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