Answering Questions

I've had a couple of inquiries re HOW I painted this last piece.
As always, I use the Pebeo Seta Colour Transparent paint ( Fr.)
I use a very wet slurry and the the moment I'm finished I sprinkle ordinary table salt and hang the piece sideways to dry.
Sounds straight forward.
The salt moves the pigments in the paint and the gravity determines the direction. If this piece lay flat it would develop a totally different pattern.

Winter Moon

As usual, the closer I get to starting something new, the poorer my sleep is. I spend the waking hours going over technique, fibres and finishes......ad nauseum.

Today I dove into the the simplest of the three, the most straightforward.

My only question with this one last evening, was the composition of the moon. I wanted something other than the Pearlized white cotton. I considered doing another patchwork, similar to what I assembled last year ........

but I thought it might appear a little too busy, seeing as this moon is at least 4x the size of the other. And I had no more silver. I tried an abstract approach, but discarded it quickly.

In a lot of "fibre art" moonscapes the craters and irregularities are features, either painted in or highlighted with quilting. In the back of my mind I was still admiring the results of the Poseidon's Eye I had used in the seascape. To give some crater qualities to plan white cloth I added some roving I purchased a short time ago, rabbit fur/lambs wool blends. It was actually white! Used with some of the darker greys and then anchored under organza, it stitched beautifully.

One of the issues with organza is it can, and in this case did pull. But the surface of the moon was up for a little irregularity.
Adding this to the night fabric called for applique, but with a piece this large I prefered to use reverse applique. There was a lot of material at the edge of the moon, cloth, organza and batting and I didn't think it would lie smoothly in a perfect circle. With the reverse applique the edge is fixed before sewing.

I like to cut my "hole" a 1/4 inch smaller than required. Using a full size circle for a guide the further the edge is cut about every 1/2 inch and with gentle pressure the edge can be ironed into that perfect circle.

Normally I would glue and then invert the two pieces and stitch along the inside fold, but the moon material was still too bulky, so I blind stitched the two pieces together.

Moon On the Water - Final

This was a fun little exercise, to ease me back into harness.
The amount of stitching is really only visible in person ( my camera is not that good ), hence the backside shot. In retrospect, I would do this again BUT I'd have a small amount of fusible material in the area of the cuts. This would ease the surface stitching and make it a little neater. Why didn't I do that? My brain isn't really working, YET.

After binding, I gave it all a quick once over with very dilute Pearl paint, just to up the shine factor.

What's next?

Time For Something New

So I'm committing to this illustration. I was so impressed with the simplicity of the last piece I have to do it again.

But FIRST... I need more bark material, a full metre.

This was done in 3 phases. First it was spatter-painted in black and a touch of orange, then dried and heat set to fix the paint.
Second step was to wet most of the surface with a spray bottle of water and them throw more, slightly diluted black. It was set deliberately on an angle so the paint would run.
After that dried and was heat set, I re-wet areas and dribbled on walnut water, just enough to stain it again.
So how to use this?...Slices

These pieces will portray a more mature tree trunk.

Pine Cone - Day 4

Well its not really fair to imply I worked on this all day. I spent most of it working on the quilt I had mounted on my frame.
Then I had a nap.
Then I worked on this pine cone for about an hour while listening to a Louise Penny novel.

Trying New Things

Need or want drives a lot of things and its no different for me.
I fell in love with this FQ of which I have half left.  Anthology Kaleidoscope Blue

None of my usual on line sources have it and its still just too miserable outside to start prowling the shops in my area. I would probably pay big bucks for this $$$$ I like it that much.

So the next best thing would be to duplicate it. Between paint and ink pencils I should be able to create something in the ball park.

So I tried to different fabrics. The left was cotton.
The right is a poly mix, (not really suitable but I wanted to try the colours on the blue to see if I could reduce the amount of colour needed).

The top pass is the ink pencils applied using Aloe Vera as the liquid medium. I had wanted to try this technique  for a while.
The colour was draw on with the pencils and then light washed with a small amount of Aloe Vera.
The second was paint mixed into the Aloe Vera and applied
The third was a wash of Aloe Vera and then paint applied
And the last was pure paint followed by a light water wash.


I cannot duplicate the white "blobs" in the fabric this way, I have read that Alcohol will move paint, but I also know that if I paint a fabric and then before heat treating it, blog it with water, the paint will move.
So there is still a lot to play with.
As the BrewMeister hasn't vacated my outdoor workplace yet, I'm stuck inside......maybe not such a bad thing in this heat.

I did a quick orange wash on my dull green fabric from previously, scrunched it to dry outside and then left it and watched the TOUR.
Not bad results. NOW it's interesting. I could add another wash but I'll wait on that for now.

