Snow hanging from the rafters

Wow - close to a month since my last post. Lots of good excuses - you know the story. So anyway, after the Christmas last minute projects were done, I got started on a piece of art cloth which I have entered in the 'Never Static' show. The juror is Jane Dunnewold -- nothing like aiming high from the start.

At left is a picture of the cloth in progress. I think it's attractive; anyway I like it a lot more than a lot of the art quilts I see. It isn't going to challenge anyone, I suspect, but I like it. I feel rather like I should apologize for it, but I'm not gonna.

There's a lot I've learned already in working on it -- especially the importance of keeping the stencil clean, and marking the front of the fabric at the start. I discharged several of the snowflakes before stencilling on paint, and because the fabric was wet, I couldn't tell which side was up. Naturally, the back has several discharge snowflakes on it.

The next thing I learned was about curing paint properly. Yes, it was pressed, just not long enough. So when I gave it another neutralizing rinse for the bleach, you know what happened.

The next picture shows it hanging from the rafters preparatory to taking pictures for the juried show. Some brilliant person on the Complex Cloth forum suggested using grey felt for the print table so it could be used as a photo backdrop as well. That works great! Just need a better camera sometime . . .

One good thing I tried on this cloth is the use of gel medium. The white snowflakes are a very small amount of white Jacquard paint mixed with about six times as much medium. I haven't yet tried just white paint alone, but the mixture has a lot more density than the other paints do, both in terms of value and thickness / texture. It also globbed off on adjacent fabric the most because of not being cured properly. I probably won't re-make the whole piece, but it has crossed my mind.

Enough for now - gotta find pleater needles to replace all the ones I broke. That piece of cloth has been pleated and dyed three times so far, and I probably have eight hours into it to date. Picture another time.