Good Morning,
I've had a few days to reconnoiter since returning from our yearly retreat in Taos.  This was definately the best session ever!  Each of the three instructors for the retreat, myself included, made a little something for each of the students.  These elegant little pincushions were my contribution.  I.V. found the glass bases at a surplus store.  We think they were probably for using under the feet of furniture.  Anyway, we have about 100 of them and will be making many more of these little lovelies.
Each one is made of hand dyed velvet stuffed with wool, inset into the heavy glass base and topped with Lucite flowers and leaves.  I'll be making lots more this week to take with us to Quilt Colorado later this month.
Till next time,
Heather

Hi All,
Here are some scarves that I made using Habotai silk blanks from Jacquard and their green label silk acid dyes.  I used cheap paint brushes and slightly diluted dye.  After they batched for 24 hours I set them in Jacquard dye set concentrate.  No steaming required.
This is a really fun technique and a great way to dye if you don't want to deal with powdered dyes and extra chemicals.
Till next time,
Heather

 

Hi All,

It's been a while again.  But at least this time I've got a good excuse; a badly torn ligament in a dislocated middle finger on my right hand - what a royal pain!  So, I haven't gotten much work done lately.

But, here is a quick little, ditty that I did on Sunday while teaching the technique to just one student.  It is 5-7 layers of cotton, silk and melty nylon fabrics along with cheesecloth, all stitched up then scored with a soldering tool and heated with a heat. gun.  

Before you get too impressed, the flowers, leaves and stems were already embroidered on the nylon fabric, but, I used wise placement and stitching to achieve this yummy end result.

Till next time,

Heather

 Hi All,
I've been really busy lately add color to lots of different surfaces in lots of different ways.  I do so love surface design! Here are some pieces of dye painted batting that I did last week.  They are painted with Dyenaflow and Lumiere by Jacquard.  I love to use this painted batting instead of regular batting.  I design right on it, collaging fabrics and other fibers right on the surface and leaving the edges of the batting exposed so that I don't have to add a binding.
Below, are some pieces of Lutradur that I painted in the same manner.  I like to melt it with a heat gun to lace it up and I love to make beads out of it.
So much fun, so much exploration - never enough time!
Till next time,
Heather

Hi All,
I taught a class last week in marbling on fabric with ink.  I only had one student so I got to create along with her - we both had a ball!  Here are the pieces that I did.  They are each 15" x 20" and were painted using Tsukineko inks on shaving cream.  I used black, white, and the metallic colors black orchid, copper, gold, silver and champagne mist.
I will be cutting these lovlies up to make a modern styled art quilt.  I think I'll add some stamped black birds to it too.  I can't wait to see how it all comes out.  I've found nothing more enjoyable than making art from the art cloth that I make! If you click on one of the images then you can see them larger in a slide show.
Till next time,
Heather

Here are a few more pieces

 

Good Afternoon All,

Here is my latest, almost finished piece.  It just lacks some hand stitching and mounting.

It began as a piece of silk fusion that I made using silk roving along with my own hand dyed silk cocoons, carrier rods and thread flotsam.  I added in some vintage silk threads during the process and that is what you see moving through the diagonal middle.

Once the silk fusion was dry, I laid it on top of the red orange dyed jute which is on top of batting and a backing.  I quilted the bajeebers   out of all of the negative space on the fusion then did some basically invisible stippling on the red orange fabric.  

The yellow circles are felt from the surplus store.  I will hand stitch those down with some violet floss then I'll mount the whole thing on stretcher bars and trim the frayed edges a bit.

 These close ups show a bit more of the fabulous textures as well as the mix of color.
It's been years since I've played much with Silk Fusion.  I made more than a dozen pieces the other day.  They are for sale in our gallery as well as on our new Etsy site:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/WildHeatherGallery?ref=search_shop_redirect

:

Hello All,
I've been really busy in the studio lately making all sorts of fun and beautiful stuff.  Here are a bunch of pieces of silk fusion, from simple to very complex, each one is very unique.  One of the things that I like to do when making silk fusion is to make them so that each of their two sides are very different.  One is simpler and the other more complex.
I use a combination of hand dyed silk roving from Treenway Silks and hand dyed silk hankies and carrier rods that I dye myself.  I also add silk sari fibers, silk waste, bits of threads from the dryer and lots of yummy, shiny Angelina fibers.  I put mine together with thinned matte medium rather than fabric medium.  It's cheaper and I've always got tons of it on hand.
I'm almost finished with an art piece made by the third piece above.  I'll show it to you once I've finished. The rest will be for sale in the gallery, on our web site and soon, on our new Etsy store.

Till next time,
Heather

 

Hi All,

I really do love trying something new.  In fact, I love change, well, as long as it's change that I put into motion.  This piece brings together several new things for me.

The lighter portion in the middle is a piece of paper that I made.  It was done in a class with one of the instructors at my gallery/studio, Deb Determan.  The paper is made from recycled copy paper.  While it is wet on the screen various resists were laid down and color sprayed on.  Once it was dry and taken off the screen, I put Misty Fuse on the backside of it and ironed it to a piece of fine whale corduroy that I had dyed.  Then I inserted the large metal circles and quilted everything down using free motion on my machine.  I used a mix of circles and straightish lines for the quilting in the negative space and simply followed lines that were present in the paper when stitching on it.  Once all of the quilting was done I finished the edges with a satin stitch and matching rattail then I hand stitched down the medium and small sized metal circles.

