More Shibori Fun

A couple of weeks ago I dyed this Dharma Rayon shirt using the Arashi technique. 

The shirt's a little large on me, but I really like the drape of the rayon and how good it feels.

I had a couple friends from my lap swim program come over to do some T-Shirt Dyeing in my studio-barn. Here's a couple of their shirts. The one below was a very nice linen shirt. Although I had a  good variety of colors available, she apparently liked the same colors I used.

Front

Back

The shirt above was a 100% cotton from Kohls.

Below are a  couple of faux shibori, or fauxbori as Betty Busby called them. We used Dye-na-Flow paint on these. The top piece is silk, which was placed on top of the cotton you see below. 

Good way to get a two for one deal. Not sure what I'll do with them, 

but I like how they relate to each other.

  

Below is another 'faux-bori' silk piece.

Painting on Fabric with Betty Busby

   

         The week before Easter I attended a Betty Busby workshop in Carpenteria. It was incredibly fun and inspirational. I learned lots of  new techniques and methods to add to ones previously learned. Betty was a very giving teacher who kept us moving from one creative activity to the next. I brought home lots of fabrics to finish and some ready to be made into art quilts. Unfortunately I also came home sick due to some bad tuna I had the night before we left. I'm finally feeling ok again. Sorry the picture is a little blurry.

   We made some sun prints. We painted the fabric and while it was still wet, we put flat objects and stencils as mask on the fabric. Betty let us choose from the many vinyl stencils she has made using her silhouette cutter.

   We put them outside and allowed the moisture to evaporate.  After they were completely dry, we ironed them and worked with paint markers, intense pens, and more paint to bring out the designs. Below are three in various stages. The top one being the most finished one.

I'll show some more next week. Still catching up on lots of project after being gone almost a week.

Sweatshirt Makeover

       I've been working more on the sweatshirt makeover that I started in Kathy Howards's class, early March. I want to finish it so I can enter it in the Seven Sisters Quilt Show in San Luis Obispo, which means it needs to be done by early June.  Today I was machine quilting the back. All the quilting should be done while the garment can be laid flat, 

which of course makes it a whole lot easier.

I was having such a hard time finding an appropriate erasable marker that would show up on this piece so I could see where I was quilting.  The ones I have are white or blue, which are the same colors as the back of this jacket. It's very frustrating

 when you can't see where you're suppose to be quilting. I tried my new Bohin pencil set I bought recently but the chalk pieces kept breaking on the linen fabric with hardly any pressure.

If you have a favorite brand of marking tool for machine quilting, please leave me a comment below. I've been using the chalk pencils by Clover, but would like something darker for use on lighter pieces. I have heard mixed comments on the Pilot Flexion Pens that some quilters are using. I did find a Dritz purple marker that so far is showing up, but it disappears in 48 to 72 hours.

On a happier note, Lesotho Pink Ice-plant ground cover in our front yard

 is just stunning right now because of all the rain we've received this year. The color of it is so similar to the color in my jacket above. Go figure!

More Ice Dyeing

I needed to create some additional fabric tor the back of a sweatshirt jacket I'm sewing using my hand-dyed fabrics.  So I decided to do some ice-dyeing.

Above and below are photos showing the ice with the dye on top. The cardboard keeps the ice cubes on top of the fabric. Without it, they fall off. I've placed the fabric on an old metal rack which is on top of an old dish drying rack, so the fabric does not sit in the dye and melted water.

The fabric in the top half in the container below was scrunched and rubber banded here and there.

The fabric in the lower half was fan folded and clipped with clothespins

Below are the finished fabrics. The top two are created on large vintage linen napkins a friend gave me.  They have a beautiful floral pattern woven into the fabric.

This last one was done on mercerized cotton. I used Komasu shibori resist technique to create the patterns. If you want to know more about that technique, 

you can look under the labels on my blog for Komasu. 

Sweatshirt Makeover

    I've been doing lots of improvisational piecing, having fun making fabric to cover my deconstructed sweatshirt. The other week I was Kathy's assistant in a class she taught to the Bear Valley Quilt Guild on refashioning sweatshirts into wearable art.

 She got me inspired and energized to make another one. Here's the one I'm working on now,
 using some of my hand-dyes, including shibori ones.

This is the second time I've taken this class from Kathy.  Some years ago, I did refashion a sweatshirt collaging Asian fabrics. The lighting in the room where I took these photos

 was not great, but you can get the idea.

Above is the front and below is the back.

Monet and More

Last week my husband and I took a short trip to San Francisco for my birthday. We saw "Monet: the Late Years" at the de Young Museum. In Monet's later years his painting became more and more abstract. He also had issues with nuclear cataracts starting in 1912 when he was 72. He refused surgery. He did get some glasses that helped him somewhat. Nuclear cataracts cause your eyes to absorb light and desaturate colors.

You can see a big difference between his two versions of "The Japanese Footbridge" below.

The Japanese Footbridge 1899

Above is "The Japanese Footbridge," 1918-1924

Above is "Path Under the Roses," 1918-1924, which is more abstract than his earlier works.

Also in the de Young was a set of  intaglio prints, "Five Beauties Rising", 2012, by Willie Cole which really moved me. Each ironing board has a name below of its owner, Savannah, Dot, Fannie Mae, Queen, and Anna Mae.  The ironing boards with all their pockmarks are a metaphor for the hard life of their owners, African American women of former generations who provided domestic labor in the antebellum South. He actually inked up the ironing boards of these women. Below is a link to learn more about Willie Cole.

https://www.highpointprintmaking.org/editions/willie-cole

Beacon Art Show and Sweatshirt Makeover Workshop

Friday night was the opening reception for the annual Beacon Art Show at the United Methodist Church inSan Luis Obispo.  I was wonderfully surprised and honored when the judges announced that they purchased my art quilt for their permanent collection.  Every year they choose just one piece of art for it.  Above is the picture of my quilt, " Gothic Grace."

This year's theme was "Blessed and Soaring."  I was all over the board thinking of ideas for it, tall redwoods, birds, etc. One day I was looking at one of my ice-dyed pieces on  my design wall when I saw the lines of a rose window in it. Rose windows were first used in the tall Gothic cathedrals  of Europe as the crafts guilds of the time tried to build taller and taller structures to reach to the heavens. I thought this would be the perfect idea for the theme.

Below is the original piece of fabric. It is an ice-dyed piece.  I block printed the smaller circles in the window and machine appliquéd them to the background. I added rick-rack trim and handmade fusible black, bias tape to create the lines. It has some  hand-quilting on it as well.

Below is a picture of me receiving the award. 

 Thanks to my son for taking photos. 

Yesterday I was an assistant to my wonderful friend, Kathy Howard, who was teaching a workshop on turning sweatshirts into art wearables through deconstruction and reconstruction. 

Above is a picture of Kathy, in her beautiful sweatshirt/jacket starting the class. Kathy also taught a lot of fabric manipulation and piecing techniques, including but not limited to seminole piecing and square within a square. She has been making beautiful quilts and wearables 

for many years and had great tips and shortcuts to share with the group.

  The class was presented by the Bear Valley Quilt Guild of Los Osos. They were a wonderful, fun group of women with whom to share the day.  It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot.