Yes, indeed, Silk black in fact, Pro-Chem’s #610.
My favourite for silk cloth. Drop a little in a wet sink and look at all those colours! Add a bit more water and the colours merge into a rich black and all its various shades of gray, and best of all, they don’t split – no halos, no spotting, and no tell-tale under tones. Just black. This is specially important when I am over-dyeing a resisted item like the one below and I want a no nonsense black background.
Lately I have been involved in producing a gazillion silk and cotton swatches using all manner of dyestuffs. That and fabric paint, as well as discharge agents etc. I thought I knew a LOT about this stuff - not the case.
Just take this intense blue above. When it is over dyed with complements like strong orange (left swatch) or burnt orange (middle swatch) I see with 'the whites of my eyes' that the blue indeed does NOT discharge when stamped with discharge paste.
But then, I always knew that... what I didn't know was how gorgeous the blue is when peering out from beneath these complementary mixes.
Another swatch with an elastic resist. This one shows what happens when burnt orange is over dyed with mixing blue. The diagonal lines are discharged - this blue discharges.
Another elastic resist swatch showing what happens when intense blue is over dyed with grape then discharged. The discharge takes where there is only grape.
Here is what happens when sun yellow is overdyed with grape. Love the brown. 
More swatches...these are silk habotai.
Oh my, it has been a long time.
The time has come to get back in the saddle and post again.
This past year I decided to undertake the Artcloth Mastery program offered by Jane Dunnewold in San Antonio, Texas. The program is wonderful, demanding (I have several assignments that are due). I have been learning a lot from a great teacher and my fellow art cloth companions.
Here is a shot of the Art Cloth Studio in San Antonio. It occupies the entire third floor of an old mission church and is therefore huge.
Here Jane is setting up a class meeting
Discharged silk fresh out of the dryer with someone's respirator.
Black rayon discharged with 1) chlorine - coppery area 2) RIT colour remover (sodium hypochlorite) white cloudy area and 3) discharge paste (Rongalit) - grey stamped area at top. All three agents affect the cloth in very different and interesting ways. More to come later.
Here is a peek at the stuff that currently moves from my wall to my table and back to my wall again. The top piece is finally quilted. It was designed with every shade of red that I could find in my stash. I must be anticipating a long, cold and colourless winter...
I have concluded that I don't have enough shades of red and I need to make more - a good project at this time.
This second piece was made with some hemp that I wanted hand dye.
It dyes OK, but doesn't hold a candle to pima cotton or silk broadcloth.
I joined it with a piece of burnt orange pima that I silk screened with a couple of motifs. It is now ready for quilting. I feel that this one will need about as much thread as the red one above.
I find that this is a great way to create a shibori resist for dyed fabric.
And here is the result.
Not too bad. Next time I plan on using use a heavier thread to produce a bolder outline.
Well here they are -- altogether on a dark background (dark mulberry hand-dye) that lets their individual colour modulations peer through. This piece is off to the shop. Hopefully Jennifer can add some finishing touches. I think that it shows what can be done with Angelina fibres, which was the purpose of this piece in the first place.
I plan to pick more of this stuff as I am now addicted to the immediacy and forgiving nature of the 'hot press' process. I think that a lot more can be done with this stuff, but I have to stop. I have just received notice that my class at Haliburton is a go!!
Alright! Given that I love to teach almost as much as being in studio, I am looking forward to this week-long session later this month.
Gotta go dig up my class notes...
I am progressing with these Angelina drawings and this stuff is really growing on me (pun intended). I have bits of shiny stuff clung to all manner of surfaces including me. I have used up three bags so far with one more to go. I only have blue left. The challenge will be to alter the shades with entrapped bits of fabric, wool etc. A nice discovery has been how amenable the stuff is to recycling. The cut out bit from the previous drawing can be included and pressed down with the next piece - nothing is wasted. 
The spiral above is made with film.
My my, it has been a stretch....
Activities occur but don't get recorded -- that's how it goes sometimes with a blog like this one. Perhaps this new look will inspire more posts.
