What Do You Do With Art Experiments?

     When you create a piece of cloth from an experiment do you put it in a notebook, put it away somewhere, or try to create something out of it? I usually try to create something. I hate for things to be put away and not used. Such was the case with an experiment on silk from my most recent Art Cloth class with Jane Dunnewold. We learned how to print on fabric using thickened dyes and used screens we had created in class to print through. Here is one of my results:

experimental screen print

     It was over a yard square in size. I cut it up into strips and machine-pieced them together. Then I overlapped two of the resulting long strips and sewed them together with a seam. I topstitched around the edges and then my scarf was finished. 

     I have two more cloths from that same procedure, but they don't seem as promising as this one was. But since I don't like cloth to just sit there, I may try to overdye them and turn them into cloth napkins. That's all for now because I'm very busy dyeing and printing to continue with my art series. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on the artists' posts so that they know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

The Quest for Spring Green.

There are so many green hues in nature. But which ones really dominate in Spring? The answer probably depends on the plants in your view. But in creating a dye background for my Spring pieces, I want to capture the yellow-green I see in the new growth popping out of stems and branches. I also need that hue to coordinate with the gray pieces I've already made for Autumn so it can't be an intense hue. So to find my desired green, I ran several experiments mixing colors to produce my yellow-green. I tried various blue dyes mixed with Prochem's Sun Yellow. I tried Neutral Gray mixed with that yellow, too. And then I mixed compliments to get a duller green because the brightly colored ones didn't play well with the gray pieces. I mixed grape with yellow, grape with curry, bronze with tangerine. All produced some very interesting greens. I think, for my purposes with this series, I've settled on the bronze/tangerine mixture.
     One thing I found was that the color will change dramatically if the fabric is completely immersed in the dye bath compared to if it is just wet with the dye bath. Here's an example:

green produced by completely immersing
fabric in yellow/grape mixture

interesting but ugly sample using the same dye bath
shown above, but only wetting the fabric with it
instead of immersing the fabric in it

I think I've learned that only wetting the fabric with dye mixtures causes the colors to split. (Which may be a good thing sometimes, but not for what I want here.)

Completely immersed in a bronze/tangerine mixture

This one is very close to what I want. (The rectangle you see on the right is a shadow of my iPhone when I took the photo.) I tried overdyeing a piece of it in very dilute Marine blue to get a little more green and less yellow.

Overdyed sample

I love this piece of fabric, but it doesn't really go well with the gray pieces I have so I'll use it for something else. I wasn't expecting so much blue to come out pure. Something for me to remember about overdyeing... Some of the new color will show as its pure color. 

     So I might use the bronze/tangerine mixture and try getting the effect I want by printing on it with the right hues. I'm getting a little frustrated because I can get the exact color I want when mixing paints, but with dye, you can't see what you've got until after you've washed and dried the fabric after it has batched in the dye bath. Sometimes, while it is in the dye bath, it looks one color, but after batching, washing and drying it comes out different than what it seemed. I guess that is part of the learning curve. 

     While my samples, batch (24 hours), I work on smaller projects. I needed some coasters in my studio for putting on wet glasses with ice water or cups of hot coffee or tea and I wanted them to coordinate with the quilt my grandmother made for me. Instead of buying fabrics, I went to a bag I've been keeping of scraps of fabric leftover from dye experiments. I cut up pieces of those to make small collages and followed a tutorial I wrote here for my very first blog post on how to make coasters using old floppy disks. 

new coasters on studio table

All four coasters

      So that's what I've been up to. Trying to find the right green and smaller things. I think it is the scientist in me that makes me want to get just the right mixture. But I've decided that this week, I'll just choose one of the mixtures I've already tried and make it work in my series. I can change how it appears by the paint colors and values I choose for printing imagery on it. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts to let them know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

     

Can Color Challenge You?

