email Youtube

Home
Galleries
Blog
Workshops & Calendar
Store
Resources
About
Contact

A bit more from Think Silk!

July 31st, 2012

I had a few extra bits that I dyed at Think Silk, but that needed wash-out and ironing at home, so here they are:

 

OK…so Tyger isn’t really part of the class, but this was too cute not to share. Of course, I could say that his coat is a perfect inspiration for some shibori!  He was watching me as I was petting the samples…..

Two pieces of blue shibori, one that began wet, one that began dry. Don’t actually see much difference in these, tho there can be. These were wrapped too tightly for me…too much white. So I shall re-do, perhaps wrapping in the other direction, and overdye with a different blue. The piece on the right is that black. Too bad it was black. May be too dark to overdye, and I dislike discharge. Erk.

Silk noil is a fairly heavy cloth, about like Kona cotton, maybe a bit heavier. This was a stitched / gathered resist. Again, more white than I like. Overdye is my new middle name!

This is why it is good to practice on small pieces of cloth. Love the colors; love the chevron pleating/patterning. Hate the blotchiness. Can you say overdye? Or cut up into small bits!

Cotton (?) cord…LOVE these colors! It was the cord I used to tie the previous sample. Use EVERYthing!  I think this is synthetic cord, actually, but it took the color because we used an acid bath method…. nifty!

My favorite piece of the whole thing: silk organza, stitched in a leaf shape to create a tight resist, then dyed. I can see small pieces like this with either stitched or soy wax resist working their way into my quilts! This one is small, maybe 4 x 7 inches total.

 

Think Silk!

July 28th, 2012

Back in April, which now seems like years ago, I FINALLY got to take a class I’ve wanted to take for several years now:  Carol Soderlund‘s dyeing silk class.  Any time she has been teaching within driving distance of Maine, I’ve been booked to teach elsewhere.  So even though this class required me to get home from teaching in Arkansas on Friday then get back in the car and head South on Monday, I jumped at the chance!

Round 1, dyeing silk yellow

As always with Carol’s classes, it was fun, packed with learning, tiring, and did I say fun?

First round of overdyeing

Mooshing. That’s a technical term! In this case, mooshing in the blue dye….the third round!  And even WET the colors are heavenly

My dye partner stacking our colors

A classmate was experimenting with stamps and thickened dye

At Quilt Festival two years ago, Melanie Testa demonstrated using an old-fashioned ruling pen (like for drafting plans in art school) with thickened dye. I tried it, and you can see a sideways of my Queen Anne’s lace. I “inked” the outlines with dye, then will overdye and color later….maybe later this summer?

We also got to try some shibori, alas with black. I’m not wild about the color, but maybe I’ll overdye with some blue and get a nice water fabric out of this… I do like the texture, just not the color. Bleah.

We also got to try some deconstructed screen printing. A neighbor did this one… she definitely had the best colors and results… I’m not much for “surface design” stuff, but this was a great cloth!

Another really good desconstructed screen print. I lust after that huge screen!

Lunch at the back of the classroom. ProChem brings in lunch–it is included in the class fee. We all sit together and pop up and down as need be to tend our fabric!

And one more time I went by 266 Third Street, Fall River, Mass., where my dad and his family lived in 1918! So glad it is still there. I may try to find where they lived in 1910 via the census and go find that house, too… my Aunt Mary lived in that house (on the first floor apartment) until she died in the 1970s!

As always, I had a great time, ate too much, and wish I had more time at home to dye fabric!  Maybe this winter?

 

It’s the Wild Maine Blueberry Harvest!

July 26th, 2012

Yesterday I went to pick up our farm subscription (organic, locally grown vegetables) so took the back way around to our drive, and what should appear to my wondering eyes but:

The blueberry field at the end/corner of our road

I’d never before seen the commercial blueberry harvesters.  The old way is to use a “blueberry rake.”  Think of a dust pan, but above the flat base is a set of tines (line a fork) that “rake” the berries and pull the berries but not (in theory at least) the leaves into the pan.   Pan gets dumped into big plastic “flat.”  Well, now I know how the big guys do it….   the field above is about 1/4 mile from the bottom end of our driveway (that’s maybe 500 metres?).  There were several of the harvesters in the field…. here’s a closeup.  Looking carefully, I could see that there is a sweep of some sort on the far side, and the driver in the center was leaning over looking out the far side and down.

The arrows show the vacuum/rake/whatever it is on the left side of the harvester. There appear to be hoses going from next to the driver to the blue box thingie  at the rear left.  The yellow things are plastic bins into which the berries go.

This shot shows (on the right) where there is something on the far side that harvests the berries. On the left you can see a shiny silver metal chute. The berries roll down the chute/funnel into the yellow bin. From the looks of it, when one bin is full, the next one comes down, etc., until the driver has a full load.

