Obsessive About Dyeing

Obsessive About Dyeing

Dyeing fabrics is an obsession.  I began with cottons as directed in the Elizabeth Barton class, Dyeing to Design, that I took over at Academy of Quilting.  I had little interest in dyeing or so I thought, and only took the class because Elizabeth was teaching it and I wanted to take a class with her and it was the first class closest to the date when I started researching her classes.  I had no idea I’d fall so completely in love with dyeing.  But I did.  After her class ended, I took her other dyeing Class – Basic Dyeing for Quiltmakers where we learned to over dye and dye just about any color we wanted.  It was thrilling to see a color, figure out what primary colors went into it and then create it!  But as is my way, I wasn’t content to dye just cottons.

I decided I had to learn how to dye wool, which is a different process entirely, so I could finish my block of the month designs (more on that in another post). So I went over to Dharma Trading, a great company that sells dyes and everything related to dyeing.  I sourced wool fabric, also not as easy as one might think, and then purchased a small amount of wools, silks, raw silks and silk/wools from a couple of different places.  I even found some lovely silk velvet at Dharma, perfect to use on my wool appliqué pieces that I began designing a few months ago.  And I began dyeing.

Fabrics

Aren’t they beautiful?

Here are all the cotton fabrics I dyed in Elizabeth’s class, including some of my silk screens and shibori dyed cottons…hand-dyed fabrics

Now I’m back to designing so I can use all of these lovely fabrics.  This is the beginning of Mr. Pig.  He still needs to be embellished and is one of twelve blocks for my Block Of the Month project featuring cookie jars that I’m in the midst of creating patterns and, hopefully, kits for, that will come with many of my hand-dyed fabrics as well as everything you’ll need to make each block.

Notice the cotton fabric to the far left?  That is one of my shibori dyed cottons and the green wools and pink wool and velvet are all my hand-dyed fabrics too!  Mr. Pig

PigSketch

Obsessive About Dyeing

Fabric Painting & the Fun Begins!

Fabric painting was something I knew nothing about before taking Elizabeth Barton‘s online class Dyeing to Design at the Academy of Quilting.  Fabric painting is the process of combining fabric dye with a thickener so it can be used to paint fabric, just as one would paint on a canvas.  Think about that.  The possibilities are endless!!  As we had been silk screening the week before, I used a couple of my silk screened fabrics and painted on them and then decided to branch out and paint on a blank white piece of cloth.  Here are some of my doodles.

As you can see I had fun!  I also painted the fabric in the photograph below, but I didn’t have a clear idea of what to do with any of it.  While painting the fabric in this photo below I was thinking about how we are all moving along in our lives, sometimes following, at other times leading, sometimes crossing paths with others, but can often feel we are alone even though we live in a world populated by so many.  Still, if we can just remember to reach out to others, we find our experiences are shared by many.  Should I have just written all that in the first person singular?  But then I might have felt that alone feeling again… Anyway, I sat with these various fabrics and did nothing for several days.

a-rippleThen, having given up on the idea that I was going to be miraculously hit with a blast of inspiration, I cut up the fabric (just a little, nothing radical) and sewed it back together (photo below.)  And then I sent it off to my class for feedback, that’s the whole reaching out thing that I mentioned above…  Elizabeth is an excellent teacher and can be depended upon to make terrific suggestions. 5abstractWhich led to this…5abstract1And this…5abstract2And this…5abstract4

And finally, finally, finally… this…5abstract6Which became this…  traveling along our various paths…5togetherAnd finally, this…  reaching out to others and no longer feeling so alone…lesson5front-copyHere are a few close ups of the machine and hand stitching…

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And this is the back.lesson5back-copy

Traveling Together measures 21.75″ x 21.75″  All the fabric was hand painted and hand dyed. Then quilted using a cotton batting and kona cotton back.  I did the hand stitching using a perle cotton thread as well as a wool thread. The binding was hand dyed and sewn on, as was the label.

I still have not figured out what to do with my various silk screens, but I just finished painting over a few of them and plan to over dye a couple of others, so will see what the results are after that.  In the meantime I painted a few more half yard pieces of fabric and am eager to see how they turn out.

Elizabeth’s Dyeing to Design class is over, but she’ll be teaching it again in the spring, I believe.  I cannot recommend it more highly.

