Saves

Just one more post about last week's workshop. Unlike most of the fiber arts classes I've taken, this one included several accomplished printmakers who'd never worked with fabric or fiber-reactive dyes before. Gerrie and I proved to be resources for those folks, and they in turn gave us a new perspective. I'm generalizing wildly here, but it seems to me that printmaking is about precision; the desired result is a discrete object, the print itself. Art quilters have a different attitude; they'll try anything that might result in an interesting surface. There is such a thing as art cloth, where the finished yardage stands on its own, compositionally. But we don't hesitate to cut into the middle of a fabric we've created to get just the right fragment for a work in progress. Unlike printmaking, painting or weaving, the whole-cloth design often doesn't matter.

I've developed a practice of bringing unsuccessful efforts from previous workshops, or boring fabrics from my stash, to class, just to see whether a new process, an additional layer or two, might redeem them in some way. This piece (below) started life as a portion of a bedsheet. I overdyed it with purple and screen-printed my own made-up mysterious runic symbol all over it. Ho hum. In last week's class I painted a shadow effect around portions of the markings, hoping to get a sense of depth. Mmmm, not so much. I used a dye that someone had labeled "purple," but that turned out to be blood-red. Quite the color combination there:


But as the dye dried, either the soda ash in the dye mixture or some interaction between the red and the earlier turquoise, or the even earlier purple, pushed out a fine white line between colors. The overlaid red on turquoise is kind of interesting, too. Tiny portions of this overall failed effort actually show promise. If and when I use this piece, I'll probably zoom in on those cool little bits and leave the rest of the fabric in tatters:


Another piece started life as solid yellow commercial yardage, which I wrapped and overdyed in an indigo workshop last year. Experimenting with dye painting, I did a few brushstroke squiggles, immediately realized my error, and attempted to wash them out. But because I'd used orange, of which the red component is a notorious dye bully, the squiggles remained. The piece, overall, reminded me of light filtering down through water. So, in last week's workshop, I screened on several fish. I remembered to account for the eyes, but the overall effect was a basic silhouette, too elementary-schoolish (no pun intended). So I stenciled a few markings onto each fish and discharged them with our bleaching agent of choice, thiourea dioxide, a.k.a thiox. As it happens, neither turquoise dye nor indigo bow down to the lightening powers of thiox, so the blue crept right back in when I washed the piece. What to do? Common household bleach to the rescue! It turns out that Soft Scrub (tm) or lotion-style Comet (tm) with bleach does the job. I used the same stuff later to print my leaf stencil (visible on the red and orange fabrics here) onto denim. It worked great, and it's the perfect consistency for screening right out of the bottle.


Shortly after I first started quilting, I acquired somewhere a length of men's shirt-like fabric, light gray with faint stripes and a tiny pink-and-magenta repeated motif. At some point I stamped it randomly with a magenta grid pattern. That did not alter its deeply uninteresting nature; if anything, I'd managed to transform it into something overtly ugly. Last week in class I did a series of swirly monoprints over it, in green, and, on top of that, printed my Japanese maple photo emulsion screen. Close-cropped, it's more interesting, at least, than it used to be. If it doesn't work as whole cloth, I can always cut into it when I need a gray-magenta-green sort of busy intertwined fabric with men's-tie motif markings. You never know.

Don't try this at home

One takeaway from the workshop way of life is the realization that there are some techniques and processes you just don't want to pursue on your own. That, in itself, is often worth the price of admission. You get to try something new without investing in equipment and supplies that you'll probably never use again. Last week's screen printing workshop produced two such "never again" conclusions.

One was devoré, the process that produces those beautiful cut-velvet scarves and other garments you see in stores. It involves applying a pattern using a toxic chemical solution that eats away the cellulose fiber (rayon or cotton, for instance) in your fabric, leaving the sheer silk backing. After the solution dries, you iron the treated portions til they turn the color of café-au-lait. At that point the nap starts falling off in those areas; rubbing gently usually gets rid of the rest of it.

All this time you're wearing a fume respirator -- not just one of those puny dust masks -- and rubber gloves. One runs the risk of starting with a too-hot iron and, peut-être, scorching portions of the backing fabric all the way to espresso. When rubbing off the nap, one might rub a hole in the delicate, now-compromised, silk. Ask me how I know this. Between the ambient toxicity and the fiddliness of the process, I strongly suspect that this might have been my sole attempt in life at doing devoré. Still, I'll mend the holes with silk thread and dye the piece, and perhaps produce a scarf that comes with modest bragging rights.

