Xenotopia at the Knitting & Stitch Show

I'm very pleased that my Atacama Salt Flat pieces will be exhibited in the HUE gallery at the Knitting & Stitch Shows this year. I dyed a lot of fabric in my quest to get the effect that I was looking for and there were many, many times when I thought I wasn't going to get the results I wanted but I'm so glad that I didn't give up. 

This piece is called Xenotopia I and if all goes to plan it will be joined by Xenotopia II and III in the exhibition. Each piece is approximately 1 metre square. You can see some of my original design ideas here.

Across the horizon is a bright red line but the impact is lost somewhat in this photograph. Thinking about the salt in the Atacama, one of my early experiments was to pour strong salt solution on cloth and wait for the water to evaporate, revealing the square-ish shape of the salt crystals. I printed this shape on the fabric and used it to inspire the rocky elements in the foreground. In my other two pieces I have also used square stitches to add rocky elements but more of those in another post. 

Xenotopia I - detail

The work in the HUE exhibition has been made after we all read Robert McFarlane's book 'The Old Ways' and we have all responded to the book very differently. The book is about walks in the landscape which I was pleased about as most of my work is inspired by landscapes. In his book Robert says that we need a word to describe....

'somewhere we feel and think significantly differently......how to describe the lands that are found beyond these frontiers?  ‘Xenotopias’, perhaps meaning ‘foreign places’ or ‘out of place places’, a term to complement the terms utopias and dystopias'.   

Xenotopia seemed to describe my experience of the Salt Flats. It was like nowhere I'd been before and I certainly felt differently when I was there and almost three years on and it is still inspiring me.

For some time I've been thinking about getting fabric printed with an image of my piece and making a top to wear when I was stewarding but have been put off by the cost of digital printing, particularly as there was a risk that I would make a mistake and not align the image to the pattern pieces correctly. Fortunately though I recently came across Fashion Formula who had more favourable prices.

The colours of the top are more olivey than my artwork and more olivey than this picture shows but overall I'm very pleased with it. It's gone from design to coat hanger in less than a week, which is just as well because the exhibition opens next week. Maybe it's just me but I think it will be wearable on other occasions too.

If you're going to the show I hope you enjoy it and if you're on Saturday 14th, you'll know how to spot me!

Dyeing in the Washing Machine

I like the bird motif on this T-shirt but whenever I went to wear it, the white seemed just too bright a white for my colouring and so it's hardly been worn and I vowed that one day I would over dye it with cream......and that day finally arrived at the weekend. 

I recently found myself in John Lewis, admiring fabric printed with this Lucienne Day motif but it also had a very bright white background and I had just persuaded myself not to buy it when a fellow shopper helpfully pointed out that it was only £1 per metre and as anyone else would do in these circumstances, I bought 3 metres and vowed to over dye it with cream. After all if it didn't work out, I'd hardly have lost a fortune. 

I dyed the T-shirt and fabric together in the washing machine, the method which gives the best chance of a smooth dyed finish, not a method I usually use as I'm usually hoping to bring textures into my dyeing but it worked perfectly and there weren't any blotches of dye to be seen. I'd definitely recommend the washing machine for this type of dyeing, better still buy fabric and T-shirts in colours you like! . 

PS the dyed fabrics are a much more creamy colour and less apricoty in reality but try as I might I haven't been able to capture the true colour on camera.  

iDye....anything

About 18 months ago, I saw a simple white lace dress, which I thought would look rather nice in another colour, so I bought the dress and decided to dye it.....well I already had the dyes, what could go wrong? I had planned on something pale and summery but the acid dyes I used just didn't work on the dress.  As the dress was no longer white but wasn't really any other colour either, I decided that I would have to go bold and go for a deep colour to cover it all up.

The dress turned a dreary colour and certainly not something I would wear, so when I saw this iDye Poly for sale,  I thought that I'd give dyeing the dress one last go.

In a pan I keep for such occasions, I  bought my dress up to a simmer and added the dye.

And it worked! It came out a really deep colour, even if it did leave the dress with a chemically smell, which has reduced but still lingers after 2 washes.

I can safely say that this dye works....it .even dyes your marigolds, any cloth you use, your sink and even your kettle. The kettle was on the other side of the hob to the side I was working but even so stray dye particles managed to reach the kettle and only some of them have come off. It's only in writing this post, that I noticed that the packaging states you don't need to open the packet of dye you can add the packet to the water. If only I'd seen that earlier, that would have saved my kettle.

You live and learn as they say and the most import thing I have learnt from this is that if you don't like the colour of the garment then don't buy it!

