More Detail

Deborah asked for more details about the "Letting Go" piece that's in the World of Threads Festival next month.

This is the piece again.  It is large for me,  60" tall, by 36" wide.

 In the detail, you can see the background is a dark teal blue, which is hand dyed organza stitched to wool and shrunk using hot water. On top is what started out as one piece of white cotton sateen, dyed black, then marked with soy wax before being bleached.  I cut this up and stitched it all down to the organza layer, and added lots and lots of french knots.  These knots get denser as you move to the top of the piece, which represent myelination, the breakdown of myelin on nerves, which is characteristic of Alzheimer's.

On another note,  I didn't get into QN this time around :( , but that means I can show you my entries, which I will do in a couple of days.  I hope every one who got in is able to go to the opening weekend, it's such a wonderful celebration.  I'm taking a Carol Soderlund class at the Crow Barn the following week, so I am hoping to see the show that weekend, and look forward to meeting all the artists there.

Dye Experiments

A few weeks ago, I was reading this blog,  http://magentafreckle.weebly.com  and compared the results with what I've done in the past.  I thought I had checked out every black made by Dharma and ProChem, but somehow I missed Dharma 300.  My main reason for testing them is to see how well they bleach to white, or cream.

 I use the formula I learned in Carol Soderlund's classes, and ended up with 10 color gradations.

As you can see, the 300 bleaches pretty close to the off white I always look for.  It also has some beautiful grays.   The Dharma 39 has nice grays too, but bleaches to this pinky peach color, which is nice, but not what I'm looking for.

I admit it

I'm a bit of a Carol Soderlund groupie.  I just finished my fourth class with her, up at Pacific Northwest Art School on Whidbey Island.  This class was Layers Upon Layers, and while I had already tried some of the techniques taught in the class, this time I was looking at them in a different way. I have been thinking about how to incorporate texture into my work, and the idea of screenprinting with cotton or silk, then a top layer of organza really appealed to me.  Of the several different methods we used in the class, corn dextrin is my new favorite.

I love deconstructed screen printing, and as you can see, corn dextrin does its own breaking down.  This screen was used at least 5 or 6 times, and it still has some pulls left in it.  I brought some orange gradation fabrics from the last class with Carol and laid some organza over it to screen a darker orange.

The picture above is the under fabric, and the picture below is with the organza on top.

Organza, being silk, grabbed up most of the red in the dye,  leaving the cotton a softer orange. I think this layering is a really great way to add the kind of texture I want to work with.

This was a 5 day class that for me ended up being 4 days because I had my appendix out the morning of the fifth day.  Whidbey General Hospital is great, and the Garden Isle Guest Cottages were awesome to let my husband ( who didn't know he was going to have a sudden 2 day vacation in Washington) and I stay over one night past my reservation. Carol and my friends Jayne and Paula babied me through the next couple of days and now I'm home feeling almost 100%.

True Colors

A couple of days after the Long Beach Quilt Show, I took a class called True Colors with Carol Soderlund at Quilters Studio in Newbury Park.  Carol is one of my favorite teachers, and this class was no disappointment.

In this class we did a series of exercises to develop our own color palette. I've been dyeing for a long time, but I'm sort of all over the map with the colors I use.  I was able to narrow down my favorites, and then decide what I needed to add to those to make my art sing.

We did lots of dyeing, made a few color pages in teams,

talked a lot about hue, value and chroma or saturation,

and took lots and lots of notes.  The wonderful thing about a Carol class is the exercises you do to affirm what you've just been told in powerpoint presentations.

After every exercise there's discussion about what worked (or didn't), and why.  Some of my preconceived ideas were thrown out the window.

I learned not to throw away any used dye until I've wrung every bit of color I can out of it, and

probably the most valuable thing I learned is being able to look at a color and reproduce it just by eyeing it, which took all week.
As usual with Carol's classes, I have lots of information to process, and lots more experimenting to do.