Two minute intro to deconstructed screen printing

Friday, August 12 is the deadline - if there aren't enough sign-ups for my DYE Classes at Oaks - the Pennsylvania National Quilt Extravaganza - they will be cancelled. To pique your interest, watch this:

Thanks, and here's a link to the class descriptions! Classes are September 16 & 17.
Next up, an introduction to the other class - a vest that is machine stitched, then dyed. Time to take more pictures!

Working and loving it!

Yesterday I spent a lot of time in the studio. I'm dyeing the fabric for a whole-cloth quilt that will go into the teacher's row at the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival next month. It's inspired by the work of Alma Thomas, and you can see a study for it in the Painterly Class sample picture below.
I finally got it rolled up in plastic to batch at about 6 PM yesterday, and now I'm doing everything I can to force myself to wait until 24 hours have elapsed before I start washing it out.
I also did some deconstructed screen printing - not a technique I've used a lot, but I loaded the screens with dye after the Oaks class in September. I finally released the dye; they are waiting to be washed as well. And since there's no way I'm waiting until 10 PM tonight to start the washing out, they're going to be stuck with only 20 hours of batching.
At right you can see two of the screens that are not yet fully released. Now I need more soda-soaked fabric!
Another way to fill my time will be dye a batch of solids - some fat quarters and a tee-shirt or two. They have homes already - more on that later! Thanks for looking!

I'm a guest blogger!

Check out my post on making a stencil-screen at http://purrfectspots.blogspot.com/2014/04/welcome-my-guest-blogger-lisa-reber.html. A detail is below. Thanks!

From spoiled to productive

OK, my sister spoils me at Christmas every year, and I’m so thankful. Last year she gave me a check to use towards the dye painting class I took at Pro Chem. This year I am going to skip going to a class and start saving for 2015, and my sister got me a load of surface design books – Dyes & Paints by Elin Noble, Screen Printing by Benn & Morgan, Finding Your Own Visual Language by Dunnewold, Benn & Morgan and Color by Design by Ann Johnston. And my niece gave me a gift certificate to Dharma Trading , so I can add to that list of books, or buy garments to dye/discharge/do design work on. Decisions, decisions.

So I have been working on some of the exercises from ‘Visual Language’ and have created a hand-painted stencil  to use with a silk screen. Here’s a picture of the first three prints I pulled through it.

And this is a detail of the first print I pulled, showing the moiré effect created by printing through two layers of sheer cloth. That alone is an exciting discovery, I think.

A few prints

Most of these are monoprints, and one is a screen print from a screen made with polyester mesh and house paint. The latter is a new technique for me, but it seems to have a lot of possibility. Now I just need to make up some more frames.

This is a monoprint with several varieties of “black.” The colors all started with some black dye mixed at 5% and thickened. That’s not really strong enough to get a good print. The grey is  mixed with 1% black dye. Then I added tangerine to one cup, and orange and blue to another. A third cup I added blue only to – a very nice blue-grey was the result.

This is the blue-grey, with ‘telephone dials’ that are the result of dropping a metal palette into the dye. The first time I did that was by mistake and I liked the pattern a lot.

The first of these two pictures is a monoprint using the various different blacks I had mixed up. The second is a ghost print with some more dye added, I think.

This was a mixture of all the leftover blacks, with areas of color removed using a small sea sponge.

This was made with stronger black dye using the screen I made with house paint. It was inspired by the print from the palette. A lot of the rough areas could get tidied up. Maybe I will just make the circles crisper, though.