Raven and Sparrow

Patterns on paper

    My need for more springy tablecloths started me thinking about what I might like to make to fill the gap. This sort of idea is usually just the platform I dive from and the finished product may not be spring-like at all, but everything starts somewhere, and here we are at the beginning. What looks like spring? Spring is fresh and new...young leaves in golden green and clean lines like checkerboards...how about some vines running over a green and white checkerboard? Okay! Should the vine switch from dark to light depending on what color square it is crossing? No, too flickery, but the vine stems should be barely suggested and the checkerboard should be broken. I make these decisions as I draw and scribble on a small preliminary pattern, not very neatly executed. When I get the proportions of things working together, the vines moving across the space in a reasonable way, and the dark squares placed, I move to the proper scale for a tablecloth.     

    The linen I have chosen is 54" square, so I can make a cloth that is 48" square, leaving room for hemming and weirdness around the edges. This is actually kind of close, I usually make a smaller pattern and then add a border. There won't be much of a border on this one. I make sixteen separate 12" squares on tracing paper, each one further broken down into 3" squares which correspond to the grid on my little pattern. Using the squares as a guide I approximate the paths of the vine stems in each square foot, mark which little squares will be dark, and tape them together to make the larger, true sized pattern. Once they are set together and any stray stems have been joined or corrected, I use the little pattern as a suggestion about where to put the leaf shapes. As I was fiddling with the preliminary pattern I had decided that the leaves should all be the exact (well sort of exact) same shape and size, playing a little game between naturalistic plant growth and simple graphic shapes. This might not work, but I probably won't know until it is done. Anyway, I now cut out a plain leaf shape from stencil plastic and draw around it over and over until the big pattern looks something like the small one, with vines and leaves and grids.

    The last step is to copy the taped paper conglomeration onto polyester pattern material. This makes the pattern into something more stable, and easier to handle. I can pin or baste it onto the linen to keep it from moving around as I trace it onto the cloth. There is a lot of tracing involved in all of this, but now the pattern is re-usable. I hope it will be something I will want to re-use.

Patterning

    Slowly, painfully, painfully slowly I've been turning the living room of the old house into my studio. All of the contents of our storage unit got dumped there when we moved to the new house last June, and little by little I've sorted, tossed, and placed all of that stuff into semi-permanent places. Then I transferred all of my dyes, cloth, plastic bins and paraphenalia into the newly emptied spaces. We hooked up my old top-loading washer. Last week Mike made a rough but extremely useable worktable out of an old dresser and a sheet of plywood and hung a light fixture over it. This week I started to use it. It's great!

    My first chore is to trace some of my patterns onto spun polyester for safekeeping. It takes a lot of effort to make the patterns...I use rolls and rolls of tracing flimsy and lots of tape, going over and over my drawings until they seem good, and then transferring them onto cloth. Once the cloth is marked, I find that my paper patterns get tossed aside rather rudely. I found four of them on the floor, seriously creased and nearly unusable. I'm trying to make them more stable and easier to store, so I spread them out on my new table and got to work.

    This is my circling swans pattern. I've only made it once, in a fairly straightforward way. I'd like to try again using different colors and maybe more underpattern. (This picture was also taken by Jesse at Asian Eye.)

Possibly prolific

After a monumental dry spell and a couple false starts, I am suddenly re-energized and working once again on textiles. Two variations in my old routine have really got me excited. I told you a couple of posts ago about the two new fabrics I was auditioning...well the winner is the linen silk combo. Its more expensive, narrower, and lighter weight, but the way it takes color reminds me again of why I do this in the first place. Also, it releases wax much more easily than any other fabric I have worked with (probably a function of that light weight). I can actually contemplate removing and rewaxing, should a design call for that, when before it was just too hard to even consider it.

Another change is going from squares to runners. I still love squares, but I'm just not coming up with good new designs and I am  tired of my old patterns. I also need to increase my output to get more practise and improve my techniques. I switched from 50" squares to 15" x 70"  runners, and now have cut that down to 15" x 50". ( The 45" width of my new fabric encouraged this also.) Long and skinny suddenly opened previously unworkable design possibilities and my interest and enthusiasm zoomed upwards. Yippee!

One new design has come from a small metal piece made by my jeweler friend Lois Bertolino. She came into work one day last fall and showed me a flat disc of metal she had etched with a pattern she had originally made by tie-dyeing fabric. (Talk about full circles.)  I was just captivated with it and got her permission to make a rubbing. The little graphite circles in the picture are what I used to make the silk screen above them. Screening the image with both dyes and discharges is how I made the runner shown.

