Yarns

Wednesday night, I got to go to my fiber group. It's been a few months due to life in general. We're suppose to be devoloping art quilts, doing critiques, etc.... In a fit of spring fever, all of that was abandoned for the lure of hand dyed yarn.

Enter my first hand dyed sock yarn:

This looks like salsa to me...fresh tomatoes and peppers...good enough to eat.

In other knitting insanity, there is lace:

This is the Swallow Tail Shawl by Evelyn Clark, published in Fall 2006 Interweave Knits. The yarn is hand dyed silk (dyed by another artist). I've made it once before and am saying bad words in the same places as last time. Fancy that!

Fabric

In the interest of keeping this blog alive, I'm posting some pics of fabric I've made over the past couple of weeks. These are all done with mx dyes. The colors looked a little wierd in Photoshop, so I'm not sure if they'll seem as dramatic to you as they do to me.

This one uses my favorite 'face' screen print with many layers of discharge and dye painting:


Next up, more discharge over layers of dye painting. I layered ripped freezer paper on here and then painted discharge off the edge:


And then two pieces of scrunch dyeing. These were the best of several




The kids kept me so busy today that this post is the extent of my creative efforts for the day. I've also been working on a lace shawl that is sucking the lifeblood out of me now that I'm to the border. Grrr.

I'm hoping to make more fabric this week.

Frustrated...

...everything I touch in the studio today is turning to garbage. Better quit for now.

The good news is that a trip to Barnes and Noble ended with this

And I did teach a lady to knit today. That was good. And my daughter taught herself how to mix brown. She's coated several pieces of paper with brown paint....fun.

So maybe there's more good than not. Now I'm off to bed with my new book. Tomorrow is a new day.

Today's Output

...a little abstract:



Pulling the fabrics together only took minutes. Making the clay emblem was a different story. I have the perfect button for this piece, but it's a Rama raku button and I didn't want to use it on this simple exercise. Enter the clay and paint boxes, the toaster oven, and the E-6000.

I think this piece is okay....it's nice but not earth shattering. I like the tree element mixed with abstract componants....maybe worth further exploration. Somehow, I'd like to get more portraiture in these little works. Not sure how that's going to happen.

Here's my daughter's output for the day:


She, too, loves the clay box:

New Stuff

So, here's a piece that got rejected recently:

"Fertile" approximately 25"x30"

I was kind of bummed about it, but then a wise soul told me that artists usually have enough rejection letters to wall paper a bathroom. Point taken.

Detail:


There's a fair bit of applique and embroidery, but also textile paints. I'm noting here publicly that the paints did not play well with free motion embroidery. They shredded all but the slickest threads. I like the effect, though and will probably add paint to future projects.

Here's a couple of quick stretches:

'Valentine' 7"x5.5"

I did this yesterday....20 minutes of design time and 30 minutes to finish. That leaves me a few moments in the hour to scan and blog.

Here's today's:

'Cropped Plant' 5"x4.5"
Cropped images have an appeal that I love. They're so immediate. This little composition was not so great. Some healthy cropping made it better.