a small break

After a few days of getting caught up on housework, sleep and emails, it’s time to tackle an unfinished project.  When Tina and I were printing the silk for our dress I threw some blue ink on the plate and ran through some fabric that I had in my stash.  I had exactly enough for a small tote bag.

 

I also wanted to try freezer stencilling on it, my new favorite technique for adding pattern and color to things.  Super easy to do.

 

I lined the purse with a scrap of vintage polyester stretch fabric in a houndstooth pattern.  It reminds me of a pantsuit I probably had when I was in fourth grade.  I love it.   The end result…

   

the skirt is finished

It was down to the wire.  Well, not really, but it was as far as my sanity goes.  I have no idea how many hours I spent stitching beads and sequins onto the skirt for the outfit Tina and I are constructing for Locavore.  Let’s just say, many, many, many.  To the point where on Wednesday night my left hand cramped so badly I couldn’t hold the fabric.  I had both kids taking turns massaging it, trying to get it moving without as much pain.

 

I am totally not complaining. I mean honestly, who has the chance to say that they did this?  That they covered an amazing skirt designed by a local fashion designer in beads and sequins for a charity event. 

 

I can!

 

Tomorrow is the photo shoot at the Kirkland Arts Center Gallery.  The models will be there, getting their hair and makeup done.  Accessories will be added.  I am handing all of this over to Carlynne (one of the organizers of the event, one of the fashion designers and our model!!) and Tina.  I have no idea how to dress myself, I rarely wear makeup and if they aren’t Keens, I don’t wear them so, yeah – no styling for me.  But I will be there!  I can’t wait to see not only our outfit but the others as well! 

 

Yes, I’ll take my camera.

Miss Colleen

(almost) every Tuesday my daughter volunteers for an hour. She helps a middle school teacher in the art room, doing various projects, helping to clean up or get things set up for classes.  I get to go pick her up and visit with Miss Colleen.  Miss Colleen is not only an amazing art teacher (you’d have to be pretty amazing to teach art to middle school kids) but she is an artist in her own right, as a milliner.  What I appreciate the most about her though is her depth of knowledge. Each visit I learn something new, either a new technique, a new artist, a new art show, and so on.  She scolds me when I miss a show at the Seattle or Bellevue Art Museum.  She helps me with my own art.

 

Today she pointed my daughter and I to this show at the Seattle Asian Art Museum about Central Asian Ikats. 

 

Textiles!  I’m in.

 

Ikat is everywhere these days. It is showing up on all the design blogs, in fabric lines, clothing, dishes, furniture.  These purses are from here. I’m excited to see original fabrics and the garments made from them.  Thanks for the tip Miss Colleen!

this is what I’ll be doing

for the next week…

 

The photo shoot of our outfit for Locavore is on May 5th.  That gives me just over one week to bead the skirt of our outfit.  Tina is working on the bustier, which is an equally big job. 

 

We’ll make it. 

 

I always work better to a deadline so I should be good.  And the clever organizers, having worked with artists before, made the deadline two weeks before the big event.  Of course, to us, this means that we can pin the garment on the model and make it work for the photo shoot and then still have two more weeks to finish it.  yay!

dyeing fabrics

My friend Anna is a tie-dyer.  She does the most amazing pieces, combining colors, creating images.  She works with precision, using the right balance of dyes and accompanying chemicals to get long-lasting, exact colors.  She mentioned the other day that she is going to start working with pigments to try to get more muted colors in her work.

 

My friend Tina is a more of a mad scientist when it comes to working with dyes and has no inhibitions about plopping a gorgeous gown into a big bin of a couple of boxes of dye and then over dyeing the whole thing in a different color – leaving the garment in the vat for three or four days or whatever.

 

Kathrin, whose blog annekata I visit quite often, has been experimenting with eco-dyes.  Dyes made from natural ingredients like the water left over from soaking black beans.  She points to the website of India Flint, an Australian who combines all three approaches.

 

 

Different approaches, both achieving the same result – amazing textiles.  It certainly has given me the bug (but not the one used to color Starbucks’ strawberry frappachinos, although that might be cool) to start dyeing my own felts and fabrics for my work.

 

I picked up a book the other day entitled “Fortunes in Formulas”.  It has quite a few formulas for dyeing various fabrics…  super helpful.  I think I’ll stick to Tina’s approach for awhile.  And will start saving my bean water.

 

      

Printmaking

I am a printmaker, or at least I keep telling myself I am. 

 

This past Sunday I got to spend the day back in the Kirkland Arts Center printmaking studio.  A few of the artists, designers and organizers of Locavore, including my design partner Tina met to take a mini-class from my dear friend Mary Mac who showed us a few basic techniques. 

 

I did a couple of dry emboss runs of our linocuts through the press.  This is something I try to do with all my prints, before they get inked up because they will never be clean enough to do this again (at least mine won’t be).  Next I inked them up in blue and printed some green fabric I’d brought. 

