Designing New Quilt

Time to take some of my precious hand dyed fabrics and do something with them instead of keeping them in stacks in my overcrowded studio.  But, it's just so hard for me to cut some of these fabrics up.  However it is clearly what needs to be done.  Here's some pictures from my design wall of fabrics I'm considering for a quilt. Five of the fabrics are hand-dyed, the other six are commercial ones.

The fabric in the top right is a stitched shibori piece I made a couple of years ago. 

 That's the one that will be hardest to cup up.  

What's Happening on My Design Wall

This last weekend, I went through my ever increasing stack of hand-dyed fabrics to figure out what  to do with them.  Some of the shibori and ice dyed  fabrics have such intense areas of pattern that to cut them up seems a shame.  Yet, I don't think they are all candidates for whole cloth quilts either.  A few of them might be.  So I threw these up onto my design wall to see how they would work with each other and did a few sketches.  The marbled fabrics are a little tricky to integrate well with other fabrics.  So I was looking at patterns and colors that played well with each other.  All of the ones below are hand-dyes except for the one with the gorgeous black background with green and orange patterns third from the right end. I picked that one up at PIQF at the Ananse Village booth.  They always have such wonderful batiks from Africa.

The small strip of black and white patterned fabric on the right is also commercial.  Black and white seems to always work well with lots of brights.

Sometimes I think I should just try to sell all my dyed fabrics, but I like them too much and it's a lot of work marketing yourself online, for which I don't have time or interst.  Looking forward to having some time to figure this all out.  

More Hand-dyed fabrics

Had time last Sunday to do a little dyeing. Here's the results.

This was folded and dyed in a small box, with orange in bottom of the box

 and blue added to folded edges.

Closeup of piece.  Definitely needs something more in the middle, silkscreening 

or some kind of texture.

This one I accordion folded the fabric, rolled it up, put a few rubber bands around it to keep  the roll together and  placed it into a small container.  Next I squirted dyes into the folded edges on both ends.

Really like how this one came out.

Closeup

This one was scrunched up into a small container, adding one color at a time, scrunching up more fabric, adding another color and so on.

Close up

Another Closeup

This one was placed in a large garbage can lid.  I pleated the fabric at tboth ends, tyeing it together and made small circles using rubber bands at random in center.  Then I squirted different dyes onto it.

This closeup shows the floral like designs.

Yeah! Two Hand-dyed Quilts Finished

Yesterday I finished up two quilts that I am planning on entering into our Cutting Edge group exhibit for the Pacific International Quilt Show this next October. Both quilts still need to titles and labels. I'd love some suggestions for titles, so please send me a comment on any ideas you have.

This one is made from three arashi shibori fabrics.  I wanted the fabrics to speak for themselves and did not want to take away from their strong designs by adding a lot of stitching or embellishment.

The one below is made from two ice dyed fabrics.  The side borders have embroidery and the top and bottom borders have fabrics with rubbings made from one of my linoleum blocks using oil based paint-stiks.  The top corners have angelina fibers and the bottom corners foiled designs.

  

Ok, now help me come me come up with some names for these two quilts.  Thanks for your help.

New Dyeing and Broken School Kiln

I am a full time middle school art teacher.  I'm sure I mentioned that before. Well, I found out on Monday from the school district electrician that my kiln  would cost $700 to fix and due to it's age and condition, it was not worth it.  A new one, of the size and quality needed for the amount of projects that are fired yearly, would cost about $2800 to buy and install. Over the last fifteen years, 2700 children have learned how to think and create in a three dimensional way, making 4500 unique clay projects through the Flamson visual arts program.  The students love to work in clay.  It is such a responsive, forgiving media in which to create a variety of things, as you can see below.

This is a ceramic personality box made by an 8th grader showing aspects of her personality.

These ethnic ceramic masks were made by 7th graders.

Four classes were finished making their pinch and coiled pots and two others were in the middle of making their gothic gargoyles and mythic creatures. They were in the drying cage awaiting their first firing, known as the bisque firing.  When they are in this state, they are extremely fragile.
Fortunately, my wonderful colleagues at the high school and other middle school, have pitched in to help me with getting them fired.  Unfortunately, I had to box up 120 fragile projects and cart them around to the schools.  Today, I have to unload and reload the kiln at Lewis.  Tomorrow, I;m hoping to get the projects black that were fired at the high school, and then on Tuesday, go back to get the balance of them at Lewis.

Then students will glaze these, and I'll need to ask my great colleagues to re-fire all of them and pack them up and drive them around town.  I'm hoping not to break any projects in the process.

Our district is broke, our state has not been funding education as it should be for many years and there isn't any money for a new kiln, so I'm now trying to figure out some fundraising.  So it's been a very busy week, without much time for my own art.

I did manage to have fun dyeing the piece below by scrunching it up and wrapping it in some netting, like the type found around bags of onions.  Then I applied the dye, using a syringe.  I like how some of the white remains in this piece, giving it some great contrast and sparkle.