Obsessive About Dyeing

Fear of Dyeing

I was going to entitle this post Fear of Dyeing (and Silk Screening) but Where’s the Pun in That?  But it was too long so I just went with the edited version… a girl can have a little pun.  Okay, okay that’s enough. I’ve filled my quota of puns and I’m barely out of the starting gate.  It’s all going to be very serious from here on out.

In my last post I promised screen printing, so here we go.  All the photographs below are of techniques described by Elizabeth Barton in her wonderful class Dyeing to Design over at the Academy of Quilting.

The last and only time I did screen printing was when I worked (briefly) for the fashion designer Zandra Rhodes while living in London having just graduated from Parsons School of Design about a hundred years ago.  Zandra Rhodes is known for her beautiful silk screened fabrics as well as being the “Queen of Punk” a distinction given to her back in the late 70’s.  All I remember from that time, aside from the time she told me to clean her bathroom, was using a huge squeegee-like thing to scrape paint across the enormous screens she used.  I wish I could remember more as it might have helped me get over my fear when tackling Elizabeth’s silk screening lesson.  I have to admit I was completely intimidated reading the lesson over, so much so that I read the lesson and then didn’t do any of the exercises mapped out in it for at least three days.  Then another person in the class posted her gorgeous silk screened fabrics and it motivated me to at least try some of the techniques suggested.

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Using newsprint this was my first attempt at silk screening on white cotton

Have I talked about fear during the creative process?  I know, I know, I have.  But maybe you didn’t read that post and anyway, I’m feeling compelled.  I’m always surprised when I feel fear while designing or doing something art “worthy”.  Why feel frightened when creating something?  Why should I feel anything but joy?  How does fear, even a twinge of it, make itself known through all the curiosity and excitement? And while I don’t have complete answers for these questions, I do know it isn’t unusual for artists to feel tremendous fear when creating.  So much so that there’s even a terrific book written on this very subject called Art & Fear ~ Observations On The Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles & Ted Orland.   Heading up the chapter entitled: The Academic World is this quote from Howard Ikemoto –

     “When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work.  I told her I worked at the college – that my job was to teach people how to draw.

She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?”

I went to Parsons School of Design for my undergraduate degree and majored in Fashion Design.  Much of what I learned had to do with the business of fashion design and that there’s no such thing as new, that everything is recycled and that in order to succeed one must be as determined, if not more, about the business as one is about creating.  The truth is, I learned little about being an artist and more about the challenges of being a designer in the business world.  By my last year my fairy tale notion of what it would be like to be a fashion designer was thoroughly squashed and in my disillusioned state I felt only  dread at the idea that I was about to go out into the world and seek a job, much less in the fashion world.  After floundering for a few years I abandoned fashion design in favor of a series of jobs/careers that I thought might be more fulfilling and less soul wrenching.  And while all the things I tried my hand at varied, even dramatically, they were all in the “Arts” of some kind.  What I’ve learned is that artists tend to have a difficult time making a living with their art, no matter what the medium is.

There’s a wonderful quote from Oscar Wilde that begins Part II of the book Art & Fear.

“When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art.  When artists get together for dinner, they discuss money.”

How does one price one’s art, something that might have taken hundreds of hours to create through trial and error, through missteps, through experimentation, through FEAR?  If artists used an hourly wage system to price their work, all art would be so expensive no one could afford it.  So most of us don’t.  We can’t.  And while in an ideal world no one would have to concern themselves with making money from their art, and instead would just spend all their time making it, few live in such a privileged world.  The fear of being able to sell our work, and how that inhibits the process is a whole other topic and one most of us can understand, but there is another fear that is far more complicated.  It is the fear one feels when confronted with something new, something one has never done before, but would like to learn.  There is the fear of failure or appearing incapable or of ridicule, criticism or being seen as incompetent by others, but also by oneself.  To create art, is to be at once vulnerable and confident, and it is a tricky balancing act to not lean more one way or the other. Both carry their own pitfalls.

Creating is a messy process.  Most people never see all the discarded bits, the beginnings and first steps taken to get to that finished piece.  What I love about blogs is that people are willing to show their process.  My favorite blogs, in fact, are the ones that do just that.

