Starting a New Series, Continuing On.

This past week I've moved laterally in my body images series, and started thinking about my daughter's fetal ultrasound images.  Right now I have two daughters images to choose from, and they have generously shared them with me.  I dyed a lot of the fabric I want to work with, a lot of earth tones this time, and now I'm looking at the images, picking out what I want to emphasize in my work.  I love the way the images seem abstracted already,  although I'm sure you can pick out the spinal column here. Above the spine is the wall of the uterus, and I'm working on depicting that.

One of the techniques I'm using is shibori, I think it gives me the patterns I want, but I'm not good enough at it to predict the outcome..  With the piece below, I drew my marks to make this shape ( , and I know enough to stitch opposite the lines you want to end up with.

This is exactly what I wanted, although I'm not crazy about the color, it's to dark.  I can fix that later.

Yesterday I found this piece that I had stitched for a Jan Myers Newbury class, but never finished.  It was wavy lines, some of them trailing off the fabric then starting up again.

It was tricky getting the dye just where I wanted it, and theres a few unwanted spots here.  This sort of looks like vaginas to me, and I didn't want to go that far back into the pregnancies :), but I think I can cut them up and use them somewhere.  I ordered Sue Cavanaugh's book "Extreme Shibori", and received it yesterday.  Wow. She's amazing.  She talks a little bit about her process near the end of the book, and it's really fascinating.  I emailed her to order the book, her email can be found here http://www.suecavanaughart.com/Contact.asp

I've also started messing around with soy wax and bleach.  I'm able to control the results  better than with shibori.

Paula and I haven't stopped working on the other body images, just shifting gears for a while.