On the other hand, a lot of activities have been recorded on my other blog. We have just wrapped up this year's Art in the Islands Retreat for Fibre Artists and we are gearing up for next year's event, it should be even more fun!
Now that I am back in studio, I still have a couple of quilts to ship off, and one more class to teach in Haliburton Ontario later in June, then some quiet time to work over the summer months. Here are a couple of items currently on my table:
This past winter I treated myself to a felting machine. This piece was done with craft felt and dyed cheese cloth needle punched from the front AND the back - very different effects. This machine is an amazing piece of technology that can transform all sorts of fabric - usually the ones that would not make it into the studio, in fact the slinkier and sleezier the fabric (ie. slinky glittery knits, lames etc) the more interesting the transformation. On a painted canvas base the effects can be are magical. I am not done yet with this new tool...
These sewn strips are samples of dark brown hand dyes and black cottons and rayons discharged with bleach (coppery red) and thiox (grey, yellow and green).
These are more samples that I discharged and timed - 5 to 15 minutes. 
And here is what is on my desk! My ever cheerful finger puppets.
Did I make them myself? No- no-noo - - Bought them in a shop.
Ok, so today I used the same thermofax motif, this time with some black textile paint. I usually shy away from textile paint as it tends to rubberize the fabric. I used Seta colour thinned way down with extender and water. Once the colours were out there was really no stopping. ...red, then blue and even some yellow. Not bad, I am somewhat pleased with this piece. If only it were not so small, only 28'' x 20''. No room left for stretching it. I don't really want to quilt it as there is too much going on already. Next time, 28'' x 40'' at a minimum.
Black and white studies and small felted studies.
And...what's on my table
This is a piece of black viscose rayon with a motif discharged on it using thiox. I know that bleach is so frequently used for discharging i.e. removing colour from cloth, but nothing, I mean nothing can compare to thioIMHO.... all traces of black are GONE.
Here is the mix I used:
1 tsp thiox (Pro Chem) + 1 tsp soda ash (yes, the swimming pool stuff) with ½ cup of sodium alginate (thickener from Pro Chem) - gently stirred in a plastic picnic bowl and ready for action.
This is a Thermofax screen I made earlier in San Antonio with a little discharge paste ready for squeegeeing onto a length of black viscose rayon cloth from RG&S.
Voila! A crisp clean transfer of the motif yielding total removal of colour -- with the help of a little heat. N.B. I used a hot iron with a respirator mask.
Gorgeous! I am off to San Antonio this Saturday to learn a lot more about all this stuff.
How I spent Canada Day, Independance Day, and my Birthday week.
I have come across several posts recently from fellow surface designers about how dyeing in hot humid summer months produces superior results i.e. better dye exhaustion and deeper colours. MX procion dyes are cold water dyes in name only... what they really really really want to quote the Spice Girls is an ambient temperature between 70 and 90 degrees (20 -25 C). That translates well for southern Ontario's hot humid summer weather that we regularly try to escape from with modern air conditioning.
So I went dockside and took another look at our neglected storage shed. I saw its future as a hot wet studio for the summer months. It had 'Art Shack' written all over it!
In its glory days, this shed/shack was a pre-war cottage built on a narrow ledge giving out onto the St Lawrence River. It had a kitchen, a bathroom, electricity and running water. Sadly, all this was removed except for the structure when we built our home (zoning laws).
I started with an exterior paint job, and spruced up the windows and their screens.
Here is an interior shot. Some of these windows have screens that open up, letting in gentle breezes off the water. I know my fabric will be very happy, but some of this furniture has to go.
Meanwhile, I painted, painted, painted. 
The old fridge might have been useful for storing dyes but it is an energy guzzler (the door doesn't close all that well) so its gotta go too. The pot belly stove has been disconnected and is too heavy to move, so it stays...an elegant reminder of bygone times.
I removed huge amounts of red indoor-outdoor carpeting along with its rotten under-padding, yuck. The carpet had been glued to tintest (?) that had been nailed to a layer of battleship linoleum...nails spaced every 4 to 6 inches apart (ugh!). What lay underneath were beautiful pine floor boards, painted deep yellow and green - how eccentric. I wonder when it was that deep yellow floor paint was fashionable?
