The Weekend

It's a 3-day holiday weekend in my country. Some will be heading out for the first camping trip of the season. Others will be heading for cemeteries as the holiday is meant to remember our war dead. Still others will be taking advantage of the ubiquitous sales that are now the standard of any holiday in this country. Me? I'll be getting this batch of carefully chosen plants into pots that reside on my deck in anticipation of the joy and smiles their blooms should bring me throughout the summer and into fall. And I just might tackle shampooing my rugs as well . . .

Maybe you will find yourself with a little extra time for reading, so I'm providing some links to articles that have caught my eye recently. First, I'll direct you to an interview with David Bowie titled David Bowie Offers Advice for Aspiring Artists: “Go a Little Out of Your Depth,” “Never Fulfill Other People’s Expectations”, which really is the perfect summary. It includes a video of an interview from the 90's with Bowie but a good text read as well. Two things that stood out for me: "Never play to the gallery." and "Go a little bit out of your depth. When you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.” I'm pretty much working on both of those this year.

A Painter's Key letter entitled Self-delusory Avoidance Activity has some advice that seems similar to me. It starts off with “What happens with you when you begin to feel uneasy, unsettled, queasy?” wrote American Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chodron in her 1996 book, When Things Fall Apart. “Notice the panic, notice when you instantly grab for something.” For artists, we may make sense of the discomfort of creative inquiry by giving it a name and influence. A genuine self-delusory avoidance activity is better known by its power-handle: “Block.”, then continues with ideas for getting beyond it. "For one month, tell no one what you plan to make." and "Set no production goals." are two at the top of the list. Again, I think I am on this track, doing some of the things in this list, not so much because I feel blocked but more because I sense something lacking in my work, something that could make it better and more satisfying. Looking at this list, I can see how some of these things would take me a little bit out of my depth.

Finally, here's an article that's been making the rounds on Facebook, Annie Albers on How To Be An Artist. I should be but am not very familiar with her work and nearly did not read this. Yet within it I found some interesting viewpoints I could not argue with. I was particularly drawn to her advice to listen to your chosen material. I so often feel that those working in textiles do not do that, try to force the medium to do things it's not best at and ignore the things it could do that no other medium can. “The more subtly we are tuned to our medium, the more inventive our actions will become,” she wrote. “Not listening to it ends in failure.” And I'm sure she was not thinking about quilting in particular in this next quotation, yet I immediately thought about the long war that wages between traditional quilting and techniques through to the most modern of art quilting: “The more we avoid standing in the way of the material and in the way of tools and machines,” she wrote in “Design Anonymous and Timeless,” “the better chance there is that our work will not be dated, will not bear the stamp of too limited a period of time and be old fashioned some day instead of antique.” There's a whole section following this where she discusses embracing new technology and tools in our exploration of the raw material we work with and where it can take us artistically. I realized she was right and I often push back against the newest thing, only to find a way of embracing it later.

It's all a journey. And I've given you plenty of material to keep you busy and thinking over the long weekend. Hoping it will ring bells or offer solutions for wherever you are on your creative journey.

Why I've Been AWOL (mostly)

Do you remember Toro the Bull from the Bugs Bunny cartoon? That's what I saw in Carla Sonheim's exercise of reading sidewalk cracks, and how I envision my dear readers might be feeling as they wonder where I've gone. Yikes! This is my first post this month but I have an excuse, sort of. I signed up for a free Sketchbook Revival course through Sketchbook Skool that started at the beginning of the month. Thirteen consecutive days of presentations geared to help you start or revive a sketchbook practice, possibly a daily one, with ideas for warming up, tips on how to draw various images and more specific instructions about using various media and supplies. I can do this, I thought. Better yet, I need this information, and how can I pass up free?

Because I am a sucker for buying supplies I know little or nothing about and then doing little or nothing with them once they are in my possession. This sketchbook is a case in point. I bought it sometime last year I think, when I found myself frustrated with the sketchbooks I did have that would not take wet media. Time to buy a mixed media one (and I also got the watercolor paper version at the same time) and then I won't feel constrained when I go out to sketch. Yeah, right. I never got farther than to do the recommended testing of different media on the opening pages. Well now I had a reason to get this out and people who would help me fill it up.

