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.
All this cloth I have collected this year... these were made to test colour relationships, resists etc. They sit, piling up and they languish on top of my dryer.
I feel the need to put them to use, perhaps cut them up and have them work together somehow. This green one below involved several processes to achieve the texture and layers of colour. Maybe I won't cut it up so much.
This is a multi-colour silk screen process. I have tons of this stuff, so I will cut away with little fear.
Here is more of the green. I really love this piece. It reminds me of a Canadian garden at this time of the year - full of promise.
Ah, my dot cloth. This swatch makes me want to go back to the silk screen and dye pots to make more of this in different colour combos.
See you all later...
Lately I have been following with interest Pam RuBert’s posts about keeping visual sketchbooks organized. She collected a great list from her readers on how they tackle this – check it out HERE.
I'm no different...I too struggle with organizing and collating my sketches for easy reference. Recently I found a solution that has worked for me. I now sketch, draw, stencil and mark as I make the sketchbook….Weird huh? But this works.
Each one of my books contains several drawings related to one theme. They are all bound together into one book that is dated and signed. I got this idea from Dorothy Caldwell, whose work I love.
Here's how it works:
I start by slathering (yes, almost sloshing) black India ink on a large sheet of really nice white paper and let it dry. I work pretty fast using a foam brush, or sometimes I even pour the ink directly on the paper, let it settle a bit, tilt the paper etc.
My aim is to produce a rich contrast between the black of the ink with the creamy white of the paper. Acid free card stock quality paper or similar is very satisfying…
Then I cut the large sheet of inked paper into several 4’’ x 8½’’ stacks.
I fold these in two and arrange them into signatures ready for sewing into a sketchbook.
There are several online tutorials on how to sew these little books together.
Pam has a link to THIS ONE on her site. My favourite is a Coptic stitch bookbinding technique I found HERE. It is fast and fun to do.
Normally this would be the end of a sketchbook making exercise, but for me this is only the beginning. In my next post I will describe how the bookbinding and sketching come together and feed off each other!
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.
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.
Some love this stuff, others hate it.
I know some even refuse to have it their studio. I have been among this crowd...as I am usually suspicious of sparkly stuff. So why am I wasting my time fiddling with this stuff? My friend Jennifer, who owns a quilt shop, tells me that up here in the Thousand Islands region, Angelina is hot- hot - hot. Many of her customers buy the stuff, want to use it but some run into difficulty trying to integrate it into their quilts. Others overuse it. She has asked me to try it out and ''...come up with something.''
Given that I am interested in exploring what this seduction with Angelina is all about and that I love a challenge, I have decided to take another look at a product that I have previously dismissed. So, I spent this past weekend fiddling with all kinds of Angelina, the shredded stuff the we all know and the newer film.
This is a pick of the shredded candy wrapping- paper like stuff that self-sticks when heated. And next shot is the newer film - same as the shredded angelina but not shredded. Hmm.
This was my first try. A real piece of Angelina GROT.
I think that as a base rule, ''when coming up with something...'' it is important that at a minimum, the effort MUST yield something that looks better than the original product!
Here is another example of Angelina GROT - Yuck!
From a process perspective, I can understand why this stuff tends to be overused as it is fast and easy to work with. It it sticks to itself yet is not sticky, it doesn't ravel and there are no fumes - but other than decorative applications I am having a difficult time finding a serious application.
More yuck - with this piece I entrapped yarn between two layers of the shredded stuff - e-gads!
It was time STOP and check out the garden.
I needed a little nature study to remind myself to stop what I was doing.
I discovered part of my problem... there was no way that Angelina with all its reflective surfaces, could come any way near with what is out there
Back in the studio I went for a different focus. Instead I put Angelina to the task of helping me to express something more personal, more abstract. So, I ironed several 8 x 10 sheets of Angelina, trapping bits of film, wool, roving etc. then I drew directly on these sheets with a marker. Better.
Here is another one.
I liked the drawings so I cut them out and pinned them up on the wall.
This is where I'm at with this. So far so good and I am not done yet wrestling with this stuff. :-))
Lately I have been immersed in painting acrylic and textile colour studies. It has been a wonderful learning and discovery process but I yearn to sew. So, thanks to a short bout of spring cleaning I found this piece at the bottom of a drawer. This goes way back to my piecing days. I don't know why I turned away from it back then as it doesn't seem so bad now that I take another look at it. I think it deserves to be quilted.
It is snowing outside . I have decided to ignore the weather turn on some music and sew sew sew. But first I need to fix the perimeter...
See y'all later.
Many many colour wheels. These are colour intensity studies done with opaque fabric paint on black cotton cloth. They are drying under the supervision of my trusty lab assistant.
Lulubelle waits patiently for more wheels to arrive as I am also making a 2nd set with transparent fabric paint. She thinks that I am having an attack of OC. Far from the truth!
Here are the two sets moved off the floor. I have fused the sheets together in a fan-fold arrangement so they can all be viewed at the same time and shades can be compared.
Now that these are done, I am about to make another set - this time, colour value studies. This is positively addictive.
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.
There are times when I am faced with a very dry creative spell. These have been frequent lately. Wisdom has it that you just keep plugging...and this is just what I have been doing. This piece of canvas, has been needle punched (very satisfying process BTW) with fabric bits, throwster's waste (stuff silk spinners throw out -- or used to) and lots and lots of thread work.
I am not quite at the point where I would rather be vacuuming, but any day now.
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