I love a lot of what is going on in the circles, but my control over their placement needs work. I took too cavalier an attitude about getting the silk screen down on the right spot ( it's just a straight march down the fabric, how hard can it be?) so the circles aren't spaced well. I thought I wouldn't mind if they were a little off, but I do. I will be making more.

A library of art supplies

Although my dyeing projects died away to nothing in the past year, I didn't quite give up. I reviewed what I did and didn't want to do and gave away a lot of fabric and general stuff I knew I wouldn't use anymore. I also re-organized some of my supplies into this old card catalog, which has turned out to be perfect for holding stuff like pencils, brushes, tape, etc....all the little bits that you always need and can never find when you need it.

The card catalog itself came from the University of Washington by a round-about route that landed it in the hands of my friend Sandra Swarbrick, who graciously gave it to me. Thank you Sandra! I've always had a fondness for card catalogs. Computers do a better job most of the time of organizing the information required to navigate a library, but they don't have any of the charm of these old wooden cases, so evocative of the stored knowledge a library represents. I planned to be a librarian once; I just loved being in the presence of so many books. It's a good thing in the end that I didn't, but using the card catalogs to organize my art supplies creates a link to my past that I find very satisfying.

Goodbye to calico

One of the things that has disappeared this last year is my calico overdye project. I was taking high quality quilting cotton and overdyeing it with natural dyes. I thought quilters would be interested in buying it and learning to make it themselves. I packaged fat quarters of four different prints overdyed with the same color together. The original color and pattern of the calico influenced the outcome, but overdyeing made very different prints come together cohesively, and gave them the beauty of the natural dyes. I thought they would be very useful in quilting, and offer something different as well. Well. My first obstacle was the water here on the rock. We have a well, and the water is heavy with magnesium and iron. As I have mentioned, natural dyes are very sensitive to metals, and iron is especially dulling. Town water here comes from a massive river, and is beautifully clear, but I had to carry it in 2 1/2 gallon carriers and when you are dyeing yards of fabric that gets to be very hard work in a hurry. I talked it up at my local quilting guild and gave one class to its members, but it was clear that the response wouldn't be overwhelming. What was overwhelming was the effort of working full-time and trying to do this kind of heavy production dyeing when it wasn't what I really cared about in the first place. It took me a while to winnow this realization out of the larger cloud of depression that has been hanging over me, but when I did, I decided to let it go. It hurt, because I had already put a lot into it. I sold all of the remaining bolts of undyed fabric on Craig's List, and gave my overflowing overdyes to my sister-in-law. She is an avid quilter who belongs to a local group that makes quilts for people undergoing chemotherapy at the hospital. They make  beautiful small lap quilts by the dozens and give them all away. All my extra cloth, both pretty and ghastly (some of my early efforts were pretty bad) disappeared into their stash and that was that.

   This week Lynne, (my sister-in-law) dropped off a package. One of the quilters in her group (I don't know who, I'll have to find out) used my cloth to make this simple, but charming quilt and she wanted me to see it before it is given away. It was so thoughtful of her, and sort of a bittersweet experience to see my fabric come together so well.

  It reminded me that I have another quilt made by a highly accomplished artist named Patti Dever. She took some of my overdyes when I was just beginning and made a lovely little quilt which she showed with her other amazing work as the featured quilter in the local quilt show. After the show was over, she gave the quilt to me.  I wish I had a better picture of it, but when I decided to write this post I had to rush home and photograph it in the last rays of the setting sun. I'll try again when the weekend comes.

  So my ill-starred calico venture has ended, but not without some positive results. I am back at work on table linens now, trying to avoid all expectations and hopes, just making what I can. I re-mordanted my bird runners and painted them again, trying for a deeper color. I put two more of that pattern, plus some other old stuff into indigo this weekend and will show it all  when it has been rinsed out. 

Not prepared

It's been so long since I have done any dyeing that I found myself bumbling around like bee in a bottle today as I plunged back into color. I found two new fabrics (linen/silk combo at Thai Fabrics, and linen/rayon combo at Dharma Trading) that I just had to try. The linen silk feels kind of thin and shiny...more like silk than linen although it is mostly linen, and the linen rayon feels like linen, but softer. I wanted mostly linen blends because I am more experienced with cellulose than protein fibers and have more of the proper mordants etc. Pure linen is good, but often expensive. My old source for linen dried up and in my search for a replacement I came upon these two possibilities. I decided upon runners (15" X 70") rather than squares and designed a very simple bird pattern for each end, which I waxed on. 

