Pages

Friday, May 27, 2011

Finally, the Fabrics

     I kept waiting for a brighter day to take pictures of my fabrics I made last week but the rain just kept coming. So last night, in some very bad lighting, I took pictures just so I could remember all the processes we covered.

     Some are really bad and not to be shown. I took it one layer too far or some of the colors bled into the other areas... but the fun of splashing all that color over a white piece of fabric was amazing. So here we go. I used a yard of fabric for each piece so that is a lot of dye and print paste.


 Soy wax resist using a large paint brush on cotton. The small tools to apply wax were in big demand so I went big. I was worried about washing it out when I had so much soy on there but it was easy after I soaked it in hot water.


More soy wax resist on linen. I ended up loving working on linen as it accepts the dye so well and wished I would have brought more of it.


Masking tape on a silk screen and then print paste with dyes applied through it . The big squeeze bottles full of color were so much fun. I felt like a kid in  the candy shop and I had been given ten bucks instead of a quarter to spend.


Dry brushing with the liquid dyes.



 Monoprinting on one of my small plexiglass pieces I brought.  This blue piece took me a long time and then I don't enjoy the blue color.


 The orange piece above is just trying out different things to obtain texture.


This is a section of a large piece of fabric that I worked on for a few days waiting and batching in between processes. And then trying different marks on different areas. I think it has about five layers on it and I even worked it from the back. I was looking to obtain really saturated colors and now I know how. You can see from the close up how much bleed I was getting from the masking tape. I wouldn't do such a rigid thing next time. I might go back to it and make the neon yellow lines a different color. Or cut it up and use it for something else. (But that's the whole point of trying to make compositional cloth-it is the composition.)



It was very freeing to know that every fabric can be fixed WITH A BUCKET OF BLACK. And if you go into surface design with that approach, you smile a whole lot more when you pull your piece out of the final rinse and you don't like it. I gave myself permission to be the newbie and just learn the techniques this time.

Two of the many things I will forever remember from Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan:

1. Stitch alone cannot fix a bad composition.
2. "Don't get your knickers in a twist." I love this phrase.


So back to work I am , stitching on a new piece and enjoying their phrases as I  try to make sense out of a piece I need to finish! They were great teachers and if you ever have a chance to take a class from them, sell a sewing machine if you need to and go.

Have a good weekend. I hope to enjoy some sun , soccer and the garden.

Be creative, my friends!

5 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing those fabrics. I enjoyed trying to guess the techniques used before reading the description. I must say, I know very little about surface design. Some beautiful fabrics! The next time I experiment, I will do my best not to get my knickers in a twist!

    ReplyDelete
  2. love the top two...congrats!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Kim- I would have thought the opposite from your recent pieces-you do know lots about surface design with your printing and really unique mark making.It says you-Kim Hambric art.:)

    paula-those two are my favorites as well.

    thanks girls.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I love! that very first one. It looked grayer when you posted it earlier but I like the orange. Thanks for sharing. This looks like so much fun.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Great fodder on so many levels ... learning, exploring, expanding boundaries ... and you end up with a few GREAT pieces. The others are fodder to be cut up and incorporated in yet to be dreamed up work. All wonderful and inspiring! I can hardly wait to see these "for real".

    ReplyDelete