Time to Play

With all my commitments met and small pieces shipped it's time to go back to painting and dying.
I'm not a fan of dying primarily because of the required safety restrictions both for myself and the equipment necessary. This topic usually results in heated "discussions" with hubby who has become the uber expert on household and food Safety. (Making jam is no longer fun!)

I started to empty the garage where I like to paint and dye in the summer. The car is outside and the place is swept and the tables in place...BUT....the space was usurped this morning for beer making. There wasn't a cue for the space until I cleaned it!!

So I played with paint in the cool of the basement. (Peboe Seta Colour)
Just to get my hand back into it...

Greens........I've worked with them so much these past months so I know what colours I want.

 After I finished cutting up my bolt of pima cotton (I have another full one), I ended up with 7 generous metres and two big FQ.
The top FQ was primarily green first and then blobbed and streaked with yellow.
The second one I started with yellow and washed with green and then threw a generous handful of salt on the surface.. I like that visual texture.

Same colours ..... rather different but very useful!

When I Don't have the Right Fabric....

I paint it.
If I'm going to feature some mature maple leaves I wanted an interesting fabric.
I'm not sure of the exact style yet but, in case I wanted some loose edges I needed to make sure both the front and back of the fabric had colour.

I had dyed some lime green fabric last September. Lime green is not the colour I wanted so I over painted it with a medium "stale" green paint from last year to which I added some black. After dousing the FQ with about 1/4C of this paint I crumpled it up and left it do do its magic.

Turning to the lower edge of the piece, I needed another shade of cheesecloth to alter the sameness of the green fabric on the close slopes. Using one of the pale brown cloths, again from last summer, I folded it loosely into a container and poured the remaining green paint, diluted, complete with black clumps and added some yellow, also diluted. A minute of mixing and this was left to drip dry in the sun.
Voila! My fabric needs are fulfilled.

And on the landscape....

(Pause to Crow a Little Bit) - Dogwood and Birches - Sold

I'm delighted to post that my piece Dogwood and Birches (April 10) sold this morning. It is being shipped to NewYork as a surprise for a gentleman's wife. She so enjoyed it at my sister's B&B  in Golden BC, he contacted my sister a week after their visit.

Here's a last look........ (My husband said " Well you can make another..." Right! Not for a while.)

www.lebeausoleilbandb.com/

Painting Day

The weather was perfect this morning, so I planned on painting.
I had picked and dried a lot of Queen Anne's Lace or wild carrot earlier in the summer but with all the disruptions I never got to use them.
They were certainly dry, but some had been too wet and the garage too hot and they rotted in the newspaper. However I did get a fair number of usable flower heads.

This is painted with 3 colours, gold and light brown and then over painted with an olive. While it may not photograph well it has lots of texture. The flowers didn't adhere well, hence, the overprinting.
I do love my "muddy" greens. But they are very useful in the background of many things.

I had better luck with the sun-printing with this gold piece. The paint was thicker and I re-wet the dried flowers to get them to adhere to the cloth better.

And yes there ARE letters in the centre of this piece. I had used this plastic coated board many times to pin my work to while it was drying. THIS time it transferred some of the label print to the back of the piece. LOL
It's a result of the very hot weather this summer. The board was in the hot garage and the heat probable weakened the bond of ink to plastic.
I doubt it will really be a problem when I use it.

Creating With Friends

I belong to only a few of the subgroups of my local quilting guild. I find I dislike being stretched too thin, and with regular meeting times, it is sometimes hard to move into that headspace when you're in the middle of something entirely different.
But the summer is coming to a close. That means the optimal time for painting and dyeing is fast disappearing.
One of my groups had decided last spring to meet this weekend to play with dye.

We are fortunate enough to have a gentleman in the group who takes this very seriously and is happy (and patient enough) to squire a group of Post Menopausal WOMEN through a lot of the pit falls.

I PLAY with dye. He is in the process of mastering it. I too, learned a lot.

I doubt it will change much of what I do, as I'm basically VERY lazy, but I will experiment again in the near future. As long as I can work in my well ventilated garage and the car doesn't need to be inside.. I have time.

And I apologize now for not taking pictures of the activity. I have only my records. Later we will meet again and i will try to remember to take some photos to post.

In the morning we played with "painting", thickening the dye with an alginate solution.

my sample cloth

I mixed a golden yellow, Cerulean blue , a red and a fushia. After showing them how to play and control the dye application, everyone went to work. Probably the hardest thing for people to get used to was the strict need for brushes dedicated to a colour, a bit like when in kindergarten and the other guy had the red brush. You wanted the red brush but the teacher said NO blue in the red!