I'm pleased with the piece.  I really like the way the paper looks as thought it is breaking apart, but mostly I like the way that the paper, fabric, metal and hand stitches are interacting with each other.

Till next time,

Heather

Hand Dyed Fabrics Hanging in the Gallery

 Hi All,
Here is the fabric that I've been working on for the last week, hanging in the gallery.  These fabrics were all done with thickened Procion MX dyes.  With the first, middle and last on light weight canvas and the remaining two on beautiful linen.  Dyeing fabric is almost always a crap shoot.  I did the two linen pieces first, both with the same mixed dyes.  With the canvas pieces, I made the red (Pomegranate) more intense by adding more dye, but I over saturated it so it ran when I washed it, even with Synthrapol.  So, I had lots of pale pink smudges all over the white background areas.  To remedy that, I over dyed them with a very pale gold.  Which yielded a very rich end result.  I'm rather pleased with them.

These pieces are hanging on the other wall in the gallery.  The two end pieces are 16mm Habotai silk and the center two pieces are Indian Dupioni silk.  All of them were dyed with Jacquard Green label silk dyes.  All were dyed with the fabrics laid flat on the ground.  The piece on the far left was done using squirt bottles and sea salt.  So was the second piece.  The longer warm colored piece was done using spray bottles with no salt and the final piece, that you can barely see was done with squirt bottles and more salt.
I simply love throwing color on things!
Till next time,
Heather

More playing, this time with thickened dye!

 Hi All,
I spent 10 hours yesterday dye painting another 6 yards of fabric.  Here are three of the coordinates that I've been working on.  They are dye painted using Procion MX dyes thickened with Sodium Alginate.  Painting fabric is one of the funnest things I've ever had the privilege to do. It makes me sort of high when I'm down in the studio mixing color, playing with texture and playing with paint brushes and found objects.
If you're a local to Denver, all of these fabrics will be gracing the walls of my gallery/studio for the month of May.
Till next time,
Heather

Playing fabric, Gelli plates, paint & ink

Hi All,
One of the best things about being an art/quilting instructor is that when my class has only one of two people in it, I get to play along.  Last week I taught a gelatin mono-printing class that had very few students so, I got to paint while teaching.  It was so much fun.  Here are some of the pieces that I painted.  The pink and violet pieces were done using a mix of Jacquard Lumiere, Neopaque and Textile paints and the blue/blue green ones on the bottom were done using Tsukineko inks thickened with Aloe Vera gel.  All were made on a medium sized Gelli Plate using found objects to create texture.  I had a blast!

New Explorations in Surface Design

Hi All,
I've been doing loads of surface design lately.  Here is a new piece that began life as left over's from the last three sided vessel that I made.  It is only about 12" x 7" or so.  It has a layer of dark gold hand dye on the top that was heavily quilted with layers of wool batting, cotton batting, Timtex and another layer of hand dye.  After all of the quilting was done, I added some luscious multicolored metal leaf to the quilted surface.
I started the process by pouring up a bit of fabric glue on a paper plate.  Next, I lightly wet a sea sponge and dried it off in a towel so that it was just moist.  Then I saturated the flattest side of the sponge with the fabric glue and lightly sponged the glue across the surface of the quilted fabric so that the glue sat on the raised portions of the quilt and did not seep down into the stitched indentations of the quilting.  I let the glue dry until it was just slightly tacky - about 5 minutes.
I then carefully laid two of the small sheets (6" squares) of metal leaf on to the surface and very lightly and carefully pressed it into the surface.   I left it to dry completely for about 1/2 hour then I placed it on top of a sheet of paper and grabbed a large, soft stencil brush.  I lightly brushed across the surface of the quilt to dust off any of the metal leaf that was not attached, then brushed a little more vigorously to make sure all of the excess was off.  Yes, I save all of the excess, metal leaf is a bit expensive and the bits and pieces are easy to re-use.  I love this technique and the quilted fabric made a delightful little three sided vessel as shown below.
Till next time,
Heather

 

Hi All,

I've been making vessels in one form or another for more than a decade.  I love doing them because they are somewhat instant gratification.  These three sided vessels are new for me and boy are they fun to make.  With them I get to quilt fun stuff, cut it up and embellish it and put it back together again.  I have a show here at the gallery in November of this year and I plan on having at least 40 quilted vessels for it, along with art for the walls too.  So, I'll be showing you lots of previews here over the next several months. The blue vessel is two feet tall and the orange one is about 10".  

Till next time,

Heather

Giving This Another Try

 

Hi All,
I haven't been posting on this blog much, I've got another one if you would like to check it out; wildheatherfiftyweeksofart.blogspot.com.  I've been writing on it this year.  It is a blog that I'm sharing with a bunch of other artists who are all trying to make a piece of art every week. 

This piece is not from that blog.  It is a new experiment that I'm trying out.  I'm calling it quilt sculpting.  It's done on a some of my hand dyed silk/rayon velvet.  Essentially what I'm doing is quilting the holy hell out of it in the negative space.  Any area that looks sandy brown is thread.  All of the colored areas are places where there is no stitch so the fabric blossoms up to the surface.  I've used three layers of batting; two wool and one cotton, so that I can achieve this Trapunto like effect.

I've dyed several larger pieces of velvet so that I can move on to bigger pieces.  However, this little piece which is 11" x 16" took me almost 10 hours to stitch and about 1500 yards of thread!

Talk to you again soon, I hope,
Heather