I kept waiting for a brighter day to take pictures of my fabrics I made last week but the rain just kept coming. So last night, in some very bad lighting, I took pictures just so I could remember all the processes we covered.

     Some are really bad and not to be shown. I took it one layer too far or some of the colors bled into the other areas… but the fun of splashing all that color over a white piece of fabric was amazing. So here we go. I used a yard of fabric for each piece so that is a lot of dye and print paste.

 Soy wax resist using a large paint brush on cotton. The small tools to apply wax were in big demand so I went big. I was worried about washing it out when I had so much soy on there but it was easy after I soaked it in hot water.

More soy wax resist on linen. I ended up loving working on linen as it accepts the dye so well and wished I would have brought more of it.

Masking tape on a silk screen and then print paste with dyes applied through it . The big squeeze bottles full of color were so much fun. I felt like a kid in  the candy shop and I had been given ten bucks instead of a quarter to spend.

Dry brushing with the liquid dyes.

 Monoprinting on one of my small plexiglass pieces I brought.  This blue piece took me a long time and then I don’t enjoy the blue color.

 The orange piece above is just trying out different things to obtain texture.

This is a section of a large piece of fabric that I worked on for a few days waiting and batching in between processes. And then trying different marks on different areas. I think it has about five layers on it and I even worked it from the back. I was looking to obtain really saturated colors and now I know how. You can see from the close up how much bleed I was getting from the masking tape. I wouldn’t do such a rigid thing next time. I might go back to it and make the neon yellow lines a different color. Or cut it up and use it for something else. (But that’s the whole point of trying to make compositional cloth-it is the composition.)

It was very freeing to know that every fabric can be fixed WITH A BUCKET OF BLACK. And if you go into surface design with that approach, you smile a whole lot more when you pull your piece out of the final rinse and you don’t like it. I gave myself permission to be the newbie and just learn the techniques this time.

Two of the many things I will forever remember from Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan:

1. Stitch alone cannot fix a bad composition.
2. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist.” I love this phrase.

So back to work I am , stitching on a new piece and enjoying their phrases as I  try to make sense out of a piece I need to finish! They were great teachers and if you ever have a chance to take a class from them, sell a sewing machine if you need to and go.

Have a good weekend. I hope to enjoy some sun , soccer and the garden.

Be creative, my friends!