Looking at Old Work with New Ideas

I'm looking forward to having some time over the Christmas break to develop some of my ideas into designs that I can take into fabric in the new year. I have now gone back to a piece that I started some time ago but can't quite remember when. I painted gesso onto paper to create some texture and then painted on my simple design, which was based on a local landscape. 

I'm a big fan of the effect you get by layering dye onto a fabric and this design seemed to suggest lots of layering and texturing with dyes but I started with dyes that were far too strong, leaving me very few places to go with the green especially. 

In fact the back of the cloth looked a lot more promising and more like the effect I should have been going for. As the fabric is linen and therefore a thicker fabric, it's harder for the dye to penetrate fully to the back of the cloth.

I did consider turning it over and working from the back but I think I would find it too confusing looking at the design one way whilst the cloth was the other way, especially as the pieces are uneven shapes. So I discharged the piece to remove some of the colour.  It does seem to have created a surprising amount of yellow but I'm hoping that the randomness of the fabric will make interesting textures as I over print.

Where to go next with this piece?  Maybe I could merge my 'old' design with some of my more recent ideas and use text to create textures within the piece?. Now that would be an interesting challenge. Lots more thought required but before I knuckle down to that challenge I want to make some cards and some Christmasy bits first.

Reeds in the Mist

Recently, I've had my head down finishing my Geo landscape pieces and any thoughts of progressing new work had to be put aside. I've got a number of ideas 'brewing' but they all need developing before I can put dye to cloth and so I have gone back to some work that I had to put on hold. 

This piece was inspired by a photograph I saw in an exhibition. When I created the reeds they were too dark and too samey, so I decided to discharge them to add variety to the colours and add some texture.

I obviously wasn't expecting the discharging to give me the results that I wanted because I started another piece in parallel but I did like the effect of the discharging and so repeated the process on the second piece. Once I was happy with the reeds I used soy wax to protect/mask the reeds whilst I developed the backgrounds.

Strangely, I've only just realised the number of similiarities of these pieces to my Barge in the Mist piece. Similiar in that it's a view of mist over water and with the focal point on the horizon but there is one key important difference; the 'Barge in the Mist' was inspired by my own photograph and the 'Reeds in the Mist' was not. I have become increasingly aware that I enjoy making work which is inspired by own experiences. I think I will be using my own photographs from now on. 

This week the Knitting and Stitch Show opens in Harrogate and I will there to Steward in the Hue gallery on Friday afternoon, Saturday and Sunday. I'm hoping to get a little bit of free time to buy some threads to start stitching. Now which one will I choose to stitch? I know I won't be doing both.

Geometric Landscapes

I've been progressing my simple geometric landscapes and have been building up the layers of yellow dye for the background cloth, with the aim of creating interest with textural marks whilst keeping the cloth a plain colour.  The left hand side is the back of the cloth and the right hand side is ...well...the right side of the cloth.

I think I may have made it a little too dark and am thinking about trying to remove some of the colour and although I have never tried it before I thought I try using Milton as I hear that can remove dye. I would have started it tonight, if only I'd had some. My thinking is that it should be easy to control, just gradually adding a drop at a time until you get the effect that you want..

I have also started stitching the fabric squares, mostly in red to start with and I will stitch each square a little and then gradually add more until I think they have enough and I think it would be nice to keep some areas unstitched for contrast.

As they are still work-in progress, the fabric has just been folded over so hopefully they will look better when they are stretched. My plan was to make the stitching uneven, in a bumpy field sort of way but I've found this surprisingly difficult. OK not even in a  Royal School of Needlework, sort  of way but not that as uneven as I'd planned to do. 

 

I have also been doing some other stitching experiments. For these 'grasses', I have used several different threads and woven them in and out of each other as I stitched and I quite like the effect.

I also stitched some tufts again with different threads, although  I would worry about them working loose if they were on a finished piece, I like the effect of mixing threads and together. Note to self: must do some more mixed thread stitching..

Since starting my geometric landscapes, Janet Edmonds has pointed my to another artist Vanessa Gardiner, who paints geometric coastal landscapes, albeit a lot more refined than mine. 

I've only done a little research into her work so far but I'm quite inspired to follow the geometric landscapes further. I've got so many ideas in my head at the moment....

Lago Maggiore - complete and delivered.

I'm pleased to say that I have finished my quilt and have delivered it to Twisted Thread. I learnt a lot making this quilt, both in creating the top cloth and also in the finishing of the quilt. The quilt is all machine stitched, which is unusual for me.

 

If you are visiting Festival of Quilts at the NEC this year, which is on from the 8th-11th August, then look out for my quilt in the Contemporary Quilt category. I'm going on the Saturday, maybe see you there?

