"Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent, and independent; with a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play."~~Henri Matisse
Basting today. Don’t want to hold up my fellow collaborators more than I already have. We have to get this show on the road! I am working on raw silk, front and back.
But how to stitch? The onion skin marks cry out for “do not ignore me” stitching? I like to do utility line stitching on most things just to get the layers together, but this? The onion marks are talking to me…so I guess I must listen. Check back later to see how I’m doing.
I am officially in love with raw silk.
A couple of posts back I posted a photo of a piece of raw silk that I dyed with onion skins. I am going to post some closeups of the patterning here, because I am not convinced the other photo did it justice!
I held two classes at the Studio last Saturday. In the morning class, called Creating your own Papers for Collage, we had quite the adventurous time…
Two papers I dyed with leftover dyes… after I made a Shibori folded pattern with the paper. The edges were then dipped in three different dye colors. Wonderful! This was plain white copy paper. Such nice contrasts.
The next paper is charcoal drawing paper that has been crumpled up and straightened back out. The texture comes from brushing ink pads over the bumps.
You simply MUST try it, darling…
I am a part of a project in MoFA (Missouri Fiber Artists) called Pairings. The point of the project is to pair up with someone and trade visits to each other’s studios, spend time together learning from each other and then eventually do a collaboration art piece. My “Pairing” turned into a trio because a friend wanted in the project, but there was no one to pair with her at the time, so I asked to put her with my pair. So three of us will be collaborating. We have already had our first studio visit as they came to my place a couple of weeks ago.
My two partners in crime, Susan Spineto on the right and Karen Turner on the left. Both are from the St.Louis/Alton area.
So, decisions were made that day of our meet up. We decided on the size of our collaboration and where we would start.
So here is the start….raw silk dyed with two colors of onion skins.
I knew they would be beautiful. I love silk crepe. I think it is the most beautiful of the silks. It has weight. It has class. It has style.
So I rolled up red and yellow onion skins in a scarf….and voila!….I am totally smitten.
I have developed an interest in natural dyeing. The MoFA girls do a lot of that and it intrigues me, so I am trying my hand at it. First try at natural dyeing: I used peony leaves and rose leaves, rolled up in a silk hababoi scarf and steamed. Results: not so much, kinda bland. So on an impulse, I dipped it in some rusty water-vinegar mixture and voila!~ The scarf turned a nice smoky gray color and the leaves all finally showed up! Ok, I already showed you that one in a prior post.
The next natural dyeing I tried was with onion skins, again all wrapped up in silk Habatoi scarves and steamed.
They might need some gray. The bamboo sticks I wrapped them around left a gray marking that I like very well, if I could just figure out how to get it over into the other areas….
Next on the agenda are some rust dyed scarves. Again, these are silk Habatoi. I am out of silk crepe de chine and eagerly wanting to order a few to try natural dyeing on.
My how time does fly….I haven’t blogged for far too long. I’m going to have get better at this.
Since the last post, I have tried my hand at natural dyeing. I heard that peony leaves were good for this and rose leaves. I have plenty of peony bushes and the flowers are now exhausted, so there are lots of leaves. I gathered up all the leaves from them and my rose bushes. I wrapped leaves in a silk chiffon scarf and a crepe de chine. The results were less than desirable. The chiffon barely showed any marks and the crepe de chine did have some on it. The day I wrapped and bundled them, I stuck a huge hunk of steel in a mixture of vinegar and water. It sat there changing the water into a dark sludge. On a whim, I stuck both scarves in the rusty sludge. Oh my! What a difference that made! Both scarves went instantly to smoky gray colors and even after rinsing, it stayed. The leaves now can clearly be seen on the crepe de chine in a reddish brown color. The transformation is amazing. The chiffon came out with softer colors and may need some more application of something….
I have had a busy week…3 of my nieces came down to visit my studio. Two of them wanted to make a quilt; the third wanted help making a pieced pillow. They wore me out! We stayed up pretty late the first night sewing…later than I am used to staying up. That made for a late morning the next day, but by noon we were at it again. I’m so proud of all of them. With little or no experience in sewing or piecing, they did very well!
A couple of weeks ago I had a play day with Lynda of Bloom, Bake, Create fame. We had been planning for some time to try out indigo dyeing. I finally had a day free! Here are my cotton cloth prints.
I also tried three kinds of silk scarves in the vat but did not leave them in long enough. I attempted to re-dye them the next day in the vat, but it had oxidized too much. I then over-dyed them with a procion dye which actually turned out similar to the indigo dyeing.
On the left, silk chiffon (yummm!), then a silk crepe, and a silk habatoi.
A productive day!
A few weeks ago I spent a day doing some dyeing. I realized that my stacks of hand dyed fabrics to sell was getting mighty low. So I spent a day dyeing and then hours of ironing to get them ready to sell. I love the palette of colors I ended up with…butterscotch, curry, terra cotta, olive in light and dark, and indigo blue. I decided to dye in such a way that I could get a piece with lighter value in the same tub as the the darker ones.
They look so yummy all stacked up together!
Today, I have started at it again. I sold a few yards at the show, but I still needed to beef up my stash as I will be setting up to sell to some fantastic quilters coming to New Harmony from Kentucky. I have sold to these gals before at the farmer’s market and believe me, they like fabric! So I am getting ready for them. One slight problem…my stash of Pure Threads by James Thompson is on the very low side. I have been pulling out every piece of white or off white cotton I can find in my house, since I can’t get any bolts of it here on time. I have now dyed my Pimatex cotton (that I usually paint skies on) and yesterday I purchased quilt backing cotton and dyed it too as well as a cheaper natural muslin. I have some heavier weight sateen type cotton that I could dye too…not sure why I bought that in a wide width…
The first batch is now rinsed, washed, and dried, but there is more to go…and then there’s all that ironing….
In the last post, I was telling you about the last day at Tan-Tara resort at the Missouri Fiber Artists (MoFA) conference.
After Annie gave her presentation and we checked out her quilts, the style show was next. I took photos of almost everyone’s garment because they were all so wonderful, but there’s quite a few to post, so I will post a few here and if you are interested in seeing the rest, you need to join Facebook, Like the Missouri Fiber Artists page, and I’ll have the rest of them posted in an album…eventually!
These gals can sew and not only can they sew, they are in to making their own cloth using surface design. The garments and ideas represented in the fashion show were awe-inspiring.
I can’t tell you who made this. It all went too fast. This is a fiber student doing the modeling.
This is Carlene Fullerton doing the modeling. I think Sharon Kilfoyle is the creator of this smashing silk piece.
Carlene again modeling a gorgeous jacket.
I thought this little orange jacket was quite creative.
And the winner for Best of Show is….
The wedding dress…made entirely of white plastic bags! One of the students made this.
Stay tuned…Part 3 is coming.