 

Finally we ran the four yards of fabric through the big press.  I’ve done long pieces of fabric before but nothing that is longer than the press.  Mary Mac, Tina and I were all standing in front of the press trying to figure out how to pull this off.  The only way that seemed to work was Mary Mac’s suggestion that we remove the blankets with each run.  If you are a printmaking you are groaning to yourself right now and saying, “noooooooooooooo!”.  Tina, bless her heart, suggested cutting up the fabric into two foot lengths.  She said it would probably be faster to re-sew the pieces together than to spend 8 hours at the press. She was right.

 

Less than an hour later we were done.  For more photos, nip over to Tina’s blog.  Wow. I’ve never been featured on someone else’s blog before.  Thanks Tina!  Oh, and for a chance to win a fabulous one-of-a-kind kimono t-shirt designed by Tina, head over to My Girl Thursday!

Freezer Paper Stencils

Am I the last person to discover this method of creating awesome prints?  I’ve read about it on everyone’s blog so now you get to read about it on mine. 

 

It was my daughter’s idea to create t-shirts for a meet-up today of her favorite homestuck character (don’t ask me to explain, it’s a teen thing).  I suggested trying it with freezer paper and promptly showed her the instructions over at one of my very favorite blogs, Jessica’s How about Orange.

 

The list of supplies is relatively short and inexpensive.  You can buy freezer paper at the grocery store in the wrap aisle (as opposed to the dub step or hip hop aisles, as my daughter kindly pointed out).  Then we bought some fabric paints at the craft store, but more about that later). As with all art projects, it’s coming up with the design that is the hard part so that was left to my daughter to work her magic on her computer and print out the stencils.  Here is a very brief overview. For proper, and much better instructions, do visit Jessica’s blog.

 

step 1 trace and cut out stencil         step 2 iron freezer paper on            step 3 apply paint

 

                      

 

Okay, this is where our choice of paints totally wrecked the process, although the t-shirt still worked out alright, just not great.  Jessica recommends using Jacquard brand textile paint.  This is lovely paint that I’ve used before and it is great.  But, my daughter had a very specific shade of red in mind so we went to the local craft store and after looking around settled on a fabric spray paint.  It was the same price as a large container of another type of paint-on fabric paint, plus spray + stencil = easy peasy.  Wrong.  The spray was terrible.  Just terrible. 

 

The spray went on very poorly and despite drying it between coats and doing two or three coats it never got dark. We even tried painting white fabric paint first, drying it, then spraying (the green example) and still it never reached the saturation shown on the bottle.  And in trying to achieve the right amount of color the red ended up seeping into the fabric and spreading beyond the stencil lines.

 

The method is awesome though and the freezer paper is fantastic and works exactly as described.  Foolproof really.  But splurge on the paint and get the good stuff.  I know that here in the Seattle area it is carried by Pacific Fabrics who carry a lot of great surface design tools and materials.

Plush You 2012 update

I’m in. 

And there will be snails.

Project Update

I feel like I haven’t posted anything new here in ages, yet at the same time I’ve been working like crazy on the outfit.  It is a slow process and of course, we are saving the “big reveal” until the day of the fashion show.

 

On Wednesday Tina came over and we mixed up a batch of dye (Tina calls herself a bit of a mad scientist when it comes to her methodology for dying fabrics).  Because of the amount of fabric involved we had to mix a rather large batch!  This cracks me up.  I’ve been going out to stir the brew every few hours.  Today I added four yards of silk.  I’m trying to get an ombre effect, we’ll see what happens.

 

On Sunday all of the artists and designers are meeting at KAC for a lesson in printmaking from the amazing Mary Mac.  Then Tina and I will be doing some printing on the silk.  I’m getting the linoleum block carved, you can see that we are repeating the pattern of appliques.

 

Yes. It’s all coming together.  And if I keep saying that it will be true!

the hat

Now that I’m done the hand stitching on the applique of the skirt I can start designing the hat. We’re not 100% sure that we’ll have our model wear a hat but we are going to build it just the same. 

 

The look we are going for is Gothic. Not “goth” as in emo-high-school kids but Gothic as in the new movie coming out about Edgar Allan Poe starring John Cusack, but don’t let me get side tracked…

 

This is my chance to add plush to the mix. I’ll be making the raven from silk and lace.  I’m thinking of adding branches after looking at a few hats, but there will also be hand stitched feathers.  I haven’t decide if I’ll use any real feathers.  I actually sat down with my bird book to sketch out a pattern. I want the wings to be large enough, and with enough armature to look like the raven is just about to take off. 

 

I also want to place the raven on a proper hat form.  After quite a bit of searching on the intertubes I settled on purchasing a Vintage Vogue hat pattern (8052), some proper buckram, wire and netting. We’ll see what happens!