What I hadn't counted on was that we would be sent an e-mail each day with a link to not one but two video links featuring two different teachers. Miss a day (which I did) and one quickly got behind. Maybe they thought people would pick and choose which lessons they wanted to work through so this was a good thing to give as two each day. But I wanted to watch them all, do almost every one, even if I couldn't work up the exercise on the same day as I watched the video (I took copious notes.) What an opportunity to work with all these things on hand (and yes, I had nearly every suggested supply), like the Art Graf water soluble graphite cakes that I substituted for watercolor paint in Tamara Laporte's Quirky Happy Houses warm-up.

The lessons ranged from "intuitive" practices using a variety of media on the page (here we were encouraged by Iris Fritschi-Cussens to try layering acrylic paint, gesso, gel pen, colored pencil, watercolor paint, markers and anything else on hand which for me was Maribu's Art Crayon I'd gotten for free in a promotion) to more traditional structured approaches. Each had their merits.

For instance, Anna Bartlett's lesson was on how to use acrylic paint in a sketchbook rather than the more popular watercolor paint, using the sketchbook as a place to work things out (like composition and colors) before moving to an actual piece. I doubt I will be using my acrylic paints to work up "realistic" sketches like this, but I really appreciated the time she took explaining the many marks you can get with a flat brush, working with shadows and how much detail you can leave out and still get across what you are capturing with simple shapes and highlights. I did this rather quickly and didn't quite follow all her steps properly, but still surprised myself that it still looks like a bouquet of flowers in a jug! Plus I got to try out some new acrylic colors added to my collection over the last year. Yes, I do let my supplies sit. Then again, I've purchased acrylics for use on fabric, primarily in stamping, and haven't done much of that lately. 

Collage has been nibbling at the edges of my interest for a long time and I had two chances to work with it in two very different ways. Not only did I get a chance to work more with my water soluble pencils (the basis for the face) but who knew drawing a face could be so easy? At least, Tony Burt made it so. I want to do more of this, getting a bit better at adding the color and bits of collage over the top.

The other collage method by Laly Mille is more what I'm used to seeing and have been collecting images, text and papers for. She uses it as a warm-up and as art journaling so adds printed text as well as writing over the top of her work. The photo above shows mine at the arranging process, before anything is adhered down with matte medium, a product I'm still getting used to using instead of glue or paste.

I was quite fascinated with Karen Stamper's technique for creating a background for future sketching using what she calls mixed media mark making that includes elements of collage. Her instructions went against the grain of what I am generally comfortable with but because she was using regular inks and India ink which I have in abundance (and that India ink has only been out once), I was game to let loose. This was day 7 of the daily e-mails and everything leading up to that had helped loosen me up in general and see the sketchbook as they were describing it - a place to try things out, make mistakes, see what works. There was way more "working" than I anticipated so sure, let's glue down some odd paper pieces, sticky labels and masking tape and start soaking the paper with ink, sprays of water, runs from tipping the paper, texture from blotting areas. Mine is really too dark, but there are ways to lighten it up before I start sketching into it. In the meantime, I liked this so much and now knew I needed to dilute my regular ink more, so I did a better one on the back of this one.

So, you can't draw, you say. Well, more than one teacher showed us that's just not true. There are tricks to that trade, as illustrator Nina Rycroft showed us. She stressed really studying your subject (as did several other teachers) and suss out some general shapes. This fun beagle started as 3 circles for the head, shoulder and rear, and then it was a matter of connecting the shapes and adding on snout, ears, legs and tail per the reference photo. And then she continued with showing how to change the subject's position and add a little action. Observe, observe, observe, draw, draw, draw, was her encouragement.

Julia Bausenhardt also showed how easy it is to draw (and then paint) a very realistic bird starting with a couple of basic shapes, this time a circle for the head and an oval for the body. I especially appreciated her information on which brushes to use on this sort of watercolor rendition, and how to use the smallest one to make tiny strokes mimicking feathers. Prior to this, about the only watercolor instruction I'd seen used big brushes and broad strokes to create washes.