Now you see it, now you don't. Discharging experiments.

In a previous post I mentioned that I had put a piece of my cloth in discharge solution to remove as much dye as possible and Wendy asked how I made the discharge solution. I was only able to give a brief answer at the time but promised a fuller answer in a forth coming blog post and here it is....the results of a couple of experiments.

I started with this piece of cloth which had several layers of dye and the piece was quite dark.

 

I cut of strip of fabric, folded it horizontally and then concertinered the fabric and clamped the square of perspex on it.

 

 

I left it in a Thiox (also call Spectralite) solution for only a couple of minutes and this was the result.

The shibori technique always creates different effects depending on where the fabric is in relation to the resist and the liquid solution. However, I may have got more even results if I had left it in the solution longer.

 

In another experiment I screwed up some of the fabric into a ball and held it together with elastic bands.

 

 

This time I left it in for about an hour and it is surprising just how much of the original colours and patterns are preserved. The thin lines of colour are where the elastic band created a resist. Is it just me or can anyone else see flowers in the piece?

 

 

My final experiment was to place a lose piece of the fabric in the discharge solution. In fact I did it twice leaving it in for 2-3 hours but it didn't seem to make much difference the second time around. It seems that once it's done it's stuff, it's done it's stuff.



 

 

You can actually see the original layers of print before the grids were added. Then there was the experiment with the commercial black fabric.

 

 

 

 Again, the crispness of the square varied depending on where the fabric was in the pile.

 

I think I might have got a better result if I had left it in longer or maybe had more fabric in the clamp, which would have caused the fabric to be more tightly clamped.

If you would like to experiment with this method of shibori or like me, you are looking to remove your mistakes then you can get Thiox (also called Spectralite) from George Weil. I used 2 tsps of Thiox, 2tsps of soda ash and enough steaming hot water to cover the fabric.

Given the darkness of both fabrics it did a good job of removing the colour. The effectiveness of the discharge does seem to depend on the colour and depth of colour on the original fabric. In my lake piece there were large areas that discharged completely back to white but other areas were left a mustardy yellow. If you try this out, I hope that you get some interesting results.

Post Sampling

I couldn't put it off any longer....I had to tackle the pole in the water. So using an off-cut, I trialled 3 ways of adding a pole to my fabric.

I tried painted bondaweb, Markal Paintstiks and fabric paint. I was convinced that the painted bondaweb would be the best method but it wasn't. So glad that I trialled it!

The painted bondaweb (right) was a bit plasticy, once I'd added enough paint to achieve the desired colour. The fabric paint (bottom left) was OK but was a dense all over colour and was also a bit plasticy. My clear favourite was the Markal Paintstik (top left).

So I bravely set about adding a pole to the main piece, which I think gives it additional interest and depth.

Even though I'd trialled the techniques, I was still a bit nervous adding the Markal as it was going to be really obvious if there were any mistakes but if there are any I haven't noticed them yet. So now to the stitching....at least you can unpick that if you make a mistake!

Sewing Bee - in the making?



Even before the Sewing Bee came to our screens, I have fancied making myself some clothes. In preparation I have bought several patterns and even some fabric but as most of the fabric was for winter clothes and time has moved on, I now need to buy some summer fabric, which is easier said than done these days. One of the things that puts me off making clothes is the risk that I'll make something only to find that it doesn't fit me. So having thought about it for some time, I have taken the plunge and bought a dressmaker's dummy.

 

 

Ironically, the first thing I fancy making is quite loose fitting but that will have to wait until I finished a couple of the textile projects I have on the go.

 

The advertising blurb says that you can also use it to hang tomorrow's clothes on it before going to bed. I can't see me doing that! But it has been used to model a bra, when my sister-in-law came over from France to do the Moonwalk. It was the least I could do to dye her bra pink. As you can see it came out a good deep colour.

 

I normally dye natural fabrics rather than synthetic fabrics but spurred on by my successful bra dyeing, I bought this dress from Marks & Spencer. 

Now white doesn't do much for me but as I liked the shape of the dress, I thought I would buy it and dye it. A bit risky I admit. I looked in my box of acid dyes and decided to dye it aubergine. Although it took the dye, it came out a little pale, so I'll be dyeing it again just as soon as I can get my hands on some more aubergine dye.

When my dressmakers dummy was first assembled, I looked at it and convinced myself that  I had bought the wrong size. Surely I'm not that big? With some difficulty and lots of help, I have adjusted the dummy to my size as best I can and it appears that I am (unfortunately) that size. It's been interesting and a little challenging changing the size of the dummy to fit my various measurements. Either the dummy's a funny shape or I am...mmmm.....