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Adding color to the purple

When I am starting something new I often have an idea in my head.  What I envision is always spectacular, but creating that idea takes skill, talent and knowledge, things I do not always have.  So I have to learn, practice, and explore in order to be able to get the skills to (hopefully) produce the image I envision.  Sometimes I’m successful, but more often I’m not.  Sometimes I realize it will take me years to achieve the level of expertise required to make what I envisioned.  So I have to accept that I won’t be able to do something as I’d hoped or modify what I’m doing to compensate or continue to practice, with the idea that eventually I might be able to produce what is in my mind.

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Torn newsprint

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For this piece I cut stencils out of a thin plastic sheet, before silk screening on top

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This is the result of using those stencils that I removed for the red piece above

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A technique attributed to Kerr Grabowski.  This piece has yet to be washed, so who knows what it will look like!

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Another technique described in Elizabeth’s class.

Regardless of the approach I take, perfectionism is truly the greatest kill joy and, for me anyway, the root from which almost all my fear springs. While some argue that without perfectionism, we would settle for less or not work as hard, they are misunderstanding perfectionism at its most destructive. I am referring to perfectionism that lacerates, the kind of self-talk that abuses and brutalizes.  It is that awful voice that needs to be muted before anything can be created.  Free from perfectionism I am allowed to explore and play.

I have no idea what I’m going to do with any of the fabric I’ve silk screened, and in some ways that’s beside the point.  I didn’t approach this lesson with a preconceived idea.  And that’s the beauty of taking a class like this one.  The assignments require you to explore and play first and then after you’ve done that, consider what you’ll make.  Most of these fabrics have been done for almost two weeks now and I still don’t know what to do with any of them.  Or as one of the many talented and wonderful people taking this class said, “I’m waiting for divine inspiration.”

Obsessive About Dyeing

Turbulent Times

I began this blog a few years ago because I wanted a place where I could discuss creativity, art, inspiration and being an artist.  Since life has always informed my art, I came up with the name – Where Art & Life Meet.  Art has always been the thing that saves me.  When I am creating I am completely present, focussed and I am most at peace.  I’m in the zone, an almost trance-like state of being.  I feel happy and serene.  So when life gets turbulent, when I am scared, when the world feels chaotic and unpredictable, art is the thing that beckons me, soothing me, allowing me to appreciate life and it’s beauty, if only in that fleeting moment.  However these last two weeks have been particularly difficult, so much so that for an entire day I couldn’t do any art at all.  Nothing.

Thankfully, I had my online class, Dyeing to Design given by Elizabeth Barton, which I’ve written about ‘here‘ and ‘here‘ and we had another project due, so I forced myself to focus.  We began with some basic shibori dyeing.  Shibori is the Japanese art of wrinkling, creasing, folding and binding fabrics before dunking them into dye.  One can get a great variety of patterns from Shibori.  Here are some of mine.

But once the fabrics were dyed, I felt at a loss as to what to do with them.  I am drawn to shapes and usually sketch out my ideas first, but these fabrics are so bold, even bossy, that I couldn’t figure out how to respond to them.  Finally I had an idea that I began to play around with, but it was going to be far too complicated and I didn’t have enough time to create it…

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So I refined and came up with this…

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I plunged in and began cutting out shapes, putting them up on my design wall, pulling things down, putting other things up.  Eventually I designed this.

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In part this piece was in response to a comment about how things seemed dark, but the sun would shine again.  That red was glaring and SO red, so I went back to my design wall and did this.

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And here’s the back and the label.

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In between working on this piece, I lost myself in the bliss of hand painting some of my pots that I threw over  a month ago.  They make me happy.  I am calling them “Message Pots.”  The next batch will feature a more diverse population, which I’m looking forward to creating.  Did I mention that I haven’t been sleeping much?  I think all these guys look sleepy.

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To all of you who celebrate Thanksgiving, have a happy one.  To all who are feeling frightened and despondent, know that there are many feeling the same.

As for me, I will be losing myself in several days of cooking, another art form(!) before getting back to my painting, dyeing, quilts and designing.

Next week – screen printing!

Obsessive About Dyeing

The Joy of Dyeing

Lest you, good readers, misread the above and think this is going to be about a metaphoric death resulting from an existential crisis, let me set you straight, it’s not.  This is about dyes, dyeing fabric and design.  Now if you’re like me, you might be thinking – oh who has time for all that? – but let me tell you, there’s so much more to dyeing than you think.  Get it?  Trying not to laugh, really, really trying…   It’s impossible to write a post about dyeing and not keep thinking of all the puns one makes without even trying…  This is just too easy.  You might dye of laughing… hee-hee!  

