Sun Printing on Paper and Fabric

I made it!! I'm retired!! Whoo Hoo!!  To celebrate it I did some sun printing on paper and fabric yesterday afternoon. As with many things, I approached it very intuitively.  I gathered together some 'masks', flat objects to place on the wet paint, which end up showing up lighter as the paint is pulled from underneath those areas to the exposed areas.

The first three photos show fabric and paper which has been been dampened, then painted with diluted Setacolor transparent paints. Next flat masks were placed on top and then the whole piece put outside to dry in the 105 degree temperature we had yesterday.  Had a lot of fun doing these and need to explore further. And I'll have time to do that now!

Notice dead grass below papers.

Crumbled up linen tablecloth above and below after it dried.

You get two fabrics for the price of one with sun painting because the back side

 is a lighter version of the front.

This and the one below are printed on paper.

Quilting New Quilt

Didn't have time to post last week.  Been very busy working to get everything done at school and trying to hang in there for the last nine and a half days of teaching. Sooooo looking forward to retirement.  I did find a little time to do some quilting, by machine and hand on my latest quilt, the one for  our Cutting Edge Fiber Group to be displayed at the next PIQF in October.

I machine quilted the dark channels with lots of circles.

In other areas, I'm doing hand embroidery. And in yet other areas, I may do nothing. It's an art quilt. It won't be washed and doesn't need it. I know the trend is to machine quilt the heck out of quilts with row after row of stitching, but I kind of like that the fabric puckers a bit, like fabric, which it is.  At our last Cutting Edge meeting we had an interesting discussion about how much quilting is needed on an 'Art Quilt'.

Ceramic Ethnic Masks

Here are some of the first fired masks of my students for this year.  More to come in the next week or so. I can only fire about 25 in each kiln firing because they cannot be stacked or they fuse together from the glaze.

Makes me want to make a mask quilt.

Quilting the Latest Project

         Happy Mothers' Day to all my readers who are moms. Both my sons visited today and my sweet husband did all the cooking  I had some time to start machine quilting my newest project, which was a great mothers day present in itself.  Finally got a variegated thread  I liked to work.

I'm machine quilting the dark fabric with many circles and am planning on hand quilting, and/or using embroidery stitches in the lighter inserts.  Not sure it that will work, but am giving it a try. Sometimes when the amount of quilting is not even, the quilt puckers funny.

Gold Quilt for PIQF Cutting Edge Show

Here's a picture of my quilt for our Cutting Edge's display at the October 2017 PIQF (Pacific International Quilt Show)  The theme for our exhibit is "Montana de Oro" but with a very loose definition. Quilts need to have gold color in them. I have not quilted it yet. The quilt is done using reverse appliqué technique.

The design in based on a photo of world's largest gold, copper and silver mine in Indonesia, the Grasberg mine. It consumes one half million acres of land.  I saw a story on the Rachel Maddow show months ago about the huge environmental issues with this mine due to the dumping of waste associated with mining.  Guess what?  Trump has ties to this mine and business conflicts. No surprise there. If you want more information on that just google Rachel Maddow Grasberg mine and Trump ties.

Mural Project

A  local  artist known for his murals, Steve Kalar, has been donating his expertise, time, energy, and materials to mentor my Advanced art students create a mural of cougars.  The cougar is Flamson's mascot.  All the students designed a cougar,, some more original than others, as will be, and then collaborated in putting the images together to create a collage mural.

They have been working on this project besides their regular curriculum since February. It has been a great experience for my students and the mural is turning out wonderfully!

Hopefully they will be finishing this up in the next couple of weeks. The mural will be displayed in Flamson's main entrance lobby.

Ice Dyeing

Here are my Easter eggs made early on Easter morning, tie dyed of course.

This is an ice dyed cotton shirt I made this last weekend.

This is another one. I really like how its rock-like colors and textures.

Here is the whole shirt

On the left side is the striped golden fabric I started with

 and on the right side is it after ice dyeing.

Below is a Kona Gold fabric which I ice-dyed. It came out darker than I wanted. I might do some bleaching on this one to bring back the gold color in places, maybe through stenciling or something.