On the last day, Leonie Norton presented a class on Travel Sketching with Pen and watercolor wash, and all I could say was YES! I've been dabbling with a panorama of city beach off and on, trying not to feel out of my depth as I pencil sketch in areas before adding color. Leonie made the process from pencil sketch to adding watercolor make sense and seem pretty easy now. Plus she used two sizes of waterbrushes, which I have and have used but not with much assurance. Now, working with her video, my confidence is much higher.

I also had ample opportunity to work with the many brush pens I've acquired while working through warm-up exercises, mark making exercises and doodling exercises (like Rachel Taylor's Magic Motif Creation above). These were all ways of generating ideas and images without specifically setting out to do so. Not meant to be great art. Not even meant to produce results every time. But pretty fun and eliminating the usual pressure to create.

I've gotten a little carried away with Richard Armstrong's Random Word doodling practice. He recommends you doodle a word a day (spending 10 to 15 minutes on it) for at least 30 days in order to start getting results. I've been working through his free e-book on the subject and find his observation true that some days are good, others are not, but about half way through the 30 days you will come up with a winner that you can take further (this happened on day 12 for me). Mostly, I end up doodling characters or stories that highly amuse me, tapping into my quirky side I think has been too locked up lately.

The moderator of Sketchbook Revival 2019, Karen Abend, wrapped things up with the final session of Staying Inspired. She encouraged us to think about what it is that we love about where we live and look for daily inspiration for our sketchbooks there, taking quick photos to use as references once home. She noted how the longer we are in a place, the more used to things around us we get, to the point we stopped seeing them. I know what she means. So I sat there thinking, mountains, lake, these are why I am here, but I wasn't feeling inspired to sketch either. Then inspiration struck as I remembered that the syringa bushes had just started to bloom, and I always look forward to this brief flowering of my state's official flower. And I knew I had reference photos right on the very computer where I was watching her video. This seemed like such a perfect ending to the journey she had taken us on, and I found I could take things I'd learned from different teachers in the series (26 of them!) in creating my final page.

Ahem. What about those missed days, yet to be watched videos and yet to be worked on lessons? Sketchbook Skool had issued a sort of pardon for us struggling to keep up daily, assuring us off and on that the videos would be accessible for another two weeks, and so these last couple of weeks have been spent catching up and re-watching a few videos. I can't say enough good things about this free class, can't really relate the many little things I learned about myself, about my supplies, about my preferences, about how simple some of this was to do now that I knew the steps and tricks, and that the eye-rolling sometimes turned out to be unnecessary. Some of this I'll not do again, some I may do now and then, some I want to do more of and hope I can keep up some momentum to do so. The sketchbook is nearly filled (and I have ideas for those last few pages including some freebie lessons offered by individual teachers when you signed up on their website) and is now a great resource to refer back to. I'm not totally sure how, but I sense some of this experience will turn out to be useful in my textile practice when I return to it more avidly. Perhaps the biggest surprised was how empowered I felt at the end of it all. It's been a great way to spend my May. And now I may need to order another mixed media sketchbook . . .

Collaborative Thinking

I love my art group.

Not only does that monthly meeting drive me to do something when I'm in a slump or frustrated almost to the point of giving up on something, so that I'll have something to talk about or ask about when the time comes, the talking out loud and then hearing other takes, other ideas about how to proceed, can bring solutions into focus, spark even more ideas, take me forward in a way I often can't do on my own.

Such was the case with April's meeting. We had not met the previous month, which was a disappointment because I'd wanted to go over my ideas about the Dolphin Fountain quilt and some of the technical challenges puzzling me. And so that quilt sat while I did other things and even started piecing together ideas for a different fountain quilt. But now was my chance, and in getting a few things collected to take to the meeting, I actually answered one of my questions. But there was more I wondered about, how to use that piece of silk from the tie, and especially how to make it look like it was flowing down steps. I'd worked out in my head (while trying to drop off to sleep) that I might be able to mimic some dimension of steps by sewing little tucks into the batik, but I'd not actually tried manipulating the fabric. But I did now, in front of the group, and then started talking about how the silk might be arranged over the tucks and maybe a narrow strip of sheer added across at the top of each step. Others tossed in some tentative ideas.

