Weekly Textile Construction #8

Textile Construction #8

First I want to thank all of you for your emails and comments in regards to my Artist Profile on Kathy Loomis. It was great fun and I hope to continue to write about some of the wonderful artists I know.

Fabric One


This weeks Texilte Construction is #8. Once again I learned a great deal from working on this piece. One of the things I learned is I still don't take good digital photos. I sold hand dyed fabric online for a year or so and the thing that drove me nuts was trying to photograph the fabric to show the color correctly, red and green are especially difficult. I am having the same issues here so I will have to ask you to read between the lines some as to what the color is really like.

I selected one of the pieces of fabric I developed a week ago and a "scrap" of fabric from another piece and decided to combine the two into one composition.

Fabric Two


The fabric was created in the same manner as previously:

1. Dry ironed white cotton pinned to a design board.

2. Activated dye in print paste. Yellow, red and black plus some turquoise.

3. The dye was squeezed from a needle nose bottle onto the fabric in various ways and then scraped or pulled across the fabric with a bondo scraper. This was allowed to cure.

4. Using Soft Scrub cleanser , I discharged similiar shapes and dots from the fabric and then applied addition dye marking after the discharged areas were washed and dryed.

5. I cut and pieced sections of each fabric together.

6. The center was quilted side to side and some areas were outlined and the outside sections were quilted very densely.

Fabric Three- Combined but not quilted

Observations:

1. I felt the larger piece of fabric was very interesting. I had applied the dye and the discharge in a slightly different way, using lots of dots and small markings. The center piece of fabric had nice areas as well but in the end I am not totally satisfied with the combination of the two pieces. I would like to have created a better transition between the two patterns.

2. The dense quilting is beautiful in person but in the photograph it darkens the value of the side panels and they look dirty.

3. Using a viewfinder you can find wonderful compositions throughout the patterned fabric and these make excellent sources for new, larger work. Well worth noting.

In my next post I will talk about how I am facing these smaller pieces.