Itajime Shibori and Painting on Silk Scarves with Dyes

Yesterday I dyed two silk scarves.  On one I used Itajime techniques.  Below is the picture of it clamped before applying the dyes.

Here is the other scarf that I painted.

Here they are after washing.

Really like this one!

 I might do another layer on this one.  It has lovely fall colors but might need more.

Arte de Tiza

Yesterday, 21 of my students showed up at the Paso Robles city park to create art

 for the annual Arte de Tiza.  Here's some of the best ones.

 This is Liz's who ended up winning 1st place for the middle school division.

 I'm leaving this one upside-down, because it looks better that way for

 some reason due to the angle of the photo.  It's done by a former student of mine.

 This one was by a group from the Paso Robles Arts Foundation.

More Shibori

I'm trying to find a little time each week for surface design on fabric.  It helps me keep a better balance in my life, since returning to work.  Yesterday I did two pieces, both very simple. One was on a small piece of fabric, about 18 x 18 inches, using Te-kumo shibori technique.  The English translation is "hand-bound spiderweb."  I used the directions in the Shibori Book by Wada, Rice and Barton as mentioned in last week's post. There's an endless quantity of techniques to learn in that book. Instead of binding with string, I used rubber bands.  I inserted a chopstick into the fabric and wrapped rubber bands tightly a round the first three or inches, then removed the chopstick.  I repeated it  throughout the fabric.  Next I soaked it in the soda ash, then dyed it using yellow, orange, red, and black.

The other piece I did was a spiral wrapped shirt using red on one side with a little bit of black and black on the other side with a little bit of red.

Komasu Shibori

It was great to have a three day weekend. Caught up on schoolwork, gardening, cleaning and then had time for some fun with dyeing, specifically Komasu Shibori. This is a Japanese resist dye method using stitching and tying gathered fabric together. It's explained in detail in the Shibori bible, otherwise known as, Shibori, The Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped Resist Dyeing by Yoshiko Wada, Mary Rice, and Jane Barton.

I folded the fabric in half and stitched as shown above, using strong button thread.

I gathered the stitching together tightly and wrapped the fabric from inside each triangular area.

The top photo is the whole piece, approximately fat quarter size. Below is a close up. 

I used Lemon Yellow, Deep Orange, Emerald Green, Chineese Red and Black

Space Quilt for My Son

This summer I finished a new quilt for my son, whose old quilt made about 18 years ago,  was in tatters. I used techniques from Ricky Timm's book, Convergence Quilts, to make my pattern.  Earlier this week I picked it up from Virginia Roos, who did a beautiful  job of long arm machine
quilting on it. Be sure to click on the picture below to see the beautiful quilting Virginia did.

 

Above is the top made up of three fabrics for the center section which have been sliced up and reshuffled to create the pattern. Two borders were added to that.

 

The back is made up of Star Wars fabrics and leftover pieces from the front. 

Paint and Dye

I've been very busy this week due to starting school again.  I have six classes of approximately 32 students each, so about a 190 students total.  I see 155 of them daily. But I found a little time to play today with some Dye na Flow paint and salt on Cotton.  The actual piece of cotton I painted is still drying.  Later this week, I'll rinse it out after I'm sure the paint is set and will show it here.

But in wiping up my mess today, I discovered some gorgeous paper towels I've been using over the last year or so,  that are wonderful. This might sound crazy, but I dry them after using in clean up and reuse again and again.  Here they are. They are two ply, which means I have two of each.  I think they'll be great in some kind of collage with stitching.  I just like their random quality and even how they dried into free forms pieces.

Attaching an Art Quilt to a Stretched Canas

Well, I'm back to school already.  Thursday and Friday were spent in tech workshops learning all about Google docs, slides, building websites, etc as our school goes Google.  I was way in over my head in most of the classes.  There was so much information and the teachers had to move very quickly, so needless to say, many of us didn't get it all. I don't even use a laptop, so just learning to navigate without a mouse was a learning experience for me.  I guess I'm a dinosaur when it comes to tech. It's a good reminder to me about checking for comprehension in my students as I start a new year.

Our Cutting Edge Fiber Art Group is having a show in December at the San Luis Obispo Art Museum.  All the quilts for this show need to be 20" x  24" and mounted to a stretched canvas.  The theme for the show is "Off Kilter."  I have mixed feelings about working towards a theme or a challenge.  I mostly like to work on whatever technique or idea is inspiring  me at the moment.  But then again, a challenge can push you in a direction you weren't planning on exploring, which can be a learning experience.

Below is a picture of my entry.  I had a great time painting the canvas in multiple layers of surface design, using bubble wrap, stamps, paint, large brushes, etc. I wanted the canvas to extend the colors and patterns in the quilt.  The canvas shows a half inch above and one the sides of the quilt, with and inch of so below.  I used 8 pieces of velcro to attach the quilt to the canvas.  If you are wondering how it fits the "Off Kilter" theme, it is because there are 2 photos of the sunflower, one printed on transparent organza which has been flipped and stitched to the one printed on cotton, increasing the petals, leaves, shadows,  and hopefully interest.