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%.