And then, one of my brilliant group said, "You could attach the silk to the batik first, before folding and sewing in the tucks. Then it would offset the design automatically." Oh my gosh - she was right! And now so obvious. I still have some things to work out but this was such a big step forward on designing this quilt. And I'm not sure I would have gotten there without the kind of collaborative thinking that happens in my art group.

The Crux of an Idea

Well, this is weird.

After returning from that 3 months at the Mayo Clinic with my friend, after she was gone and I was going through her stash that I'd inherited, I came across this batik and added it to my "water wall" because it would be perfect to incorporate into a quilt highlighting the man-made pool on the Plummer House grounds. That pool was set back into a shady area thick with trees and ferns and vines, and I remembered the purplish colors reflected in the water along with the greens.

I'm thinking about this now instead of proceeding with the Dolphin Fountain because of an accidental juxtaposition of two fabrics from the last snow-dyeing. It was pure chance that I laid the fat eighth over the fat quarter and suddenly saw in it that Plummer House grounds pool. I grabbed the batik off the water wall to see if it worked with those two and saw that it did. Since this would be pretty straightforward requiring little working out of process (while the Dolphin quilt still has me pondering over technical approaches), I want to move ahead with this one before the inspiration fades.

Plummer House Grounds fountain - photo from an internet google

So I decided to take a quick look through my reference photos to remind me of the details of that pool and surrounding areas, and to my puzzlement, none of them bear out this memory of purple in the surroundings. Many of the photos, in fact, are very poor because of how darkly in shade the pool was, and apparently I was more focused on capturing reflections. So yes, this is weird, that my memory does not match reality. Maybe it's just my photos, I thought. So I also googled images of the grounds, and still no purple. In fact, I discovered this pool is actually a fountain, which was not running the day we were there. 

My photo from a blog post that showed up in a google search

Which brings up another weird thing. While googling those images, I clicked on one to discover it was from my own blog post about our excursion around the grounds. Have you ever had that happen to you, finding your own photos in a google search? You can read that post here and scroll down to see more photos and narrative about the water features. As I look at them now, I have no recollection of this fountain pool having that "unnaturally blue" look. But there it is in my photo, if not in my memory banks.

I'm taking it as a sign of artistic growth that I'm not letting any of this "reality" lead me away from my original design colors (although seeing that blue makes me feel better about the blue in the one snow-dye which I was feeling uncomfortable about, thinking it wasn't really accurate). I was thinking about this as an abstraction anyway, a hint at the real thing. And as often happens, scarcity of fabric will drive the design. As I pondered how to work with what I had, I already started wondering/worrying about the quilting, until I suddenly remembered this batik I bought maybe a month ago. I often catch myself picking up a fabric because the design on it strikes me as one I could translate some way in my own surface design efforts. I was taken in not only by those waves, but also by the colors within them - intriguing. And as it turns out, the batik itself is a perfect match to coordinate with the purple/green batik should there be any left. But what made me get this piece out and study it again was the thought that in those lines was the answer to my quilting design question, a much different kind of wavy water line than I've used before. Pretty exciting.

Another #DingsplatZ

Not sure this is much of an improvement over the first one. Or at least not particularly different or imaginative since I used some of the same tangles. I'd intended to have fewer loops than the first one but only decreased by one. So still working with a mostly rectangular space within the framework. And didn't quite get the auraing going right to produce an over under effect so added the lines within the auraing instead. This is what happens when you go into this with expectations! I do like adding the red and the leaves got a hint of green added to them. I do like my color.

#DingsplatZ

Working on a Zentangle wasn't on the list of things I might do today, but before heading off to yoga, I watched a video by the Zentangle people working with something they call a dingsplatZ. It's another way to create a framework, they say, for the tangles you will add on your tile. I was so fascinated with the demos that all else was off the table when I got home from said yoga class. I spent a lovely hour working this up, lovely perhaps partly because it wasn't what I had intended to do with that bit of time, a guilty pleasure, and winging my schedule as it were. The framework or dingsplatZ is just drawing loops in a circle around the page with a single line that joins up, giving you an enclosed space to work within. They mentioned you could think of it as an ink splat too. Lots of "auraing" or echoing around that loopy line, building the framework around where tangles would appear. Placing some tangles outside the framework as well. Shading with pencil and highlights of red, since this was done in my "and then add red" sketchbook. The flourishes in the corners came about to cover up a place where my pen slipped under my template when drawing the outer square. (There are no mistakes in Zentangle, just opportunities.) One example of auraing around the loops put me in mind of the ratoon tangle which this looks somewhat like but is approached in a very different way. This was fun and I have another square drawn where I can try this again with that alternate aura like I see in ratoon.