The result was, of course there were over twenty brushes on the table. LOL

In the afternoon most tried a method of dyeing called "parfait" dyeing. Yes, like the dessert, cloth is layered, added at a fixed interval to let the dyes set and each addition receives a dilution of the original dye concentration. The result is (will be) a progression of fabrics in different shades.

I don't stand around and wait for things like dye very well, (or bread rising, or canning timing) so I will  attempt this another time.
What I did was deal with the left over gels that have a very limited life span.

Using the dye as paints necessitated the addition of the fixative (soda ash) into the dye. Adding it as a solution at the end, which is the norm, negates the whole point of controlled painting...it would wash and move the dye around.
But after it has activated in the thickened dye, you have a time period of about 3 hours.
We played for a few hours in the morning and had a leisurely lunch (watching dyeing videos), so we we're at the end of the time period for any meaningful take up of the dye to happen.

I DID use the layering method, however for the first two samples.
Starting with the deep blue, I scrunched a FQ into my container and poured the gel mixture, diluted to about one cup, over the cloth.
It was worked for about 5 minutes.
I added the second FQ on top and poured the diluted golden yellow gel over the new cloth, working it only enough to get all of the white into the dye solution.

 Check back to the top sample.

This blue is very pale, echoing the edge bleed of the first fresh sample. This is not a true dye colour, it is a commercial mixture, so when they try to work at the end of their useful time, it gets interesting.

And boy was this dye at the end of it's life span.

Adding the yellow on top gave another interesting sample. The yellow, too, was exhausted but the interaction between the blue and the yellow gave a lovely soft green mix. VERY useful.

The reds still had some punch left in them.
 I combined the red and the fushia to get this brilliant sample. The blue contamination may be from the "dirty brush" syndrome.

But  WASTE NOT WANT NOT....

I have 3 very useful and unique pieces of fabric.






Our learned friend is on a mission to mix his own BLACK. This doesn't exist, other than chemical mixtures between the primaries. We've all seen it, black T shirts and jean fading to blues, and grey and even greens. When I discharged a piece of black material for another piece, I got rust.

So I took the remainder of his gelled black. But this time I accordion folded a FQ and stood it upright on its edge, in the gel. And I got this....

a nice little Shibori style...

But here it is very evident that this is also a tired mixture.

This activated dye is near the end of its usefulness and the mixture is coming apart. Some colours react faster than others.
Most of this piece now reads blue and both red and green are coming through very clearly.

There IS a science to this.......my goodness a whole industry.
But it fun to play.

Twiddling My Thumbs.

While I work on the cats in my head I keep busy.
There was this piece of cloth I had dyed a year ago.

And there was this image I found on the internet.

I thought they might look nice together.

(It's much better up close and in person. LOL )

Background Frames

I did run a few errands today and played a bit with some dye colours. But as the heat drove me back indoors, I retreated to my sewing room and completed 4 of the background for birds.

Each follows the suggested outlines from the block prints I made first and each is either picked out or accented with one of 5 colours.  I think that will be enough, but who knows. I can add more when I finish each piece.

A Day Without Sewing.......Never!

So I'm between major pieces again, but my mind has already begun working on another item. In the mean time, I started finishing up the small backgrounds for Birds, I had started in June ( Batch Painting).

These will probably all be envelope finishes but on each I've begun picking out the stamped and painted leaves.
When the time comes to add the bird, I'll determine a suitable perch for it depending on the pose.

It really doesn't take much to add some punch to these. Only 15 to go. But they're quick work. It's also a great way to use up scraps of batting and stabilizer.

5 Birch - Final

This will only be 2  days late for our anniversary. I finished quilting the whole piece, everything but the leaves and the boles of the the birch trees. That took two days.
I'll finish the edges of this tomorrow, with a facing, and hang in it my dining room for Hubby.

Gee what a Lucky guy!

5 Birch - When Enough is Enough

I spent most of yesterday putting on leaves. There are four different materials here. I had cut the same volume from each and "randomly" applied them.

 2 colours, bronze and purple

  4 colours, bronze. purple, pink and red.


It wasn't enough. I used all but the "pink" There were sections of that material that were too colourless.

In the end I added more red. I can still add more, but I don't' think I need to.

After a break while I watched the finish of the "Tour de France", I bit the bullet and started in on the main trees. They were a bit plain in comparison to the three small ones. After I edged the left hand side with a dull beige, I got out the ink pencils and added more snudge, and interest. As a last touch, I increased the "Shadow" areas where the shrubs would be blocking the light.

This is really touchy work, and as edge areas becomes dampened to spread the ink, it increases the length of time I have to wait to finish this.
The remainder needs to be over quilted.
I had hoped to have this complete for today as I intended it a gift ...for our anniversary.
Maybe tomorrow.