Hinzpired

A few samples of recent work:

This is step one and two of creating this piece.  I soaked a piece of cotton in soda ash, line dried and then painted it with a few random colors of dye.  I then drew on stitching lines with washable markers and stitched it up.  This shows the dyed fabric with the stitching before I pulled it tight:

In this picture, I’ve pulled all of the stitching up tight. For some reason,  I really liked how it looked at this point, all textured and colorful:

The final result, after over-dyeing the whole thing with black dye.  It’s a bit more vibrant than this photo shows and the sections that appear white are actually more blue:

I really like the way this turned out and was discussing it with my probably-majoring-in-art college  student son.  I told him I liked it, but I didn’t know what it meant.  He thought for a minute and then told me it was obviously about the battle for water rights of native peoples around the world. The souls of those people are the colorful parts shining through juxtaposed against the dark background of the struggle.  This is, of course, not at all true  (although I do have concerns about water rights battles).  He’s just been immersed at his college in art in which the artist statement seems to be required to “understand” the work.  My son, my husband and I all tend toward the “let the art speak for itself” school.  My son encountered a lot of art last year that wasn’t in this tradition, where the statement seemed more important than the art, so it’s something we joke around about.  He did think that the water rights approach might be the way to go to get a grant to continue my work, though.  Um, yeah .

Here’s another related piece.  In this one, I stitched circles on white fabric, pulled the stitching up tight, and then dyed it in a weak solution of black.  After removing the stitching, I soaked it in soda ash, line-dried and then painted on a few colors of dye.  It’s also a little more vibrant than this photo shows:

This is an experiment with a result I love.  I dyed the base fabric orange.  I then used my sewing machine to baste irregular pleats into the fabric.  I pressed this flat, soaked in soda ash and then line dried it.  I then painted on sky blue dye thickened with alginate so it wouldn’t spread too much to create the brown striped areas, using my color wheel skills (I sort of thought everyone knew about the color wheel, but my kids and I have discovered this summer that it isn’t the universal sort of knowledge we assumed.  It’s way more important than times tables!  ;) )  Anyway, here it is:

On this second, similar piece, I took it one step further.  I placed an old lace curtain on top and sprayed on blue dye through that.  The sprayer developed a leak, so the bottom got saturated in a way I wasn’t planning (not that I usually have much of a plan…).  It’s interesting, anyway.  My son says it’s steam punk and he’d hang it in his dorm room, so it was successful on some level.  The photo is sort of blurry.

And this is a small round tablecloth that I got at a garage sale on which I poured random bits of leftover dye.  It will soon be happily on a table in my living room:

Lots of these will eventually be cut up, perhaps have printing added and who knows what else.  I tend to take advantage of warm summer temperatures for dye work and then play further with paints, scissors, etc., in the winter.

On Sunday, our family was invited to a birthday party for a young friend.  On Saturday, I decided that I would try to make a stitched-resist t-shirt as a gift. There’s nothing quite like the last minute for inspiring me to make something .  

I took pictures along the way this time.  I started by drawing a simple flower design on a children’s size small t-shirt.  I used Crayola washable markers, which seem to wash out well:

Then I grabbed some thread and began stitching.  I’ve tried a couple of different threads, but keep coming back to this kind, Dual Duty Plus button and carpet thread:

I use this thread doubled and tie a double knot on the end.  Also, before tying the knot I use my fingers to smooth the thread from the eye of the needle down to the end of the thread.  I do this a few times and it seems to help keep the thread from twisting and knotting as I stitch.  

Here are some pictures of my first few stitches:

I use a separate thread for each section of the image.  I often switch around colors of thread which allows me to see better which threads I’m gathering up when I’m finished stitching the design.  As I finish each section, I trim the threads, leaving a tail of a few inches.  

Here’s a picture of the flower with all of the stitching completed:

Next, I began pulling the threads tight, one section at a time.  Because I used a doubled thread, I tie the two loose ends to each other in a few knots when the section is pulled tight.  I’m not sure if this is the “right” way to do this, since I’ve pretty much been figuring it out on my own.  However, it works for me and I don’t particularly believe in right or wrong ways of anything involving creative pursuits anyway .  

Here’s a picture of the first section pulled up tight:

And here is the entire image pulled up tight:

At this point, I dyed the t-shirt using blue-violet dye from Dharma Trading Co.  After rinsing and washing out the dye, I carefully clipped the knots and removed all of the stitching.  I gave the shirt one more rinse to close up any visible holes left from the stitching.  

Here is the finished shirt:

I’m mostly posting these pictures  so I’ll remember that I DID actually accomplish a bit of artwork this past week.  I’m trying really hard to do a bit of work every day, even if it’s only a teeny, tiny bit.

The following pictures are the result of my first experiment with deconstructed screen printing, as described in Rayna Gillman’s excellent book, Create Your Own Hand-Printed Cloth: Stamp, Screen and Stencil with Everyday Objects. Basically, various resists are placed under a screen and thickened dye paste is pulled across.  The screen is then left to dry and then plain print paste is screened across to transfer the design to fabric.  It’s not very complicated, but it takes some time for the screen to dry, for the printed fabric to cure, then to be washed out.  I did this over 4 days this last week.  I really think I’m going to need to make or buy some more screens, because just having one is limiting- I would have liked to play for quite a bit longer with the screening process and with just one screen, that’s not possible. All of these were screened on to fabric that had been previously dyed with a combination of pink and gold dyes.  I used a blue violet dye for the screen.

And here are a couple of small shibori stitching experiments  from this week.  This one is the same pink/gold fabric from above, stitched and over-dyed with black:

This one is a piece of bargain tangerine linen-rayon blend fabric that I bought, hoping it would be good for over-dyeing.  This was my sample piece, which I dyed with bright pink dye.  It’s a little brighter than this photo shows.  I loved how it turned out, so I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon sewing a summer dress out of the tangerine fabric.  This week (or maybe for longer!), I’ll be working on doing the stitched resist work so that I’ll hopefully end up with a very fun and funky one-of-a-kind summer dress.

Hopefully, I’ll have more to post next week- maybe sooner, depending on how much work and everyday life gets in the way of making art .

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve stitched up a few more mini-shibori experiments to use as studies for something larger that I have in mind.  I finally had a chance to dye them yesterday and am sharing the results here- perhaps mostly just to remind myself that I did them.  Once again, I didn’t take any pictures of these “in process.”  I still mean to do that, perhaps with the bigger piece that I have in mind for my next project.  I did find a nice little stitched shibori tutorial online that shows some of the possibilities here:

http://www.burdastyle.com/howtos/show/658

This one was stitched using  the stitch pattern from “step 1″ of  the tutorial above:

The rest of these were stitched using the stitch from  “step 4″ of the same tutorial:

Spiral

Heart

Curve

“Peace” on a scrap of an old t-shirt

Circles