 The linen rayon was much easier to wax than the linen silk. I did two of each and put them into mordant. Today finally I had time to deal with them, but as I set up to add color to these long, skinny things it felt like I had never done it before. All my logistics had to be re-thought, and I kept forgetting details, like soaking my brush before beginning, and what color I actually wanted to apply. I finally chose a combination of osage orange (yellow), madder (browny red) and cochineal (sharp pink) because I could reach them easily and they dissolve quickly. Actually, madder doesn't dissolve easily, as I remembered by doing, but I kept ploughing ahead. I just eyeballed everything, ignoring all the best practices stuff I spent so long learning and of course ran out of dye half way through. It was a train wreck as far as reproduceable results are concerned, but I just wanted to see some color on these two fabrics and get something.....anything going again. So stay tuned.

Mad at miters

I have hemmed many many tablecloths, and every time I have trouble with the mitered corners. I found very clear instructions in the February 1997 issue of Martha Stewart Living but if I don't get it out and study it each time I mess up the corners. Even sometimes with the magazine open and available, I mess them up. As I did this time.

Out of the eight corners on the two tablecloths I was hemming, one went bad. Of course I didn't see it until I had clipped the seam, and after that there was no way to fix it. Sigh. Now the brown tablecloth is defective. Not that every tablecloth isn't loaded with mistakes, but this is so obviously bad workmanship. Grrr.

This makes me less interested in doing any embroidery on the brown cloth, but as I said I was on the fence about that anyway. I think I will declare it finished.

Successes and failures

Here is my other tablecloth in a dyebath of 1.5% weld extract. It was blue and white with faint green hints, all of my previous efforts having disappeared in the wax removal process. Now it is electric green and yellow. Saint Mike said that he usually really likes my work (bless his heart), but this one leaves him cold. Also, it still has those mysterious smears which look so appetizing. I think this one is headed back

into indigo.

Also, I was happy with my Clorox bleach pen discharge, except it was a little faint. I thought maybe my bleach pen was running out of umph, so I opened a new one. Disaster. I have to re-think this technique.

On the bright side, I think over-painting my lac-dyed cloth turned out pretty well. It is always hard to get the consistency of the paint right, and having done this entire cloth I think I almost have it right.

It still needs something more, but I like where it's going. It sure is different than I planned.

Alas, a-lac

My original idea for this tablecloth was a lavender background with white leaf shapes. I waxed the pattern, mordanted, painted with cochineal, dipped in indigo, painted with cochineal again and dipped indigo again. You have seen some of these steps in previous posts. When I tried to remove the wax, I lost all of the pink and most of the blue I spent so much time putting in. I've never had so much trouble losing wax. I re-mordanted and immersion dyed with lac, the insect dye from Southeast Asia (source of lacquer and shellac). It is strong blue-pink like cochineal, but not quite so pure in hue. I like it better, even though I have to boil it with cream of tartar and strain it before I can put it in the dye kettle with fabric. It isn't tremendously light-fast on cotton, but I decided I don't care. This is what I got. I haven't yet washed all of the dye out, so it may finish lighter. The contrast between the pattern and the background is low, so I need to add some definition. Embroidery is the safe route, but I am thinking of using fabric paint to bring out the pattern. Unfortunately, I don't have any way to try it out without working on this cloth, so I will have to leap into it...do or die, so to speak.

Over-painting is the plan with this table runner too. It is an old reject from a couple of years ago. I was experimenting with clamp and fold dyeing, (you can see the faint squares running down the middle from that trial) but didn't care for this result. This time I have used a Clorox bleach pen to discharge the branch pattern, which I will over-paint. The stray dots came from the last shake of the pen just as I was finishing. Darn.

Back to work

Vacation is over and I am back at work. My holiday was way too short, I think, and it will be a year before I get another. Sigh. I am also back at work on my tablecloths. The brown one came through the wax removal process with its dark value intact, and really nice veining and color variation in the pattern. I am done dyeing it and will move on to hemming. I'm wondering if embroidered edges would add anything, or just gild the lily.

The other two aren't so good. All of their initial color was lost, and even the indigo blue faded out. Both of them have some smeary places that look like someone wiped their nose there or something. I have put them both back in mordant and plan to over-dye them in immersion dye baths. All "white" will be lost, but perhaps the heat of the bath will minimize the smears. They are now embarked on paths that will take them far from my original ideas for them. I don't know how they will look when they are finished.