Studio Kit

I have a piece due for a call in October, so it's high time I began, no? :)

It's 60 x 45 and, as you can see, involves a city scene. The city in question is Montreal - circa 1735 or so. It's not meant to depict a specific street, but people from Montreal will recognize some of the buildings.

On occasion, I shop at Value Village (a non-profit second had store) where I buy a lot of second-hand damask and cotton tablecloths for dyeing and sometimes find lengths of fabric) and a couple of months ago I found a long length (perhaps 100 inches) of untreated canvas. I decided to use it for this piece.

It's the first time I've used canvas, treated or otherwise - so I was quite interested to see how it would work. I can tell you before I've got anything done that it's quite heavy, and is going to be challenging to quilt!

I applied gesso first, and when it was dry, drew my city directly on the canvas as above.

And then I got my paints ready for the sky.

Looking deep and dark, no? Stay tuned...

Well there it is!

So, this little fern is finally done - I say "finally" because it was definitely a long time coming. After I finished the first fern back in November, 2011 (which I also made using disperse dyeing)

I said I was going to make two or three more ferns, I guess I just didn't say when. (Details, details...)

And hey, speaking of details, in these pics you can see all of the little tiny line of quilting, and the veining in the leaves. Although, now that it's "done"...

I am very tempted to colour in that leaf in nice, mulit-valued greens. What do you think? Yes, or leave well enough alone?

Next week, I start with a piece for a call for entry. It's a big' un! Lots of painting...

When I left you on Monday, I had begun some of the quilting - these lines are TINY - so they're taking a really long time! :)

More evidence...

Finished piece on Friday - with a little surprise!

P.S. Check out our friends at The Needle and Thread Network!

Last year, you may remember, I was working with disperse dye (also known as transfer paint) for my month-long "class" when I was a contributor at And Then We Set It On Fire.

As a reminder for those who weren't around then - my method is as follows:

Mixing the colours:

I used IDye for my disperse dyes (the link is for a Canadian store but I believe you can also get it at Dharma Trading, but any powdered dye that is meant for polyester fabric will do.

I mixed the powders to the following method:

a) 1 tsp for pale

b) 2 tsps for medium

c) 4 tsps for dark

d) 8 tsps for black

and then mixed the dye with a 1/2 cup of boiling water and two drops of synthrapol.

For a watercolour effect rather than the opaque result, you can thin this mixture with another 1/2 cup of water and once cool, paint your paper and let them dry as usual.

Painting the Paper

There's no secret or particular method to this process. The most important thing for me was the paper itself - I had the best results BY FAR using "good" or heavy weight paper from a sketchbook rather than bond (photocopy paper). I found the heat process bound the colour to the bond paper (that's what photocopy paper is for, after all!) whereas the colour just sat on top of sketchbook paper. However, you don't want to use a really, really good quality sketchbook paper as the colour will then sink into the texture of the paper rather than sit on top.

Once you have the right paper, make sure you have a place set up where your can lay your papers flat to dry as well as drip dry - one of my favourite papers was hung to dry and as a result has drips and globs of dye on it that translate really well when transferring.

As for the painting itself - the sky is the limit. I painted papers with one colour, multiple colours, in patterns, in solids, I did solid undercoats with finger painted swoops and curves over them, painted grid patterns, combed them, splatter them, "dropped" dye on the papers, smooshed the colour with my hands - or combinations thereof. Do whatever you want, let them dry and see what happens.

Fabric choice

The higher the amount of 'man made' material in the fabric, the better result you'll have. I had the very best result with 100 polyester silk which gives a really lovely glow to the fabric I also tried a sheer polyester tulle with a very dark value paper which produced a really lovely see through print.

Transferring the colour

Start by using a heavily padded surface on your table, and then putt a sheet of craft paper over it. Lay the fabric on that under surface "good" side up, put the painted paper(s) face down on the cloth, and then put another, bigger sheet of craft paper on top of it all to keep the iron clean. While you're working, keep the iron moving, keep the iron HOT HOT HOT(no matter what the fabric requirements are - you have two layers of paper between the fabric and the iron to protect it) and press down as hard as you can.

The longer you press and/or the more pressure you apply when you press, and the higher the heat, the more brilliant your result is. (For me, with arthritic hands, elbows and shoulders, pressure was problematic, so if I wanted brilliant colour, I just increased the time rather than the pressure.)

Further Advice

Try different things with your papers - using resists, cutting out shapes from your dried papers or tearing the papers into rough pieces and laying them out on your fabric as I did for the piece above. The key is to keep that iron moving and to do it as long as you can.

Don't worry if your first pieces are crap - my first ten were!! :) You really have to invest quite a lot of time and practice in this method of creating fabric to get a good result.

Okay! So, to produce my finished product this week, I used some of my already painted papers (they don't seem to have an efficacy expiry date, although they do have an end date in that you can only use them so many times before they have no more colour to transfer), cut them into angular shapes, used a fern as a resist under the cut up bits of paper, and ironed.

Here's the back with some of the (endless) quilting begun:

See you Wednesday with more of the process behind the process!

Here is Paper # 3 - Japanese paper again to augment the paper towel (which has a lovely sueded feel), as well as little square gold sequins and round silver sequins.

When I fused this one to the canvas, it actually melted the beads and sequins a bit - but I like the effect.

And this is the very first one I made called Paperwork #4 ('cuz that's the order I labelled them in)...

You can see that I was a bit tentative about it - I wasn't sure how the paper towelling would work, how to quilt it, all that - AND as you can see, the lighter colour green was a economy brand paper towel - it's quite obvious that it is in fact paper towel, whereas the darker, mottled green was our usual brand of towel - and it actually *looks* like hand painted paper.

On this one, I fused strips of the paper towelling to the side - all in all, I prefer the painted sides.

I'll be doing more of these in future, but I'll be getting back to the fabric on Monday - working on that new fern I teased you about last week! See you then!

Well hello - getting back to our regularly scheduled programming, we were talking about the paperwork series, (made from "mop up" paper towels, quilted, beaded and sometimes with added other paper then fused to a pre-made 8 x 10 canvas).

This one is actually the second one I made (after the first one I showed you, which was actually the fourth one I made), and, as you can see - I put fabric on the sides of this one, rather than painting the sides as I did in the last one I showed you.

The effect is much better with the painted sides, no?

But to me, this looked a bit like the Omega Nebula (also known as the rose nebula) so added some little stars along with the blue beads and quilting.

On Friday, I'll have two more finishes for you in this series. See you then!

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