Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Dyeing day


So, today, I devoted more or less the whole day to catching up on dyeing and related stuff - actually, only related stuff, as no actual dye was involved - it was all paint and stuff like that. The first order of business was 8 fat eights of complex cloth for a swap - I decided to see if there was something in my stash that was suitable to use as a starting point - and found this lovely shibori piece. It's big enough to cut into 8 pieces for the swap, but I decided to work on it as a whole peice rather than individually. The first step I added to it was to screenprint some designs onto it in various colours. I then hung it up to dry and worked on the pieces for the screen printing swap (below) but for the sake of brevity, I'll go through the entire complex cloth at once. After the screen printing, I added some stamps in various MetaMica colours (my mom helped with this) and then added some texture using Markal paint sticks and a stencil. Finally, I sprayed a bit with whatchamacallit - Mountain Mist? Something like that - too lazy to go upstairs and check it! Now I just have to wait until the paint sticks dry and then heat set it - could be a few days - those things take FOREVER to dry!
I caught up with a couple of complex cloth round robins (I've only had them a short time, but they were delayed before they got to me) - I added stencilled paint sticks to both pieces - the one on the right is actually more subtle than it appears.
And below are the pieces I screen printed -I used a variety of stencils added onto the screen with tape and printer labels - there are actually four pieces with stars on them, but they are much the same, so I haven't showed them all - lots of pictures in this post already with those to bulk it up!
And finally, here's some post - yesterday, I received this little mini quilt (which is flatter than in the photo - it was folded in its envelope) from the September 6-12" swap with my flickr swap group; today I received this Batik Beauties postcard from Di. Wow. Tomorrow, there won't be much to show, though, as my mother and I are going up to town - we might do a guided walk - haven't decided for sure yet. Should be fun, regardless, despite not getting any work done.

2 comments:

Vicki W said...

Those are great fabrics. I'm hoping to do some fabric painting this winter.

Anonymous said...

Lots of yummy eye candy there Kate, it's looking pretty good.