Dye Day Saturday

I don't own the supplies for hand-dyeing fabric. I'm usually content to paint fabric for the colors and textures that I want, but about two times a year I manage to wrangle an invitation to the workshop of one of my friends who do dye their own fabrics. Yesterday a group of us made a day of it at the home of Susan Italo, all 'round talented artist.

Left to right: Susan Italo, Judy Rys, Linda Cassirer, and Mary Norton. All happily playing with dyes and fabrics.Now, here's a picture of "the hard part". After we had applied dye, we had to let it batch for four hours. It just sits there. We aren't supposed to poke it or pick it up to see what's happening. We just wait. We originally had a plan to work on some self-portraits while waiting for the dye to strike, but somehow that turned into eating too much wonderful food, drinking wine, and drowsing until we roused ourselves in order to have some espresso and chocolate trifle.

I'll post a couple of pieces of the fabric I created. Somehow several of us ended up with more white areas than we wanted, but in my case, have paints, will transform white into something else.

Coming back to bite me ......

Ya know the old saying about your words coming back to bite you? Well, I think I'm bit! Here is a photo of the piece I am working on to enter in the Buddha Abides show. I am pleased with it so far...... but ......

Sometime back, fellow fiber artist Judy Rys and I were discussing the quilting aspect of our work and I told her I felt pretty lucky because the quilting pattern usually came to me along with the vision of the work content. So, dear reader, you can probably guess that I haven't a clue what to do with this. I stare at it for awhile, close my eyes and try to visualize it quilted, picked the threads in the hope that would kick start me, but nooooo, still no inspiration. I decided to just forget about it for about a day and see if anything wafted into my head, but again, no. I came in this afternoon after attending the Santa Barbara Symphony and, I swear, it smirked at me. I don't think it is appropriate for a Buddhism-themed piece to be so argumentative. There's probably a lesson here, I'll keep you posted.

Sharing the joy of fabric painting

Today, Judy Rys and I painted some fabric. She wanted to see the technique I use in some of my fabric painting. This is my piece of fabric in the beginning. Paint, salt, and water is down, now it is just a matter of waiting to see the end result. Check out Judy's blog for more photos and her fabrics.