just teasing

If you're wondering what I've been doing this month - well - I've been making a quilt. It will feature in an exhibition this summer (a big juried one if I'm lucky, a small open-to-everyone one otherwise. All I can say about it is it's a bit weird (I'm not sure where it came from) and it's made of scrim. One detail above and one below:

I have really enjoyed working with scrim: I love the effect of transparent overlays - a bit like putting on watercolour glazes only with crosshatching cause by the texture of the scrim itself. I've used dyed wadding (batting) as the base colour, a purple which shows under the blue in the middle of the second detail.

Now fired with enthusiasm for scrim, I'll just show you the first stage of the second scrim quilt - various blues and greens "glazed" over bright lime green wadding (batting). Not sure where this is going next (though I have a number of ideas which should be interesting)

dyeing bright colours - a tutorial

I love bright colours. Decided I needed some for the quilt I'm currently making, so had another dyeing session yesterday. People have asked me how I get such bright colours: here's my basic method for dyeing brights.

1. First of all I use urea. It makes the dyes more soluble in water and enables the dye to dissolve more easily. It has other qualities too - it keeps fabric wet for longer (important when dye-painting silk for example) and if you dilute dyes with it it helps to get even-coloured pales and pastels. It even makes fuchsia behave! I would not be without it. So I begin by mixing a urea solution - nine tablespoons full to two litres of very hot water. Quantities are not critical - if you have some urea pearls left undissolved at the bottom of the jug they'll keep.

2. I immediately put my dye-powders into containers - for strong colours I put in 2-4 teaspoons per cup depending on the dye: light dyes (more bulk per gramme) such as turquoise, rust or gold need more, heavy ones like fuchsia need less. Then add a little urea mix (also called chemical water) and a plastic spoon to each container and stir well - the ideal is a smooth paste. Then add about a cup full of chemical water. Go away and have a cup of coffee, prepare your fabric if you haven't already done so but leave the mixes time to dissolve. If you're not sure, stir - if there's anything solid on the spoon it means the dye is not thoroughly dissolved so stir and leave some more (you can also strain through an old pair of tights to remove undissolved dye but I've never had to do that yet). The advantage of working with dye solutions rather than with powders are firstly that it makes the whole process safer (you spend less time risking inhaling the powders) and secondly it gives you easier control over shading the colours.

3. Mix up the soda ash solution: approx 8 tablespoons per two-litre jug. I have been known to use guesswork here and not have problems. MAKE SURE YOU LABEL THE TWO JUGSFUL OF SOLUTIONS SO YOU KNOW WHICH IS WHICH.

The urea and soda solutions keep for ages. The dissolved dyes should be used quickly as otherwise they bond with the water. They will keep longer in cool or cold conditions - a day or so (longer if you have a spare unused fridge you can store them in); in hot weather use within a few hours. If you have dye left over at the end of a session be adventurous - use it up by trying different colour combinations, dyeing different items - revitalise those dingy white knickers socks and teeshirts. Whatever.

4. Prepare fabric: non-PFD (Prepared for Dyeing) fabric (also called loomstate) often has dressing in it which needs to be removed or the fabric can't take up the dye: scour in hot water plus detergent; you can also improve matters by adding a handful of soda to the wash water. You can do this bit in the washing-machine but leave out the soda. Rinse thoroughly (in the machine is fine). If you rinse by hand, adding a tiny drop of baby shampoo or washing-up liquid to the final rinse will help the dye to penetrate difficult fibres such as wadding (batting in the US). I also tend to rinse out PFD fabrics in hot water before using as this seems to enable them to absorb dye more readily.

5. Add dye to fabric: in a separate container add the same amounts of dye and soda solutions (the dye solution can be diluted with water/chemical water). Pour/dribble/spray this onto the fabric. Use a second colour and repeat the process. And so on until you are happy with the result (remember it dries paler). If you are using strongly contrasting colours avoid overloading the fabric with dye unless you really like shades of mud!

6. Leave the dyes to do their work - preferably at a warm temperature overnight if you can wait that long. It's possible to leave them for too short a time but you're unlikely to leave them too long (I once found some dyeing fabric shoved into an invisible corner that had been sitting there for a couple of weeks and it was fine though I wouldn't want to risk it with silk which rots more easily). Then rinse, first in cold water to remove the soda ash, then in hot to remove excess dye.
Then wash in really hot water and detergent (the milder kind without added whiteners which could bleach your fabric slightly). I usually leave the fabric to steep in the soapy water for ten minutes or so - this makes it easier to remove the excess dye. I then rinse in hot water and steep in hot water for a further ten minutes before flinging it into the machine for a full rinse cycle.