     Have you ever mixed colors and gotten a surprise? I've been doing some color studies to learn more and to get the hues I want for my series. One of the hues I want to get with Procion MX dyes is a mustard hue. I know that they sell a dye color called mustard and it looks close to the hue I want to achieve, but I'm trying to make my colors by using the colors I already have. I'm in the mode of using what I have before I buy more. And theoretically, I should be able to get a nice mustard by mixing the right proportions of purple and yellow. I proved this with a paint study I did. I made a color wheel on watercolor paper and then started with pure yellow at the top and added purple paint little by little and painted a space at the bottom of the wheel with as neutral a color I could get with yellow and purple mixed. On another wheel, I painted purple at the top and went towards the same neutral color at the bottom. Here are the two wheels of reducing color saturation or intensity.

intensity wheels

     I used Profab opaque textile paint for these.  As you can see, I got some nice mustard colors in the top wheel. So I thought if I took Procion Sun Yellow dye (which is the same hue as the yellow paint) and Procion Grape dye (which is the same hue as the purple paint) and mixed them, I would get close to the same hues on the fabric that I got on the paper.

     As you can guess, that's not how it came out. Here are the results on cotton broadcloth.

Yellow with Grape added

The yellows turned more green as I added grape.

Grape with yellow added

The purples aren't too far off the paint samples, just lighter. Isn't it interesting how the paint samples compare to the dye samples? It's all about chemistry. How the dyes react with each other and with the fabric. On silk, it would look even different. Bottom line, I'm still working on mixing mustard. I came close with bronze dye and tangerine, but the tangerine splits out a little too much and gives orange streaks. 

     So while I'm working on that, I've started one of the pieces in the series, because I did successfully come up with the blue-gray that I wanted.  And this week brought good news. I sold my piece Inner Balance 2 to a doctor. He asked me what I did for a living and I told him I was a fiber artist and gave him my elevator speech about art quilts and what I do. He was interested so on my second visit, I took two of my works to show him in person what an art quilt looks like. He bought one of them. What a nice surprise. 

Inner Balance 2

     The other good news is that my piece Rise was juried into SAQA's exhibit Growth. It will be in Dunedin Fine Art Center from June 9 - August 18 in Dunedin, Florida.

Rise

So I'm continuing with my color studies and creating a wealth of a dye notebook and working on paint studies, too. There is so much to learn about color and I'm finding it fascinating. I'm linking this with Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts so that they know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

How Do You Study Color?

     When you need a special hue for your work, do you make an educated guess on how to get it? Or do you take some time to do a detailed study to get it very close to what you have in mind? I want to create a color palette to go with a piece I've already created. The background is a bluish gray and I want to create three more pieces that will coordinate with it. I'm using the gray one to represent Autumn and want to create one each for Spring, Summer, and Winter.

The gray one

     I'd like a bluish background for the Winter one but need it to be a dullish blue. I have several blue dyes from Prochemical and Dye Company. I know that if I mix a blue with an orange, I can dull it down. Rather than just guess how much of each dye to mix to get it right, I decided to do a color study and keep a notebook with all the details so that it will be useful for future works, too.
     So I chose several blues that I have and an orange dye named Strongest Orange to do this study. I may continue it later on trying an orange called Terra Cotta, also. I cut up 22 pieces of cotton broadcloth for each test and calculated the amounts of dye to use for my stock solutions of blue and stock solution of orange. Then I dyed the samples, starting with pure blue, various mixes of blue/orange, and pure orange. Also, for each, I dyed a sample diluted 1:10 so that I could see what the pale color of that hue looks like.
     Here are the results showing the gradual change from pure blue to pure orange:

Mixing Blue/Strongest Orange

Mixing Blue/Strongest Orange

Teal Blue/Strongest Orange

Teal Blue/Strongest Orange

Marine Blue/Strongest Orange

Marine Blue/Strongest Orange

Written underneath each swatch of fabric is the recipe I used so that I can reproduce the results. As you can see, I got some lovely browns that I'm sure I'll use sometime in the future. Also, if you look closely, you'll see that the swatches are not a solid color. I purposely didn't smoosh the fabric too much in the dye to get a solid. I wanted to see how it looked if I let the colors split a little, because that is most likely what will happen on the larger cloths I use to make backgrounds.

