A bit of baring the soul

In less than 3 weeks I am going to Nancy Crow's Barn to study with Dorothy Caldwell in her Human Marks Workshop. I can't tell you how excited I am about this. On the way home from Ohio, I am stopping in Toronto to visit Kit Lang, a long time blogging friend. What a thrill! I will also engage in some urban sketching.

Over the last little while I have started to ponder stopping my blog. I went from 3 days a week to 2. I thought moving from surface design in fiber to human marks might possibly lose the blog many readers. I was right.

This last giveaway brought back many of my long time blog readers. It was heartening to see so many familiar names. In the next few weeks, I am going to post some great fabric dyeing experiments  I have made some of the most beautiful fabric ever and I am so excited to show it to you.

I have decided to keep my blog going, do more surface design work and more tutorials. I hope to see many of you long time blog readers and maybe some new ones as well.

My Family: Eric's son, Seth on my right, my son,Russ and his wife Fiona and their two boys on my left, parents in front and Seth and Jennifer's 3 boys, Brandon, Nathan and Ryan to my parents left. Unfortunately, beautiful Jennifer is always the photographer so here she with Brandon.

For the sale

I am having a bit of a sale to try to make some money for next years art supplies. This is a cute purse I made a few years ago that I will place on the "table". It has a metal "snap" opener.





I made this and the next 2 bags from a "recycled" quilt I had made then cut up. It actually was a pretty nice quilt of the phases of the moon which no one liked but me. I am actually tempted to remake the piece.

This is a cut roll bag as in tootsie! It has a top zipper and loads of room inside for cosmetics or whatever.

I put a new tie on the zipper - turquoise sari silk 

This looks small but is 7" high and 14" long with a generous padded handle.

Winner Announced (sorry so late)

Marcella came over and picked the winning number from my brass bowl. 

The winner is Marion Caspers

 Marion Caspers said...

That looks like a great book I would love to own. Thanks for your generosity.
Marion

21 April, 2013 10:04

 

Blog post 350

Just an excuse to give away a book. Leave a comment...

Some good news

I received a phone call today from the Penobscot Marine Museum which is behind my house. It seems Searsport had more Sea Captains living in it than any other town on the east coast at one time. Our town is awash in nautical history and the Penobscot Marine Museum is the jewel in the crown. If you look at the map of the campus, you can see the Searsport Congregational Church which is in my backyard



Well, back to the phone call. They are readying themselves for the summer tourist season and ordering things for the Museum Gift Shop and someone mentioned that instead of buying scarves from a woman from farther away, they heard there was a woman in Searsport who made scarves named Beth Berman.

The next step is that I have an appointment next week to show my scarves and anything else I would like to sell like any jewelry I have left over from my business, purses or tote bags  I am remaining calm and will report the outcome of this meeting at the end of this post since I am writing it 3 weeks before it will appear. I will imagine you are wishing me luck (as I'm sure you would had you know).
Just got back from my "showing" and they LOVE my scarves, mini-purses and they also want some Kindle and Tablet covers in water colors (my colors - blue, green, turquoise and green). They also picked up 5 of the necklaces from my old jewelry business and they want more......off to dye!!

Fooling with dye

I talked about my catch cloth or small drop cloth in my last post that I used when setting up my screens. I had a cloth with the blues, greens and purple from my screens and Rosalita had a yellows and reds cloth from her screens. When all the work was done, I used the cloth to wipe out the bowls of thickened dye - just an excuse to get more dye on the cloth. I wiped my plastic knives on the cloth as well then took a small amount of print paste and drop of blue dye and use a credit card to cover the cloth with a light tint of blue dye - an all over coloring.

 I still had dye left so I took a 36" X 45" piece of cotton that I hadn't even washed yet and drizzled thickened dye on the cloth then used a credit card (Thank god dye doesn't hurt a credit card) to scrape the dye over the cloth, scraping hard with the edge of the stiff plastic card. My mistake was adding the red (3 primaries = mud). Perhaps the paleness of this piece is because I never washed the cloth in advance - note to self...

All this as well as the DEconstruction from the last post was done on my 4' X 8' print table which I keep covered with a flannel sheet and an old piece of fabric that I had deconstructed a LONG time ago. At the time, I thought it was the cat's pajamas but now more like the cat's lunch (eeewww). SO with the last bit of thickened dye I had left, I drizzled it onto the print table (our work was wrapped and batching in safety) and scrapped it around - Much nicer...

45" X 7'10"

Look at those yummy red/yellow smears!!!

Say tuned for a drizzle dyeing tutorial coming soon.!!

Deconstructed playdate

Rosalita, one of the founders of the FIRE blog, came over the other day to get a refresher on how to set up the silk screens for deconstruction.
Since this was really just a mini-session of work, I didn't want to drag down my 4' X 8' printing table so I just used a 19 X 25 piece of 1" Styrofoam covered in an old quilt and white felt as a padded surface. I'm sure I've shown you this before but I can't remember when.

It's kind of a handy dandy quick print surface as long as you are working small.

I started by putting a small square of poly film on this printing surface covered with a piece of cloth. After constructing the screens with dye, I can stack them with spacers on the printing surface to dry. The catch cloth is great for a "clean-up" rag and potential usable fabric.

 I made 4 screens for her and 4 for me and we started the day by deconstructing them.

I didn't take many "wet" pictures. Rosalita's first deconstructed screen and below, mine "wet" on Haboti silk with vinegar soak.

This is linen "wet"

Here are the results of my work dry and ironed

silk

an old cotton sheet scrap

The dry version of the wet linen - subtle and sweet

A larger piece of linen

drizzle print purse

I started doing these drizzle and credit card prints last year. I take a piece of fabric and drizzle thickened dye on the then scrape with a credit card. I will do a tutorial soon. Meanwhile, I was pawing through my stash and found this fabulous drizzle print.

Since I am in a state of chronic state of being broke, I am trying to make things I can sell. Eventually everything will be on the table but today I decided to make a purse out of this fabric.

Drawn to Stitch finished

Remember the image transfer I started back in February? Well, the black sari yarn came and I wasn't so enamored with it - pretty bold stuff. At any rate, I just finished the stitching. I have probably 30-40 hours in this piece. I was determined to finish it so I could go on. I just can't seem to move forward until all unfinished projects are finished. No UFOs here!!

Now, remember that the image transfer is placed face down on the fabric so it is the flipped image you are seeing.

Here they are with the stitched pieced and the FLIPPED image

and some detailed shots.

The back

I am going to mat and frame this puppy!. I am very happy with it. That's one thing about hand stitched work; it goes so slowly it's hard to make a mistake. I had to actually think about each color and each stitch. I never referred to the photograph only responded to the marks left on the cloth by the image transfer which was very faint.

Black or White??