Mudcats final

For the moment, this series of raw edge, hand stitched pieces has run it's course. Now I have to make myself finish them so they don't languish in UFO land. Too much fun to waste. I think I'm going to cover a large(30"x30") pillow with this one. Eeww, actually sewing? I have a ton of administrative work to get through; pieces to ship, new fabrics to post for sale, entries to finish and mail, and that power point presentation looming...all with Spring fever lulling me senseless. Yesterday afternoon I sat outside on the deck painting fabric and listening to the frogs and owls telling tales - a perfect day.

Rust Never Sleeps

Lately, neither do I for any extended period of time. You would think I would need a good night's sleep after yesterday. After I finished drying and folding all the new fabric, I decided it would be a sin to waste the beautiful weather ironing.Instead, I got busy with the annual Cleaning of the Pool, easily on a par with the Cleaning of the Aegean Stables.

This year I beat the tree frogs to their egglaying but they were not too busy to hang around on the walls of the pool kibbitzing as I worked. In the foreground, Jim's cast iron frying pans are hard at work rusting a couple of pieces of fabric that got left behind. The studio is in chaos with piles of fabric everywhere waiting to be worked on. Tomorrow.

Chag Sameach - Happy Passover !

wash day was never like this

This beats using a dryer any day but I'm real glad that I didn't throw out my old ironing board. You know, the kind you can adjust for ironing while sitting. My grandmother is spinning in her grave. The rusty business in the middle here is one of my favorites. The spotty looking things are in a preliminary state. Painting comes next. Some of these things look like skins taken from non-terrestrial beings. My "Custom Blood" recipe worked out quite nicely. I usually don't dally much with reds unless they are close to neutral. From the sublime to the ridiculous. All delicious.

Spirits in the Cloth

It was a transcendent day at the dyeworks yesterday. I found the right music (thanks Vin), surrounded myself with all the tools and materials and worked the fabric directly on the table like I was working pizza dough (but not too much kneading). Some of this fabric is top shelf 400M and batiste from Testfabric, some is mongrel cotton from OHCO, some vintage damasks from strange tables in distant times. Spirits in the cloth. Now for the fun. Finding out just what went on in all those mason jars and baggies over night. These are wet so don't get excited yet about the intensity of the colors but there was almost no dye in the rinse water. A portent of good things. These were rinsed in tubs of water that stood overnight on the deck. I feel for all the generations of women who hauled the laundry down to the river to pound the clothes on rocks and rinse in the freezing streams! I'll let these drip dry for a while before I try to haul them upstairs to the washing machine. Many of these pieces are destined for further transformation through discharging and textile paints.

Dye Day Redux

I finally got a chance to get the rest of that fabric into the dyes. It was too beautiful a day to NOT be outside working on something but now I'm pooped and will save the rinse-wash-dry-iron boogie until tomorrow. Best to batch anyway.

good Motto

I wish they had sent one in my size! Colin is the only street team rep for Rhymesayers Entertainment. He gets cool freebies in the mail. The band is Atmosphere and that <- is the name of the new CD that dropped yesterday.

FIBERcrack!

The making of it anyway! After I get home from the office today I'm going to be incommunicado for a while. I forgot how much fun magik-making was. left - Worlds Away 25"x18" below - Mystic Cheerioz 17"x23"

Fizzy Fat Quarters

I returned to the studio last night and started rummaging through all the wonderful commercial cottons I was recently gifted with. My intention for these fabrics is to transform them any way I can. These two fat quarters have been discharged and then hand painted with textile paint with some iridescent powder mixed in for sparks. They've been heat set and I don't really want to see if they are wash fast since my intention is to use them only for Art pieces that will never be washed or dried. The base fabrics are all excellent quality cotton that you will probably recognize if you look hard enough. As these accumulate and strike my fancy (or not) I will start moving them over to Like Hotcakes! where they will be for sale.

Juicy bits

Okay - here's what excites me about dyeing my own fabric. This black is just like most black horses - from a distance they look inky. Step up close to pat a flank and you discover that their color is more likely a layer of dark brown, rusts, with black dusted over the top. In this instance, iridescent paint too. Behind that one is one of the two rusted pieces that came out so well. The teal damask has an overlay of iridescence too.Impossible to photograph but still gorgeous.

Then again there's a fool at every party!

Personal Archeology

I'm worn out and not entirely thrilled. It's a real mixed bag of results. Some of the things that I already know won't suit the work I have in mind are posted for sale on my Like Hotcakes blog. The second day of hand dyeing is all about the hard work - the serious cleanup, the rinsing, washing, drying, ironing, measuring, documenting....yada yada, on and on. There are a few jewels still rumbling around in the dryer waiting to pick up my spirits later on. While I was rooting around in one of my directories looking for old hand dye images to delete, I found this one from early 2006. The imagery got me thinking about the work that I want to be doing. I have no idea what became of the fabric. Hacked up into something no doubt.