     From these samples, I think I can choose a blue that will work for a nice winter-themed background. My next study is to find a yellow/orange that will coordinate with the series for a Summer background hue. I'm starting that study with a color called "Curry" and mixing it with "Grape" in the same 11-step gradation I used for the blues. I have my first study with that already soaking in their baggies and the colors are looking very interesting.

     While I'm doing the color study, I'm also spending daily time stitching small collages with leftover pieces of fabrics from my first Autumn series. 

collage 1

collage 2

For now, I'm keeping the collages on the simple side to work with basic composition and color combinations with just a little marking and stitching added. I may revisit them and work them more later.

     So although my color study may take a month or so to complete, for me, I think it will be time worth spending to improve my dye technique and to have a notebook full of hues and how to get them. I'm linking this up to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on the artists' posts so that they know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

Can You Bear To Experiment With One-of-a Kind Fabrics?

     Have you ever had special fabrics that you were afraid to cut up or paint onto or add other surface designs and possibly ruin them? Well, I dyed several fabrics to prepare for my next session in my Art Cloth Mastery Class with Jane Dunewold. The supply list for this session said to bring 6-8 pieces of at least 1/2 yard pieces of hand-dyed fabrics that didn't work out and maybe some you even liked. We are going to be over-dyeing and discharging among other things this session. Since, I haven't been a fabric dyer, I didn't have any pieces of dyed fabric just laying around so I had to freshly dye all mine.
     As it turned out, I ended up liking all but one. I kept notes on how I made each piece and was surprised that I got different colors from the same mixed dye in the same jar of chemical water simply by how I poured it on the scrumbled cloth. I'll have to experiment with that some more in the future. Here are my fabrics that will be sacrificed next week with further experiments in Jane's studio in Texas.

cotton fabrics hanging on my design wall

I applied various manipulations to them so that I would have a variety of things to look at and consider when I discharge and over dye. And I used both pure dyes and mixed dyes to see how they would react when over dyed and discharged. We also have to take 5 yards of white fabric to dye and over dye. I think my dye notebook is going to get a lot thicker by the end of the seven days. 

     Looking at those lovely fabrics, I want to cut them and sew them together and make them into a scarf and boro stitch it, or make them into a cover for my iPad or a purse. I hate to change the actual fabrics. But, alas, their fate is going to be for research and that is that.  I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts so that they know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

Are Some Weeks Busier Than Others In The Studio?

Or, in my case are some weeks busier than others in the laundry room? I've been working on my research project for my Art Cloth Mastery Class with  Jane Dunnewold. It involved lots and lots of dyeing cloth and getting dyeing recipes perfected for me and for the other students. I prefer cloths with texture and mottling, but in this study, I needed to get solid-colored cloths so that I can cut them up into swatches and each student in the class gets the same color and value on their piece as everyone else. I'm going to prepare the samples on cardstock with the recipes for all the other students and for Jane and give it to them at our next session. I got to choose my topic. I like to work with pastels, so I chose to find the recipes to get lighter colors of each of the 12 colors on a standard color wheel plus gray plus brown. (Brown isn't shown here.) I did the standard color plus 4 tints.

Whew! That's a lot of dyeing.

     I got quite tired of making solids only so I occasionally did a scrumble with leftover dye to see if the mixed colors would split at all. I did a scrumble of the blue-green and washed it out during a thunder storm. Here's the result.

Some lightning bolts?

And of course, Opus and Andy played their part in all of this. One of days, they were wildly running and chasing each other all through the house while I was in the laundry room measuring out dye. I was glad of that because it kept them out of my way. But then it got very quiet. Quiet is not good. I went into the studio to find this...

Is that a look of guilt or contrition? NOT

There is no way I can be angry at them. I love them way too much. And there is no way I can keep them out of any room. I love their company way too much for that, too. I only keep them out when there is paint or dye involved for their own safety. 

So the last two weeks have been very labor intensive. But the hard work is done. I've learned a lot about dyeing and have a wonderful resource. Now I can get to the creative and fun part of the homework. So looking forward to it. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on the artists' blogs so that they know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.