Disperse Dyeing Results

Disperse dyeing is full of surprises. It is so exciting when you peel back the freshly pressed paper and see how the dye and fabric sublimated. The purple paper was in fact a brilliant blue. The dull red was fuschia and the mustard yellow was bright lemon. Very alarming! I was forever looking for my paper of ‘mud’ colours to iron over the whole works to tone it all down. My mud ran out and I just had to deal with it.
I tried several fabrics and loved the intensity of a 100% polyester ‘satin-like’ shirt with a heavy drape. My favourite is the last one, shown here, printed on the same polyester fabric. Very pale and pleasant. Too bad there was so much red dye left in the top left ginkgo. At this point I had learned there would be no fixing the bright pink with another layer. More than 3 layers proved more disastrous than not.
I stumbled onto Barbara McKie’s disperse dye work at http://mckieart.com/... again. She must use disperse dye in a large format printer to get her images. What is with these fibre art studios that don’t have a thread out of place?!

Disperse Dyes and Ginkgo Leaves

Yesterday I got my new painting area organized enough to paint computer paper with disperse dye. I read Linda Kemshall’s book ‘Color Moves, Transfer Paints on Fabric’ quite thoroughly before starting. I have been looking forward to doing this final Module 2 activity since July. I really liked the transparent effects when the paper was ironed onto the various synthetic fibres. But first…I had to get the paint on the paper.
The disperse dyes are very watery so the first few papers were drenched and runny. The cute little paint palette was too small and the watery paint spilled every where- not at all like the tidy pictures in Linda’s book! I thought it wasn’t working out very well so I added some thickener. This seemed to control the liquid much better.
I laid plastic wrap on the red, yellow and blue (looks purple to me). This made for great texture. After I had these basic colour sheets I started painting the positive and negative ginkgos that I had cut out. Freezer paper would have made sharper images but these will still be useful. I started mixing the primaries but did not get oranges like I was expecting and green was not going to happen. I must have contaminated the blue with red somewhere along the line.
This morning I checked out the dried pieces and was thrilled with the colours and did not miss the blue. The runny watercolour-like pages are actually very interesting when I lay the ginkgos on top. I think I have enough painted papers and possibilities to entertain myself this dreary October afternoon. Now to heat up the iron, thanks Doreen, and see what colours I really get.

Kiwi Jewel

14"X18" , click on image for quilting detail

Acrylic Paint Inspiration

My first blog entry was ‘Kiwi Mosaic’. This completed quilt is ‘Kiwi Jewel’. I really like it. Usually I just enjoy the doing and feel quite indifferent once the challenges are faced, decisions are made and the work is done. Translating my original kiwi acrylic still life into this mosaic was absorbing and challenging from beginning to end. Don’t be fooled by the small size! The border was a gorgeous piece of hand dyed fabric that resulted from Darlene (co-Fabricator) generously sharing her dyes this past July. I used up every square inch of it.
How to quilt the kiwi section was a big stumbling block until last week; when I bought a funky printed batikish fabric from Poppins. As I was pondering how to quilt an oval motif, my eyes landed on the swirly, sort of round shapes, in the fabric that squished in and around each other. It was fun to stitch the pattern. I couldn't resist adding the yarn around the large border. The chartreuse looked so great with the purple. I just realized this might be an example of complementary colours.

Tomorrow is the first day of a Bargello workshop, 'Twisted Ribbon' at Poppins with teacher Gwen Ledyard. I think I have my 20 fabric picked out. I look forward to the feedback of her experienced eye.

Transparency

I first picked a few leaves off of my sycamore tree then layed them on sheer fabric which was on top of a piece of glass. Using my very hot burning tool I burned an outlined of each leaf, lifted the excess sheer and peeled the leaf off of the glass. I just love when a technique works so slickly.
Using a metal ruler I burned a lot of rectangles out of a lot of different colours of sheer. Some shot, some not. I found it frustrating to try and control the placement of the sheers so opted for a willy nilly arrangement. Always something was not working with the arrangement. I'd move one thing and create a problem elsewhere. Finally I decided to accept this arrangement. (I see a few things I am going to change!) Nothing like a picture to see the flaws!

The goal of the City and Guilds exercise I was to observe the effect of laying yellow over blue vs. blue over yellow and was the layering effect the same result as in the paint wash exercise. However, I got caught up in where the heavier colours were laying with respect to the lighter colours and with respect to the leaves. I'll do a more structured experiment with colour layering tomorrow.

Flickrd

Finally I have started a system for organizing my photos. I decided to go with flickr.com. My user name at flickr is materialeyes. Its free for now but I will want more than 3 'sets' to organize and access my photos. For $25/year you get unlimited photo uploads and unlimited sets. I really love the ability to have so many tags. So far I have quilting, line and texture sets.

Picture organizing is really cutting into my already limited quilting time.

I'm posting the king size quilt I made for my dad a few years ago. I still really like like the quilt it but I love the cherry bedroom suite he made for us.