I am not the kind of dyer (and there are many of them) who thinks her method is the only one that works. It is simply the method I learnt with, have continued to use and which works for me. If you're a beginner dyer do try other methods; you will eventually acquire a range of techniques that work for you!

Django in the dyes

I had intended to post about the fabrics I dyed last weekend, for a series of projects, the first of which is now on the way. The fabrics are cotton scrim (in twists on the top), cotton wadding (the tope folded fabric) and various fabrics. Have got hooked on the combination of wadding and scrim so am trying something somewhat bigger than a postcard. If it continues to work as well as it is doing so far I may well take my courage in my hands and try entering it for something which is why I am keeping it under wraps for the moment.

All dyed with Procion MX (except the cat who I banished - I've been very careful ever since the day I found him strutting proudly round the neighbourhood with bright blue paws).

The purples are dyed with Fuchsia (8B) and carmine (5B) and a series of blues including 4RD which is a sort of deep midnight/ reddish navy. I find I get good purples using these two reds whatever blues I use. Trying to dye purple with the yellower (postbox) reds produces a duller, brownish purple.

Django loves having his photograph taken and he was not going to budge easily off all that lovely soft fabric: he looked so contented I didn't have the heart to chuck him off (luckily I have a good supply of lint rollers).

As a result of working on this new piece (which could end up being a series of pieces) I am having to take a brief rest from postcards but they have already served their purpose of getting me working again.

A footnote on lethargy - it appears that I have an enlarged thyroid gland and may be hypothyroid (a lot of symproms fit, especially the one about feeling exhausted much of the time). Am currently awaiting the results of blood tests. Hopefully it is treatable - according to a friend with the same problem - and I may lose some weight and have thicker hair - wouldn't it be wonderful to look and feel twenty years younger again? Though maybe that's a bit over-optimistic, I can dream...

Feline fun!

Ok Week 3 (actually it took a week and a half - busy finishing off group quilt for the QGBI Button Up Challenge and it's amazing how long those final stages take) of the "Wake up Sandra by making postcards challenge" This week I decided to have fun, using a range of favourite print fabrics to create some more lighthearted stuff on one of my favourite topics.

This time the challenge elements were to a)draw the cat outlines myself; and b)use a selection of fabrics I've found difficult to use so far:

In the case of this first one the checkerboard fabric (overdyed a few years back) with the wavy stripes and batik plus gold highlights. The cat needed the narrow red zigzag outline to make it work.

This one's called Hiding in the Garden, something my cats do a lot of, especially when I haven't weeded and the jungle takes over; the background's a really mad Laurel Burch fabric that I love but have found difficult to use so far and the blue seemed to have just the right amount of patterning to provide the contrast.

The thrid one is another two-fabric one, called I'm not talking to you - I'm sure most cat-owners will recognise this behaviour:

The mad squares is another irresistible bright I found languishing in the "one day I will find a use for this" corner of my stash and it sort of made friends with the blue stripe.

The next one, called Chat en forme d'une poire (Cat in the form of a pear) is based on my white cat Bixy who has been on a diet for the last year but not sd's you'd notice (I'm going to have to take drastic measures soon). He likes to spend time sitting looking our of the window and is always there to welcome me when I get home. I've used one of my favourite Carla Miller (Rowan) prints for the background.

This one's a portrait of my cat Django, a sort of birds-eye view of him lying in front of the fire with his paws in the air, in the way he's spent most of the last winter. He really does have a lightning-streak belly and a lop-sided face. A couple of years ago he had a serious road-accident - a complex pelvic fracture, plus associated nerve-damage and I was really scared he would lose the hind leg and the paw with the black spot - thankfully he recovered and is now more of a home-cat than a roaming moggie.

My third cat, Pepper, likes to climb trees: I love the way cats go up trees really fast and then panic sets in when they discover it's not so easy coming down - most tackle the problem by doing a sort of controlled fall. Anyway this is a cat up a tree - not necessarily Pepper who's tabby rather than blue:

The final card uses a selection of fabrics - an African dyed damask, an indonesian batik, a commercial batik and a black fabric with holographic swirls I couldn't resist at a show (you know how it is). I hadn't had any squabbling cats so far so included the arched back hissing pose in this one, plus the tail end of cat disappearing off the scene familiar to cat-owners everywhere.

