Backgrounds

Monday (Patriots day for us from Massachusetts and Maine), Judith came over for a play date. Something I was really wanting to try was making black marks on white fabric that I could later dye a certain color for inclusion into a piece. I made the marks in sections so they could easily be cut out at a later date and dyed or used in some other way.

I assembled a PILE (really) of mark making tools and Judith and I had a ball. My fabric was pre-soaked in soda ash. Judith used print paste with soda ash already in it. Both of us were using really old print paste from the back of my refrigerator. I found out after washing that Judith's print paste was fairly exhausted but the end of the day and the color changed from black to green. This is why I am including photos of the marks wet which were all black as well as photos of the cloth washed and iron (and green).

I'm starting with the wet prints made with black MX dye and print paste.

The alphabet stamps I used with thickened dye on a glass plate.

 Upper left is my smacker (below)

The piece below was printed with small bubble wrap (center), a lint roller with carpet pad on it (below), a monoprint off the glass plate on the upper right and solid and hollow circles made with an empty cone spool (below)

This was a thin line of thickened dye with a wide tooth comb run through it. Not one on my more successful attempts. It worked great on paper with India ink. (below)

These were done with my rope stamps (below) 

This , which I LOVE, was done with a square cut out of a car sponge (below)

Now the washed, dried and ironed versions:

I switched from my squeeze bottle of black thickened dye to Judith's exhausted dye. Had I known......

a thin line of dye with a credit card run through it vertically

pale grey dye applied with a credit card

This is a large panel done with the dye in a syringe graffiti style

Credit card dipped in dye. I think if the dye was thinner, it might have come out better

I printed letters and figures for a reason I will talk about in the future.

Monoprint from the glass and designs made with letters and numbers (fun!)

The smacker

The solid circles were made with the screw on cap from my soda ash jug. They smacked like the smacker does. The left side was done with a lint roller with elastics (below)

I will do more of this, possibly trying to perfect a few mistakes and maybe trying new mark making tools.

Playing with my new thermofax screens

While preparing to make the tutorial on using thermofax screens, I decided to try some of my new stamps.

Here are my "Rice and Beans" stamps:

Because of the height and hardness of the rice and  beans, I decided to load the paint on to the stamp with a foam pouncher.

Now for the thermofax screens with fabric paint. Some of these are old and some I just had made by Lyric Kinard. She makes customs screens.

The writing was done with a marker then flipped backwards to make reading it difficult.

This was done with a roller pen - fine point as were all the screens below but the last two.

This was done with a marker.

Fine tip pen and marker together for thick and thin lines.

Thermofax Screens

This past weekend I taught my first workshop of the season. It was a ball and just what the doctor ordered. NOW I feel like a normal person - all treatment has ended!!

Here are a few images I sent to Lyric Kinard for her to make into thermofax screens:

These first few were made using a sink mat with square holes cut. I just used the rigid edges of the mat to help contain the pen. Diagonal lines

There were circles within the square

 These were horizontal lines made with a marker

The handwriting is backwards on purpose. I wanted the "marks" of handwriting without being able to read it. The top one was marker and the bottom one was pen

This last one was done to mimic a side view of waffley papers. I did this free hand. All of these were done as overall background on cloth (or paper) as a first layer.

Yesterday Judith came over for a play date and the screens arrived too so I tried them with thickened dye. More about the play date next post.

Here they are with the dye wet:

 And here they are washed and ironed

The ones that look green were done with Judith's thickened dye which has soda ash added. It had been so long that the black dye was exhausted. Live and learn. I used black thickened dye on pre-treated cloth.