Given that this will be a working studio and I will be dripping fabric paint and dyes, I don't plan to do a major floor-sanding job. Just enough to keep the floor very clean and functional for the fabric. I really don't mind the distressed look.
That's it for now. I'll keep you posted on progress as the summer unfolds.
Look at these -- I finally found 23" long latex rubber gloves - long enough to reach the drain at the bottom of a laundry tub that is full of cold brackish dye water... they are called Elbow-length Mucking Gloves (they go past your elbow) and can be bought on-line from Lee Valley Tools for $7.95 Cdn.
Item no. BL650. BTW they will send you a wonderful gardening catalogue at the same time - free.
I finished up the 12 metres of tray dyed fabric. Honestly most of them needed a couple of tray treatments plus a third pass of LWI overdyeing before I was satisfied with them. Here are six lengths washed, ironed and ready to be cut up.
Here is one opened up. Yeah, I guess it's OK. 
A couple of days ago I posted some shots of fabric in the tray. This is a technique described by Leslie Morgan and Claire Benn in their book on Tray Dyeing.
Here are a couple of shots of fabric lengths that are quite eye-popping.
I have 12 metres of tray dyed fabric so some of them need to be toned down with a LWI bath. This will murk up the colours and give me some deep down dark tones, the ones I love.
Will post results in a couple of days. great technique but somewhat time consuming - then again anything really worthwhile is time consuming (grin).
A sample of stitched resist done in San Antonio.
Here is what's on my front burner these days
1) Group show: Seven Threads Studios at the Britannia Gallery in Ottawa, ON - 1 -31 May, 2007
2) Open House Studio Tour as part of the Thousand Islands Arts (TIA) group, also in May
3) Fibre Art Retreat organized by the Seven Threads Studios at the Glen House Resort in the Thousand Islands, 20-22 April, 2007
Yikes!
Back in my dye lab, here is a shot of my new work surface.
A 4'x 6'piece of plywood, covered on both sides with polyester felt, stapled and duck taped around all four sides. This allows both sides to be used, and the top slides easily across its two supports - the sink counter edge and an old microwave cabinet on the other side that just happens to be the right height.
Even though this is a small space, I still have access to both sinks when needed.
N.B. I Still haven't painted the room yellow yet. black stain on door still there from my dye spill a while back.
I covered the felt with with poly cotton sheeting as it doesn'tbond well with dye but absorbs wet under the art work (plastic would cause puddling). The sheeting gets tossed into the wash regularly. This large surface allows me to work with larger pieces of wet cloth when stamping, silk screening, stencilling, or foiling, etc. - is much more efficient than what I had previously.
It can also be removed and stored vertically when I want it out of the way.
Small sample showing two dye baths, wrapped, scrunched, stamped, and thermofaxed.
Below is a larger piece 60"x 72" just out of its first bath. This is a 2 yard piece from a bolt of Hathaway shirting. The Hathaway Factory in Prescott ON was closed Christmas week three years ago putting 140 people out of work. I was lucky enough to come across a 100 metre bolt of 60" light blue shirting. I would have preferred white, but the light blue is almost as good. It has a satiny shine to one side and loves all kinds of MX dyes. More of this panel to come.
I am just back from a week at Jane Dunnewold's studio in San Antonio. I have always held a fascination for the process as I love to muck around with dyes and paints in the studio. Prior to this workshop I had not really taken a hard look at Art Cloth other than drooling over images on the web.
Last week I was able to see first hand and up close how a simple length of cloth can be transformed into a work of art. I am now hooked.
These images show a couple of samples I made while there. As you can see I managed to layer as many techniques onto these two bits as I could possibly cram in. Each piece includes at least two dye baths, discharging, thermofax transfering and silk screening with fabric paints; oh, and and a bit of foil in the mix. Instead of yielding mud, the panels seem to glow.
I am now back in the studio making stamps with erasers and have a couple of yards in the dye bucket. A cup of coffee, NPR (or CBC...smile) a #11 exacto and a box of Dick Blick erasers spells heaven for me these days. Below is an image of a couple of eraser stamps on newsprint.
It is the part I like best.
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