A Taxi and Some Thoughts

Working with watercolors in a 5 x 8 Pentalic Aqua Journal

There are still some piles of snow yet to melt, but it did warm up enough towards the end of last week to entice me into some urban sketching. I noted this Yellow Cab tucked in the back of a tire shop along my walking route last fall. It definitely has seen better days, but I was surprised that those days were in Idaho. I've never seen a Yellow Cab on the streets around here, although it is true that is an Idaho area code painted on its side. So I definitely wanted to capture it in a sketchbook and hoped it wouldn't disappear while I recovered from my nerve issues and winter weather precluded outdoor sketching. I spent one session outlining the shapes with a Pigma Micron Pen (which didn't work well on the watercolor paper) and went back the next day to add some color. I'm very much a novice with watercolor so every time I get out the little travel set, it is an adventure and a learning experience. And really kind of fun!

I've been reading through Sue Bleiweiss's The Sketchbook Challenge, a collection of various textile and multi-media artists' approaches to working with sketchbooks, highlighting some of their favorite techniques. This is especially of interest to me since I started my water series sketchbook, comparing how I am using mine to their's, nodding when my experience is similar to someone else's, and picking up a tip or idea here and there. Sue herself is included, and I appreciated the comment she made at the end of her sharing of her process:

"Serendipity is great and will always have a place in my studio, but you can't rely on it to get you where you want to go."

Gosh, this struck me as such a bold statement to make when so many art quilters really do say everything is serendipity with their creating. I've never bought it 100%, and think a lot of very poor art is being made "serendipitously". I don't discount its value, but like Sue, I don't feel it can be relied on totally.

Austin Kleon threw a few gems at me this week worth sharing. You might file these under the heading "Points of View", adding to my recent post of the same name. This first one is a Saul Steinberg quote from Steal Like An Artist and resurrected in this post which is worth reading too.

"What we respond to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her own limitations.”

Since I KNOW I have limitations and do struggle with them, it's nice to know I'm not the only one and that it is ok for that struggle to be a part of a finished work.

On the occasion of singer Scott Walker's death, Austin shares, among other things, an Albert Camus quotation, the part below in bold which showed up on the back of one of Walker's album covers. (Lots of links and a video in his post It's Raining Today.)

"A time always comes in an artist’s life when he must take his bearings, draw closer to his own center, and then try to stay there…. A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. This is why, perhaps, after working and producing for twenty years, I still live with the idea that my work has not even begun."

I hardly know what to say to that but I can't stop re-reading it and thinking about it. And feeling it prodding me back to my art.

*************************************

March 29, 2019

Rather than put this in a separate post, I'm amending this one to include a quotation from John Berger's Ways of Seeing that was included in a thoughtful excerpt from the book What If This Were Enough? by Heather Havrilesky. Copyright 2018  as posted on Longreads.com (The Miracle of the Mundane). While the excerpt only peripherally references art, its thoughts about our current consumer-driven world and what that does to how we end up viewing ourselves is pretty interesting and possible worth your time to peruse. On to Berger, who I add here because his thoughts somehow complement and expand upon those of Saul Steinberg quoted above:

"It is necessary to make an imaginative effort which runs contrary to the whole contemporary trend of the art world: it is necessary to see works of art freed from all the mystique which is attached to them as property objects. It then becomes possible to see them as testimony to the process of their own making instead of as products; to see them in terms of action instead of finished achievement. The question: what went into the making of this? supersedes the collector’s question of: what is this?" 

I rather like that part that encourages us to see art as action rather than finished achievement. It goes so well with my own experience of often being more interested in process than the finished product. The journey is a major reason I create, and perhaps that is why when looking at a finished work, we somehow can't resist wondering about the how, imagining indeed just what went into the making of it.

