Dye Painting Class

Here are some pictures from the class from a couple of weeks ago.

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Avery, our only male in the class, painting with a syringe on a monoprinted piece, I believe.

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A better look at where he was going with this one.  I love the colors.

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Sandra, doing some layering on a monoprint.

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Jennifer’s piece has some rubbings and stamping on it.

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Avery did a rubbing over a piece of construction fence, then came back in with another color.

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A rubbing from a paint grid and I’m not sure what else, but I like the colors.

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I’m really mad at myself for not getting more pictures!  There were so many pieces of awesome cloth everyone was working on.

This ‘N That…

I can’t believe it’s been nine days since I blogged here!  First I have to go out and take a walk.  The weather has cooled off considerably and this is a great morning for walking.  The intense heat finally broke here yesterday.  It was much cooler when I came out of church yesterday.  88 degrees actually felt good compared to what we have been having.  Be back later.

What have I been working on? Last week I needed to get photography done for an entry that was to be in by June 30.  Application had to be filled out, etc.  This is for the Mid-States Exhibition that is held every year at the museum in Evansville.  I have only entered once and didn’t get in, but this year I felt I had something that might get accepted. But who knows?  The previous year that I entered, I was beat out by a nylon stocking with rocks or something in it that really looked like a bull’s testicle.  It was supposed to be some sort of  “necklace”.

Here’s some stitching I did on a deconstructed print…I am thinking of making some small bags with these prints.

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I got out my Featherweight machine to do this with because I want to demo free form stitching with a Featherweight for an upcoming class.  These machines can be a little touchy.  I couldn’t get it to stitch in free form mode because the needle was in backwards.  But once I figured out that’s why it wouldn’t stitch, all was well!

I loaded some new little bundles of fabric to my etsy shop and someone picked one of them up for a treasury.  That’s never happened before and has increased hits to my shop, although not a sale yet.  Keep fingers crossed. I need to keep working the shop, although I get sidetracked in the morning and forget to load pictures.

Piece of fabric I dye painted a couple of weeks ago…not sure where it’s going yet.

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Falling in Love…

I am falling in love….with dye painting! I have been going out to my delightful patio and painting 2 to 3 mornings a week for the past couple of weeks. I am really enjoying this process. I painted more pieces yesterday and was going to go out this morning and hang everything on the clothesline to dry, but, good thing I didn’t as a small thunderstorm rolled through. What a mess that would have been. Thankfully, I have a nice warm garage to lay everything out to dry in. It got quite warm here yesterday, a change from all the nice mild weather we have been having. So here are a few of the better pieces from earlier in the week. I haven’t photographed yesterday’s work yet.

monoprint using leaves and other things from nature

monoprint using leaves and other things from nature

monoprint

monoprint

paint rag overprinted with soy wax screen design

paint rag overprinted with soy wax screen design

Results?…

Here is how the pink scrunchy thing with the dark places from the previous post turned out. The directions said not to push the paint too much into the stitches….oh well…it’s still interesting.

The snaky looking thing didn’t turn out at all as expected. The turquoise dye migrated, but the other colors didn’t migrate and make a very good pattern.

More Painting….

I painted some more pieces yesterday. Experiments…these are still wet in the pictures. They may look quite different after being washed. I hope not!

Painted with a sea sponge and salted with rock salt.

Three different monoprints in three different colors…chartreuse, turquoise, and black.

1st layer: chartreuse paint dabbed on with brush; 2nd layer: turquoise stamped with commercial stamp; 3rd layer: black paint stamped with potato masher

Sttiched resist….it may be a few days before the finished product is ready, but I will post it.

Brush cleaning cloth.

What’s this?? A snake??? No, it’s another stitched resist. This was painted with turquoise, fuchsia, and yellow. I can’t wait to see what all of these look like when finished.

I’m Cleaning Today…

It’s time to clean up all my jars and bottles and throw out  old dye solution that I was saving for whenever. Whenever came and went and I still haven’t used it. I did pause this morning thinking how much paper I could dye with all of it, but, since I couldn’t see myself dyeing paper all day, out it went. Time to get organized and cleaned up! I am preparing for a dyeing, painting and printing class for the artisan’s shop. I need to make some samples and plan the dye painting/printing part of the class. The class is scheduled for all day Saturday September 6.

If any of you ever buy those tie dye kits from Walmart, don’t throw out those wonderful plastic bottles with the tapered tips. If you don’t want them, give them to your favorite dyer! I saved a bunch from last year’s dyeing spree at kid’s camp. These are wonderful to have on hand for squirting dye in a small stream.

I mixed up the chem water and thickened it to make the paint. Now that I have my new little refrigerator from the back-to-school department of Walmart, I have a place to store the paint. It is the perfect size.

Two pieces I painted this morning before it got hot. Some stripes….

…and then stamping with a wide foam brush and syringe squiggles.

That’s all I got done today…had other things to do. I plan on spending more time painting in the morning. It has really turned off very hot here this week. These pieces are batching nicely in a discarded plastic shower curtain in the patio. Oh, did I tell you I save plastic shower curtain liners? I use them to cover my tables with when I’m working. And they wash up nicely in the washing machine.

Soy Wax and Dye

This is a piece of hand dyed (deep red) fabric, stamped with soy wax, then painted with activated dye paint (turquoise).  There was a lot of wax on this and it came out quite easily.

Yesterday I made a gelatin print plate and will be making prints today to post later.  Let the fun begin!

Friday This ‘N That

Just a quick post…some pictures from my first attempt at breakdown printing…

Plastic canvas and sequin waste placed beneath the screen. Squeegeed yellow-orange dye across the screen, let dry. Next day, made turquoise dye paste and activated and squeegeed onto cloth. The little dark rusty looking areas are where the orange yellow dye came off the screen. Interesting. Oh, and there was some pink blotches on the fabric when I started, just so you know.

These I screened the yellow orange dye on and then later dye painted with turquoise dye.

Observations:

1. It would be good to have several screens available to use to do this with. I have one at the moment, so I made the design on the screen and had to wait a day til it dried, before I could go on. I will be purchasing more.

2. Putting the textural objects beneath the screen and squeegeeing the dye paste on the inside of the screen worked very well, perhaps better than coating the screen and laying objects in it, at least for me. More exploration is required, but I definitely liked the images I got on the screen by laying the objects beneath it.

3. Some of the fabric had been presoaked in soda ash and dried and some had not. I’m not sure if it made much difference in the colors. The turquoise dye itself was activated on both kinds of cloth. The only reason I had some presoaked is that I had made it for another project. I did not do presoaked specifically for this process.

4. There is more work and mess involved screening with dye than with paint, but I very much like the hand of the cloth with dye. Lovely.