Now feel inspired to take it a stage further and create a hanging with wild prints in bright colours and black and white: I now have a list of projects to undertake as a result of doing these postcards: well worth while.

postcards week two

After long deliberation, and with a certain amount of trepidation, I have decided to include here the "what was she thinking?" ones, because I think you can learn as much if not more from failures than successes and I would certainly find it reassuring to dicover that someone else had failures too.

The week two challenge was to use scrim: I have a stash of hand-dyed scrim crying out to be used: I love its texture and its ability to soak up dye; I've also used some of what we in the UK call muslin and those of you in the US and Canada call cheesecloth.

WARNING: some of these are downright ugly/clumsy/amateurish but publishing them is important to me in coming to terms with my hangups about failure.

Sunday and Thursday I played with chenille, a technique I hadn't got around to earlier, the snake being Sunday, the abstract Thursday: my chenille technique improved between the two but everything I'd learnt in Liz Berg's class went out the window (lesson - even speedy projects need a bit of forward planning) in the abstract one:


Can't make up my mind about the Monday and Tuesday ones - broadly I think I haven't got there yet but there are things worth exploring, especially the way it's possible to layer scrim and stitch to get a painterly effect.

Wednesday's effort is cringemakingly embarrassing: a real "what was she thinking of?" moment.

I felt distinctly lacking in ideas that day and could only come up with the idea of contrasting scrim with satin, chucking bits on without care or planning: I didn't even realise how unbalanced the shapes were till I took the photograph. Apologies. I think I've learnt my lesson though.

Friday's piece was speedy, enthusiastic and exciting to do, and came together like a dream: I'm not sure where the dolmen shape comes from though I'm familiar with it coming originally from Oxfordshire/Berkshire which has its share of them. Saturday's piece, which I like a lot less than Friday's is a less successful attempt (it went dead on me) at portraying standing stones from the end of the lane where we once lived - the local legend was that a man his horse and his dog had been turned to stone by a local witch.




Of them, I think there's only one that I'm happy about at this stage (and I shall probably develop strong reservations about that as my standards improve. However even one makes the week worth while, and I learnt far more from week two than from week one when I played safe!

The Elusiveness of Memory

This is about a memory I thought I had. My mother was a GI bride; she met my father whilst doing war work in Birmingham; he was stationed in Sutton Coldfield, a suburb of Birmingham. Early in 1946 they were married. I was born in April 1947. Somehow I had assumed that my father had stayed on in Birmingham and did not return to his home in New Bedford until a year or two after I was born. Looking back this is I think an assumption I made rather than anything I was told. I knew my mother missed the boat (literally) because my grandmother was ill and she did not want to leave; as time went on she then seemed to get cold feet about going to live in the USA; in the end my parents were divorced.

Recently I made a discovery that - whilst it was unsettling at the time - presented me with a slightly different version of events which made better sense than what I'd believed before. Migration records were published on the family history sites and I discovered the date of the boat my mother was to have taken and the alternatives - all three in the Autumn of 1946; soon after my mother would have discovered I was on the way, I suppose, almost as if I was a parting gift to her from my father, though of course he would have assumed she would be following him in a couple of months' time.

My parents had been very young by todays standards, (22 and 23), both from close communities and away from home for the first time, during wartime and the immediate postwar period when everything was disrupted. Though I spent some years of my life feeling unhappy that I didn't have a dad of my own, only a stepdad, and had a tendency to hero-worship the dad it now turns out I'd never met, I can see at this distance that it was a difficult and unhappy time for both my parents and can understand much better why they made the decisions they did.

So how does this fit in with my earliest memory? Well, what I remember is my mother taking me with her to a large railway station to meet a man whom she hugged and kissed; in my memory I had assumed this was my father, but now realise it can't have been (on reflection I think it might have been one of her cousins who came to visit her and my grandmother at that time - he and my mother had grown up together and were like brother and sister - I have a couple or recollections of his visit).

The piece here, however, portrays the memory that didn't exist. Two faces, poised as if to kiss; two faces turning away; onlookers in the background; all done in layers or various organzas to suggest the ways memories sometimes seem drifting and insubstantial.

a change from what I haven't been doing

For some time now I seem to have been beset by inertia - part physical (my body really doesn't like the dark months of the year) and part mental (the vicious circle of not meeting challenges I've signed up for, feelings of failure and of the fear of failure if I try something new and so on. I am about to retire from paid employment and I have plans for all sorts of things I want to do, but I reckoned that if I wasn't careful I'd spend my life sinking deeper and deeper into the sofa if I didn't take myself in hand.

