dye day preparation

These are just some of the stitched and clamped resist techniques I'm going to be experimenting with. There are also another half dozen pieces with soy wax on them ready to go. Now all I need is for the weather to warm up just a few degrees. In the meantime, I'm busy digging through past pieces, re-shooting them and posting them for sale on my LikeHotcakes! site with the object of raising the money I need for FOF08- it's a Send Deb To Art Camp Sale! As the new hand dyed pieces emerge from the dyepots they will be going on the block too.

Valentines Day

Here are a few more images of my "slow cloth" work that show the wonderful way that vintage cotton or linen damasks will take dye. This was the last of a piece I called "Tomato Freckles" now in the body of a giant horned newt. Old cotton cut-work doilies are great finds too. I wonder if they take the dye so well because they have been washed so many times or because they were made before the processes that prevent a good dye job? Any notions? The white fabric is lawn cut from an antique Italian wedding trousseau. I wonder when I'll know there's enough stitching on this one. Maybe when I can't lift it anymore. Oh, and by the way, I failed a studio inspection this morning. Voodoo only comes by once in a great while to hurk on something (last time directly into my clever little bobbin holder) and be critical. This morning the criticism was about an empty food dish.

Exquisite cloth!

There is nothing like coming home to a package that was an impulse buy that you had forgotten was coming! I won this incredible embroidered Irish linen tablecloth on Ebay for little more than a song and some postage. It's so sumptuous. I know I'm going to be hacking it apart and dyeing it all manner of colors but for the moment the snowy acres ( 82"x80") has me completely intimidated. Look, Dijanne, it's Banksia! The embroidery runs all the way around the four sides. How to color this stuff? What a problem to have. Can you imagine what the lady of the house would think about my plans for her finery? {{{boo.boo.boo.boo.boo}}}

Ancient Beings & New Fabric

Between coughing fits and lie-downs I'm finally cleaning up the guest room and I came across this old photo. When Colin was about 7 we lucked into an old Super-8 movie camera and I made this monster from clay with the intention of making stop motion films. There was once a complete cast of characters but Jake decided that they were more fun to play with than look at. So much for our film venture. I did manage to fool with the soy wax and some dye a bit yesterday. Again a strictly experimental process, no surprise that the turquoise is so pale - the mix was cold and it was chilly outside. The white shapes came from pouring soywax over a set of glass cubes and discs. The metallic gold dots were painted on an heat-set with the iron. 23"x37".

the daily shout out

Good Morning! Melbourne, Westcourt, Tallin, Vilnius, Zebbug, Eyguieres, Dewsbury,Illescas, Rio Branco, Hallifax and everyone in the US from Honolulu to Portland! As a person who hasn't had the privilege of traveling outside of the United States (or inside it much, for that matter) I am fascinated by the placenames and imagined lives of the people who visit my blog. I'm quite likely to wind up paying to continue using the NeoEarth widget that appears in my sidebar. Imagine, someone from Malta has dropped by recently. I have become a computer chair traveler. Someday, I may just get a passport. Many years ago I was telephone operator and I always loved the opportunity of getting someone an international, person to person phone call. How many of you even remember having an operator handle a call for you? Many of the women I worked with had a great deal of stress from that job. I faced the fact early on that nobody calls the operator to tell her to "Have a nice day!" so I rarely took the daily quota of abuse personally. When I was moved into the customer service and sales arena it got a lot worse. For a long time after I left that position I missed conversations that started out with "BITCH!". I'm one of those lucky persons who was blessed with a good phone voice so I took each confrontational caller as an opportunity at lion taming sans chair and whip. I usually won the toss. Yep, the board I worked in 1971 looked just like this one. Hello World!