Ahem.

Okay.

Seriously.

I never thought I’d enjoy dyeing fabric.  I always felt there’s so much great fabric out there, why would I want to dye my own?  Well…  it turns out, not only was I wrong, but what a beautiful world it is once you begin dyeing!  Before I get ahead of myself, this all began because I was looking for blogs by quilters who are also artists.  As I was looking around I found the extremely talented artist Elizabeth Barton, and her blog, Art and Quilts, Cogitations Thereon.   What a find!  I read this post, The Proliferation of Online Classes, which I then felt compelled to comment on, which in turn led me to investigate the classes Elizabeth teaches and in particular one that began a week ago Friday, which I promptly signed up for. Her five week online class, given through The Academy of Quilting, is titled – Dyeing to Design.  Love that.

Dyeing has never called to me, but I enjoyed reading Elizabeth’s blog, really like her work, and this class had the most immediate starting date and I’m impatient, so I thought – Why not?  This is one of the many wonderful things about being new to something, it never hurts to try something you’ve never done before and the worst that can happen is you discover it’s not for you and you move on.  On the other hand, you might fall in love with whatever it is, become totally obsessed and that is a indescribable joy unlike any other.  The latter pretty much describes my experience with quilting and fiber art.  And so it was again, with dyeing and this class, now in its second week.  What a fantastic class.  I cannot recommend it, and Elizabeth Barton, more highly!!

It helps that Elizabeth is a terrific instructor, very responsive and thorough, has a great eye, and gives excellent feedback.  She writes extensive instructions with good explanations and examples of her own work to illustrate what she’s talking about.  The first week we dove right in mixing all our various dyes for the next five weeks and did this – gradations of black (photograph below.)  You’ll notice the mottled effect, which I think is so beautiful and striking.  As we were working with black and since there’s no such thing, the blues, pinks and greens can be seen in different areas.  The organic look to the fabric also appeals to my sense of design and so I was hooked.  Totally fell in love.  Completely.  Dramatically.  In.  Love. Gradations.JPGDesigning a piece using these gradations was next.  I had a couple ideas and with Elizabeth’s encouragement settled on this one, which also happened to be the first idea I came up with.  Gradations Sketch.JPG

I  decided I would cut the fabric into 2.5″ squares, which meant that after they’d been sewn together they would be 2″ squares, gradating from light to dark, but a little unevenly to keep things interesting.  This is how it looked positioned on my design wall.  Lesson 1 design.JPG

Emboldened by Elizabeth’s helpful suggestions, I made a few adjustments and began sewing all those squares together.  That’s a whole lot of squares…The beginning-Sketch1_Lesson1.JPG After consulting Elizabeth (again), she suggested linear and horizontal stitching, I began quilting, but left the larger square alone as I wasn’t sure what to do with it.  I wanted to do something, but couldn’t figure out what.Quilting Sketch1_lesson1.JPG

Back to Elizabeth who gave me more excellent feedback, suggesting a different color thread and syncopating the stitches so they didn’t meet with the other lines from the larger piece, and off I went to finish it.  I decided against a binding, instead made a facing out of my lightest grey and backed it with a piece of red fabric I had.  I made a label, again from one of the light greys and voila!  This piece, entitled Living in the Grey, is 17″X 23.5″.

Living in the Grey.jpgLivingInTheGrey_Back.JPGThe thing about dyeing your own fabric is how utterly seductive it is.  You can mix any color you want by tweaking the proportions of your primary colors.  The mottled effect enhances the overall feel of the fabric, making it completely unique and like no other.

We are now in Week Two and are dyeing as many colors as we have the time, inclination and material for.  Of course I went totally nuts with dyeing all the possibilities.  I admit – I’ve now dyed every color including varying intensities and am eager to start experimenting with the subtler, more nuanced shades of each, but ran out of fabric, dye and other materials I need, so will have to wait until all the things I’ve ordered arrive.  Here’s a sneak peak of a few of the colors I dyed over the weekend,  (and stayed up until 3 or 4am, I can’t remember now, to do so!) getting ready for my next design using colors.  Lots and lots of colors.  You could even say…  colors to dye for.  Oh behave yourself!

I’m just dyeing to read your comments.   Okay, okay, I’ll stop.

No, really.

I promise.

You have no idea how hard I’m restraining myself right now.