SO

I came up with an idea that seems to solve that particular problem. I have given myself a further challenge: to make a fabric postcard every day. This is the first thing I do each day after breakfast or after returning home from work. There's very little investment in terms of time and materials. I'm finding that for once I don't mind if something doesn't go as well as I'd expected: I can always do another one tomorrow! Ideas are churning and I'm working on other things too, including catching up on challenges, notably the Take It Further challenge. I'm also exploring new ideas and ways of doing things. Most important for me is that life is suddenly becoming more enjoyable.

I will admit I played safe with the first batch, which I started a week ago (week 2 is riskier because I have challenged myself more) - all use fused applique and free-motion stitching which are techniques I am familiar with, and are based on plant forms (mainly dead plant I still have to weed out of my garden - I hadn't thought of this as being symbolic till now but maybe it could be). Anyway - here are the first five, Thursday to Saturday in order:

what's all this white stuff?

Easter Sunday and I woke to find snow on the ground. By the time I got dressed, grabbed the camera and went out it had half melted, but even so managed to get these shots of snow on the blossoms of my neighbours' flowering currant:

More from Liz Berg's class

Am catching up fast with this class, discovering design concepts I didn't know existed, and producing lots of small pieces (mainly paper but the most recent ones have een fabric). I'm also gaining confidence and learning to work more playfully. Here are a few more pieces:

I like this one a lot - not my usual colours but the brief was pale with low-key contrast and I surprised myself. (The papers I used are oil-marbled, done ages ago)

This is a more familiar colour-combination for me (paper painted with brusho on plain sugar=paper), as is the next piece:

The next set of pieces are about contrasts. Firstly a contrast in scale, which is not something I've considered a lot in the past

More marbled paper - hmm, maybe I need to marble some more fabrics to play with too. On to colour contrast (the greens are from magazine pages):

And then to texture: luckily I had some textured paper left over from my City & Guilds days; now I need to create some more (I intend to go over the exercises a number of times as some ideas still do not come naturally to me): marbled paper, gel medium and silver paint, plus angelina for the moon:

And the last in this group is a contrast of shapes (I chose straight and wiggly - a bit obvious but it sort of works, even if it does look a bit like snakes crawling over logs:

And finally a stitched piece - the brief was to produce a small stitched piece using contrast: in this case I used a colour contrast:

I have some reservations about this one - I need to live with it for a little while before I quilt and finish it, and I may need to modify it. I'm hoping by the end of this class I will be able to see more easily how I can change things to improve the design of a piece. Liz is expert at this, but I'd also welcome comments from blog readers.

Liz Berg: Elements & Principles of Design

Sorry I haven't blogged for such a long time - January brought successive illnesses - none major but unpleasant and one after the other which left me feeling flattened. I'd also signed up for various challenges and two classes which I'm now having to catch up on. Most of my spare time in the last few weeks has been spent on Liz Berg's class, Elements and Principles of Design.

This class has been very demanding and also very worthwhile. Though I found the first two lessons relatively straightforward, having done some design work as part of a City & Guilds class some time ago, lessons 3 and 4 (there are 6 in all) stretched me to the limit.

The earlier design work is done postcard-sized on paper, a useful way of working which produces fairly quick results without risking loads in materials. I chose for the most part to work in cut paper (I've loved cutting paper freehand ever since I did a C&G pproject on Matisse). Here are a couple of the more successful pieces, from a section on size (including relative size of different features of the design). The first is simple two-colour design:


At first I really disliked this design but it has gradually grown on me (it's also one of the ones Liz liked, which helped). The second is a similar exercise but using smaller high-contrast shapes against a dark background. I like this one because I think the contrast works well. The dark paper is painted with brusho; the light paper is the result of playing around in PaintShop with a photograph I took of mosses.


The third is from an exercise I found really difficult at first but eventually managed to get a grip of: the intention was to produce a design which moved the eye round the composition. Used the same paper as the second plus some cheap dayglo stuff from the kids section of my local supermarket.

Once the class is over I shall rework these and some of the other designs as fabric postcards - plus other ideas are already churning around in my head - enough to keep me going for some time! I've also gained a great deal of confidence (much-needed I assure you) doing this course.

You can find more details of Liz's class (also called Better Art by Design) on her website at www.lizbergartquilts.com/classes-schedule.asp

I'd really recommend this - it's really good value for money: though it may look expensive to start off with it's packed with so much that is valuable it's worth every penny.