm working through these color exercises to remind myself of basic color principles... and it's fun and very reinforcing. And it was a lovely way to spend some time on the sunny patio!

More complementary color

This week, I am thrilled to be taking a three-day workshop with Sue Benner through my art quilt group. I've never had the good fortune to have a class with her before now, and I'm really looking forward to it. The workshop will be on abstraction ... so we have been given the task of bringing some pictures to work with, and will go from there.

Conveniently, this has coincided quite neatly with Bob (my brilliant lawyer boss) being away for 10 days. So I'm free to to have fun without worrying about work.

Meanwhile, I thought I'd post some color exercises I've done lately on complementary color schemes (Brenda, note the "e"!). It was fun to put these together.








I've been doing color exercises in a journal, collecting color bits from photos to capture various ranges of hues. It's simple, but it IS making me look at color with a different, more conscious eye.

Entertaining a bored child (and me, too)

A cool overcast morning... a bored kid... a mom tired of work at the computer... What to do???

Paint fabric, of course!

We put music on, set everything up on the kitchen table (along with lots of protecting plastic) and away we went. Caroline really got into it.



I had fun making component parts for a piece I have in mind... I am so enjoying the tjanting drawing experience!



By the way, those big plastic trays we're working on are wonderful items. I ordered them from Dick Blick Art Materials and they've come in handy for all sorts of dyeing, painting, and other messy projects.

We draped our wet pieces on the table on the patio to dry...



and by the time we finished, it was covered. What fun!

More from the Gerry Chase workshop

One of the big breakthroughs I had in this workshop was around drawing and painting. Like a lot of folks, I don't have any confidence about drawing and painting and tend to avoid it.

When we started on Friday with our tjantings and flowy ink, and Gerry reminded us that we weren't to try to make anything attractive but just to be spontaneous and have fun, that really liberated me. I figure I can make unattractive stuff as well as the next person! So away I went.

My first pieces had big swoops of line and splodges of paint and those are now torn up, waiting to be put into artful compositions.



I kept squiggling and splodging paint and having tons of fun.



I had fun experimenting with drawing onto wet fabric, which resulted in a sort of eerie, streaky effect.



Then I started working on how to control the quality of the line I could get with the tjanting, and how to wash paint over the drawing while retaining a clear line. MORE fun.





I loved using the tjanting so much that I started drawing fat-quarter-sized pieces of all over patterns, which will be fun to cut up and use for something...



On this viney one, I loved how the greens I mixed separated into the water wash to make a yellow halo. What a lovely accident!







And by the end of this, the piece of muslin stretched under my painting surface took on a very artful look too. (Many people in the room exclaimed how much we liked our muslin under-surfaces almost better than the actual paintings we did!)



I can't wait to start playing with this fun fabric....but I have returned to an inbox full of real-life work, not to mention a family I've barely seen for 3 days. Ah well, this will be waiting when I come back to it.

Abstraction

After getting home from Tahoe late on Saturday and doing some quick unpacking, I turned my attention to preparing for my monthly Practical Design workshop on Sunday. I really look forward to this class each month, as I get such inspiration from my classmates and I always come away with a lot to think about in terms of my work.

This time, we talked about abstraction. I understand the idea, but I have a surprisingly difficult time achieving something that is truly abstract. Even when I start fiddling with random shapes and colors, my brain immediately wants to turn it into something. I guess it's that rational right brain trying to overcome the creative, visual left brain! Our discussion of abstraction reminded me that work doesn't have to be totally divorced from any specific idea to be "abstract". Even the most traditional quilt blocks are abstractions of images... think log cabin, flying geese, etc.

Anyway, after we talked about these concepts, we played with small collages. Here's what I achieved that afternoon.



Marilyn (our workshop teacher) suggested that we start with SOME basic concept... a shape, an image, a color, an idea...and go from there. I decided to play with line. I started composing this horizontally, but when I started to channel Liz Berg (whose work I adore) I turned it vertical to get my head away from her wonderful fences. I'm not sure where it will go. But I like what's there so far. Our challenge for the month is to do something with what we started in class.

I also just got some photos from my friend Carol T. who was in the Color Mixing for Dyers workshop. She shared what she washed out after class, and her results are FABULOUS!





Look at these -- don't these just make you gasp with delight?



Carol Soderlund had demonstrated a "rose window" type fold and demonstrated dye application to achieve a stained glass look, and Carol really managed to get stunning results.



I've got to give this a try!