Odds and Ends Snowdyeing

Looking back at my blog posts, I see that I did indeed do a session of snowdyeing last year, and somewhat similar to what I ended up doing on Monday - a bit of overdyeing of previous snowdyes that could be improved and a bit of folding and manipulating of undyed pfd fabric. You've already seen my snow-stacked and dye sprinkled setup in the previous post. Here it is 24 hours later, still with snow left to melt. But I can see around the edges that things looks promising. I always fear I'll get nothing but ugly results as I look at how the dye powder appears dissolving into the snow. But this time I used only two dye colors - the bright green which was so fabulous on the parfait piece, and the ultraviolet for contrast. I think I also sprinkled a little blue around the edges to use it up, or maybe some lavender. Not sure - I was winging it. It was so warm in the afternoon that I left the garage door open when I got home from my afternoon yoga class in the hopes that the sun and air would heat things up and get that snow melted!

I always have fabric in the bottom of the tub to use up perfectly good dye in the melted snow water. This time, inspired by Wisconsin friend Michele's experiments with dyeing wool yarn, I also tossed in some cotton yarn down there. You can just spy it through the plastic grating.

Finally, the snow all melted away and I was able to start rinsing and unfolding this batch and boy, did some of them surprise me! There was only one that I feel iffy about and even it has potential. (I have to warn you that my camera struggles with some colors so I've had to tweak these photos, sometimes with better results than at other times.) I'll show before and after photos together starting with some I rolled and scrunched. That method has you roll fabric around a cord of some kind and then push the fabric along the cord in a gathering motion before tying the cord to hold it in place. I remembered that I'd purchased some reusable zip ties from Dharma and decided this might be a good time to test them out.

First I tried them with the yellow fat quarter from the parfait dyeing session (seen under the zip tie package). This one I rolled on the diagonal and the zip tie was a little short to reach all the way across but I made it work and managed to just get the end of the zip tie in place. I used an ordinary twist tie from the grocery store to hold the point of fabric in place there at the middle.

And this is the result. While the yellow fabric was not a fail, I think this a grand improvement.

This photo shows the manipulations on two more from the parfait snowdyeing plus some undyed fabric. In the  upper left is another roll and scrunch, this time done end to end instead of on the diagonal with the mostly blue fat eighth. It was so handy to be able to cinch it tight with that zip tie.

And I am SO pleased with this result. I see water here. ;-)

In the upper right, I tried something I hadn't before, a way of twisting the fabric until it twists back on itself, using the mostly blue with ugly yellow/green from the parfaits (seen under the yellow scrunched in a previous photo). It didn't seem to pick up much new dye but it is altered just enough to make me like it better.

In the lower left you see a wide accordion fold which was then accordion-folded to create rectangles and then clamped to hold in place. I did NOT see this coming, although I did expect it to give me something of a windowpane effect Wowsa!

Nor did I expect THIS wowsa! Its folded before is shown in the lower right, starting with an actual square of fabric with a diagonal fold and then adding folds in the hopes of getting some kind of kaleidoscope pattern. Somewhere in my mess is instructions I'd found on how to properly fold for a kaleidoscope but I could not find it. So this is what happens when you wing it! Not sure what happened there in the middle, perhaps a fluke of the folding or how the random dye powder worked its way down, but it is challenging me to make it work anyway.

There were so many surprises in this piece, including the way there is an absolute glow of green around those outer motifs - only there in this piece.

Here's the last folded piece and the cotton yarn. I should note that I took the advice of another prolific kaleidoscope maker to do all the folding with a good press before soaking in soda ash solution. I've always done the folding when the fabric was wet and so always got less precise results. On this last piece of undyed fabric, I wanted to see if I could get lines going off in all different directions so folded randomly. The yarn (Lily Sugar & Cream cotton yarn) spools from the center so I carefully removed bunches starting from the outside and used twist ties to keep it all from ending up a tangled mess.

The yarn turned out wonderful. After rinsing, I put it in a net for the final wash in the machine. I had to replace my 18 year old washer a few months ago and this was my first chance to try it out with dye processing. I knew that if I didn't corral that yarn in some kind of bag I'd be very sorry. But even this bag was no match for the super duper spin cycle of the new machine. I had to laugh at the way multiple loops of yarn worked their way through the holes in the net. I pulled it all back in before tossing in the dryer, where it all stayed within the net.

