FIBER JUNKIES - OCT. MEETING

Our Oct. meeting was held at Gen's house.....yes OCTOBER....we can hardly believe summer is gone already!

 Show and tell was rather sparse but Gen filled in the time with her wonderfully creative journal pages.

 This is a saran wrap method of allowing the paint to dry with balled up saran warp placed over the page to provide texture when it's removed.

 Can you imagine the hours it took with pen and ink to create these designs?  Gen has a real eye for composition and style!

 Today our goal was to play with disperse dyes, along with more immediate color transfers using fabric crayons and pens.  Denny, the master of layering showed us several examples of various designs she added to her cloth with numerous designs.

 Each has probably been processed 4-5 times.

A few months back we did string pulling to create designs.  Rather than using acrylic paints that most of us did....Denny used disperse dyes on paper, allowing them to dry and transferring those images later to fabric.  

 For the 2nd time in two months Denny organized our entire day......sharing her wisdom and more supplies than one can imagine.  Thank you DENNY!!

As a short overview:   Denny has placed a protective piece of muslin over the ironing surface...then her fabric.....these techniques work best with synthetic fabrics only.  Then she placed her mask (a body form cut from a magazine).  Notice, we have two irons....you want to use an old fashioned one....without holes.

She had previously painted her mixed her dye into a liquid form and onto a piece of computer paper and allowed it to dry.  Placing it face down.....she pressed on the wrong side which transferred the dye to the fabric beneath.

 Once the mask was removed.....her  image is apparent.

 She could have started with a lighter color first then added the mask and the red dye....but in this case she used another one of her painted papers and pressed over the entire fabric....adding a goldish color to the figure and more interest to the red.

 This is just a portion of the prepared mixed dyes, spoons, towels, extra fabrics, papers, irons, resits, masks......it must have taken her all day to organize this for us!

 I don't work with synthetics very much so I just puttered, not being in a big hurry to generate lots of that type of fabric.  But I got far more interested than I expected.  Here I used a nifty sink mat that Kate brought as a rubbing plate for fabric crayons.  The circular shape was created using fabric pens over one of Gen's commercial rubbing plates.

 The great thing about these two transfer methods is that they are very immediate, no drying involved and their colors are generally nice a bright.

 After copying mentor Denny......I did some layering of three different paper designs onto a sheer poly fabric (another gift from Denny!!)  Now this WAS FUN.

 Years ago Judy and I went to a fabric outlet that will forever more be called our 'dumpster diving' trip.  She brought some weird synthetic fabrics for us to try.  My paper fabric pen design (lower left) wasn't well thought out....I just wanted to see what would happen on that strange white with faggoted sections in it.  We were surprised it transferred 3 times before it petered out.  I went back several times and layered over the initial design with other papers.....but of course don't have a picture handy (sorry).  Denny is so right....if you don't like it the first time, layer, and layer and layer some more.  It really does get better.

 Here's Denny's masterpiece......I couldn't say how many layers she's done on this or how many masks......but it's soooo very Denny...we all loved it and her generous spirit.

Check out what other artists have done this week:  Nina-Marie's Off The Wall Friday, Sarah's, Whoop, Whoop Friday, Crazy Mom Quilts.