Regular store-bought blueberries are big… like the tip of a finger big.  Wild Maine blueberries have SO MUCH more flavor…they are tiny, the size of what is sold as “Petite Green Peas” in the frozen section of the grocery.  I found a great recipe for muffins in Cook’s Illustrated a while ago, and Eli and I love them!  We add frozen raspberries, too!

Cool beans…or maybe I should say Cool Berries!

Sketchbook Journal….around the world

July 24th, 2012

One of the last exercises in my Joggles class (which now feels like it was about a thousand years ago) was to work within a grid.  I chose to work with items in our living room from our life around the world.

The finished (I think it is finished) page….may add some color to the upper left corner, just a light wash of the ochre….

I chose things from my parents’ home, like the bedwarmer and the Tibetan horn:

The Peruvian copper bedwarmer (lift lid, fill with coals, close lid, pop in bed! from the pre-electric blanket era!). Behind it is a decorative Tibetan horn–think like on the Swiss Alps, except in Tibet. This one, since it is perforated with holes, clearly could not be used to signal a nearby mountaintop.

Things I sketched….observed by the dog! Left to right back row: one of Paul’s carved monkeys from Zaire (remember hear no evil, see no evil? This one is speak no evil–his buddies are still on the shelf), a Mate cup (tea, with a strainer on the bottom of the straw, used by the Gauchos aka cowboys) from Argentina, an M’Bigou soapstone carved head from Gabon, and a duck made from a pully. My half-brother TJ was very creative; he lived in LA near the docks, and made things from leftovers–our coffee table is actually one he made from a ship’s hatch cover. On the bottom it has a note from him to my dad, for whom he made the table. They are both gone, but the table lives on! In the front is a rebenque, the crop/whip used by the Argentine and Brazilian gauchos.  Not pictured is the bird on the left side of the page.  It also is M’Bigou soapstone.

Jane LaFazio was our teacher. She wanted us to draw a grid (3×4 squares or whatever filled your page) then fill the squares, sometimes merging a couple of squares if needed. This is at the inked-but-not-colored stage.  On the bottom I wrote the places I have lived.

With some of the items colored, but no background or border yet….

And now I’ll send you back to the top to see the finished page.  I rather like it!

 

SAQA Auction and my donation quilt

July 21st, 2012

Every year, Studio Art Quilt Associations (SAQA) has a fundraising auction of small works–all 12 by 12 inches– by some of the finest art quilters working today.  I’m thrilled to be able to donate this piece:

Conversations III

Inspired by a visit to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, I made a series of three quilts, a larger center panel flanked by two 12 x 12 inch quilts.  Conversations III was donated to the 2012 Studio Art Quilt Associates online auction fundraiser.

Detail from Conversations III

When I began this series, I thought first of the conversation my beloved Sister-in-law, her friend and I had at lunch, but then realized that there was a conversation between the architecture and the landscape, the sky and the stone in the buildings, the artists and the viewers, and in the case of these quilts:  between me and the cloth/dye/thread.  Yes, all of the fabric in these pieces began as white, and I dyed them.

Conversations I has been juried into A World of Beauty 2012, the judged show at the International Quilt Festival in Houston, and Conversations IIis now for sale. I am thrilled with how they turned out.  Quilted into the sky, and written in ink onto the table and chairs (for the shadowing on the wood) are words about the art and the conversation:  contrast, line, shape, form, sky, water, stone, shadow, sea breeze…..

Conversations I, II and III

Some of you  may recall seeing these three pieces when I blogged about them last summer (here and here) for The Frayed Edges show at the Camden Public Library.  The small quilt on the right is the one I have donated to the SAQA auction!  Learn more about the auction here, and see the quilts here.  I’ve just discovered that my quilt, Conversations 3, will be among those auctioned live (gulp, eek!) at the International Quilt Festival in Houston.  Thrillingly, Conversations 1 (the large central quilt) has just been juried in to the IQA World of Beauty contest.

The online auction is in three parts, starting September 10th.  Each week for three weeks, a group of quilts is auctioned.  On the first day, prices for the 12 by 12 inch quilts are $750.  The next day the price drops to $550, and so on down to $75 by the end of the week (tho not much is left by then!).  The risk is:  do you wait to get a lower price, or lose the quilt you really want?  Inevitably (sigh) the ones I want are gone in the first two days….  The auction in Houston will work similarly:  on Preview Night (Weds., Oct. 31) prices will be $750.  Thursday morning the price will drop, and again at 2 p.m.  And so on, through the end of Festival.  To buy one of the quilts at Houston, though, either you have to be there OR you need to have someone there to buy for you! I shall be nervous walking by the SAQA booth to see if mine has sold!  I wish SAQA all the best in fundraising!