And here it is before removing the twist ties and rolling into a ball. I love this combination of colors.

You're going to say butterfly or dragonfly, aren't you?

As for that randomly folded piece, it was the only one that I felt iffy about. It did not do what I thought it would at all. But it still may be usable - parts of it are interesting.

The ultraviolet reads more red here than in real life

Oh, there is one last folded piece, the one that was in the bottom of the bin. I didn't get a before pic of it but I just made random wide accordion folds both directions until it fit flat in the bottom. It soaked up all the dyes and amazingly, has specific areas of green as well as the ultraviolet and some colors in between. It's moody and reminds me of water too. And as I looked through this batch, I see the advantage of this kind of dyeing of multiple pieces with the same dye combination. I have pieces that I can use together rather than a bunch of interesting but unrelated ones. I've already got an idea peculating for two of them . . .

Parfait Snowdyeing

It's been 2 years since my first go at parfait snowdyeing, and I was not thrilled with my results. I came away with things I should and would do differently for better results should I do it again. But really, I wasn't sure I ever would. It was almost a whim to try it over the weekend, those piles of snow you saw in my moose pictures destined to be greatly reduced if not totally gone within the week with forecasts of temps getting near 60 degrees. I already had some pfd fabric cut into half yards for gradations I never got to and I knew that if I took the time to scour them beforehand with synthropal, I'd not get to the dyeing part. I know most people don't bother to wash their pfd fabric but I always have. This time I just gathered my precuts, cut them into fat quarters and fat eighths before soaking them in soda ash solution (left over from my last dye session), quickly reviewed the process and, per my resolution word(s) for the year, winged it! I pulled some recently acquired vases and a variety of dye powders out and started layering.

The original directions suggested placing some small thing in the bottom for the fabric to rest on out of the melted dye-laden snow, but instead, I stuffed a fat eighth into the bottom of each rectangular vase before topping with snow and my first fat quarter. More snow and some dye powder, more snow and another fat quarter, more snow and more dye. That's all that would fit. A similar process for the tall cylinder vase. Sitting in my garage with nights still getting below freezing, it took about 24 hours for the parfaits to melt. The idea of this method is that dyes from upper levels will seep down into the fabrics below creating interesting mixes. It didn't look to me like there was much seeping as I emptied the vases out and started rinsing. However, as I unfolded and soaked, things looked promising.

These are the fat eights in the bottom of the rectangular vases. Yes, not a lot of dye made it down to them. The one on the left became a candidate for overdyeing in the next session.

These two are from the shorter rectangular vase. Golden yellow and I believe mixing blue were the dyes, me thinking that when the two seeped together, I'd get a lovely green. Not so much. Both of these would get overdyed, even though the yellow one had some nice texturing in it.

These from the tall rectangular vase are much more interesting. I rather loosely gathered these side to side and then folded the ends under to fit the width of the vase. I used more than one dye color on each layer, spreading them side by side more or less, and there may have been a bit of seepage onto the one on the right, the rose red coming through. I think the other colors I used were more of the mixing blue and some seafoam green. The one on the right has bright green, ultraviolet and maybe some lavender thrown in. I wasn't really keeping track, and making last minute decisions as I went. (Winging it!)

There's some very nice texturing in there.

The big winners came out of the cylinder vase. Again, struggling a bit to remember what I put in there, but definitely the ultraviolet and lavender on the top and more of that golden yellow underneath. But there was also a surprise.

While trying to separate the damp fat quarters I'd layered in the soda ash, my rubber gloved fingers struggled to find edges. I was coming up short on fabric and I had this feeling I had two fat quarters glued together and already stuffed into a vase. Sure enough, it was in this vase that they ended up, creating duplicate pieces that also create a mirror image! I'm very excited about that and the possibilities they present.

So I guess you could say, my faith in parfait dyeing has been restored, and I will probably do it again. Not prewashing the pfd fabric didn't affect how it took the dyes - good to know. And these results got my brain ticking away, knowing exactly what I wanted to do next. I quickly gathered more snow and fabric for a regular snowdye session. They say you must make hay while the sun shines. Well, here it is dye fabric before the snow melts! I'm ironing up the results this afternoon . . .