I hesitate to dismiss photo emulsion as cavalierly as I have devoré. It's an interesting process and fabulously versatile, but it requires a darkroom, a light box, and considerable deftness in applying the emulsion to the screen. You start by preparing a black line image -- an ink drawing, a stencil pattern, a photograph that you've tweaked in Photoshop to get rid of the gray scale values -- and copy it onto transparent acetate. In the darkroom, you coat a screen with a liquid light-sensitive photo emulsion and let it dry. Then you lay the acetate on a light table, position the treated screen on top of it, and expose the image for four or five minutes. Finally, you wash the screen quickly, under a strong spray of water, while the image gradually emerges on the emulsion. On the unexposed portions -- the parts that were black on your original image and on the acetate copy -- the emulsion washes away, leaving clear areas on the screen. From that point on, you work with it as with any other stencil; the clear portions allow the dye through, the coated portions block it. You can burn more than one image on a large screen and, when you print, mask off the ones you're not using. I used a public domain Japanese stencil design (thank you, Dover Books), and one of my own photos of a Japanese maple. Here's my first screen in its virgin condition:



And here are a couple of the prints I made with them. I'm pleased with the crispness of the black stencil on denim, and with the multicolor tree on a hand-dyed orange-y cotton:





Later I burned another stencil, a delicate bamboo pattern, on a smaller screen. It gave me eight or ten nice prints, and then started producing big blobs along one edge. I realized to my horror that the emulsion was peeling off. Apparently these things happen. It was nice while it lasted. I'll just think of it as a limited edition print run:

Five Days a Week

Last week I remembered what it felt like to commute to work. Gerrie and I took turns driving out to OCAC, four days in a row, for yet another art workshop. We left home at 8:30 and got home between 4:30 and 5:00. On day five we had to drive separately, but the routine was the same. Everything else in our lives -- cooking, email, catching up with family -- had to be accomplished between our arrival back home and bedtime. How do working people manage? For me the pressure was greater than it would otherwise have been, because Jer was in New Hampshire for his high school reunion. I even had to prepare meals for myself; the horror.

The bright side is that the hours between 9 and 4 felt more like play than work. For five days we explored screen printing -- apparently the preferred term now, since silkscreens are no longer made out of silk -- from simple stencils made from freezer paper or masking tape to tricky photo emulsions. Here's my wall o' stuff -- some of the better stuff, at least -- at the end of the workshop:


When you're immersed in art, you see everything through art goggles. Both this bubble pattern in a soaking bucket and the remains of my midmorning snack struck me as potential silkscreen designs:




Got dye? The studio refrigerator (below) is full of dye solution, print paste and assorted other chemicals. No food allowed, needless to say. The retro aqua interior adds to the skeery effect, casting a sickly aura on its contents:


I love the point in a dye workshop when your fabrics come out of the washer, colors fixed, and you hang them on a clothesline in the full light of day. It's sort of like a gallery show. Here's some finished work -- mine and others -- drying on the line:

There will be dye

Above is my OCAC work table at the end of a productive dyeing day. Below, another shot of my area on Sunday afternoon, as the workshop was winding down.


Below are a few more examples of the liquid resist work I did there. The small pinky square in the lower right was a nondescript scrap I'd painted at some point with acrylics. Daubed with potato dextrin and brushed with green dye, it's marginally more interesting. The middle piece is organza that I'd indigo shibori-ed in a previous workshop, now given the potato dextrin treatment and a coat of the same green dye. You can see a lot more detail, of course, if you click to enlarge the photos.


Despite my infatuation with potato dextrin, I was pleased with some of my results using other techniques. For instance, I marked several pieces of cloth with this silkscreen design (below), plus some random stamping here and there. First I re-cut the stencil I'd used in a previous workshop with Jeannette; this time, instead of putting thickened bleach through the screen to remove color, I used thickened dye -- putting color on, instead of taking it out. I also used the same stencil with a corn dextrin resist, rolling thickened dye over it later. When I washed out the resist, the stenciled form appeared in the color of the original fabric.


The horizontal blue piece at the bottom is an antique dresser scarf that was originally white. I dyed it in the same indigo workshop as the organza up above, with similarly blah (a.k.a. "very subtle") results. It was buried under books on Jerry's bedside table until last week, when I reappropriated it for my workshop stash.

It was big fun playing with the various silkscreening permutations. In the process, I also created some lovely patterns on the dropcloth:


Painting with dyes, especially on damp fabric, is a much freer and more improvisational process. Applying the dye with a syringe instead of a brush turned it into a Jackson Pollock-y process: keep moving, don't hesitate or ponder; work fast but gracefully. You can pause between colors to decide if it needs more. Now I know how those expensive "designer" sweatshirts I used to covet at Noma in Gualala are done.


The grid pattern on the lower left was done by laying a piece of patterned plastic under the fabric, then rolling over it with a dye-laden (but not too laden, I eventually came to realize) foam roller.

Yes, those are cut-up jeans at the top left. I didn't buy an inch of new fabric for this workshop. Everything is either overdyed commercial fabric or yardage I'd previously dyed myself. The dark-red material appearing here and there used to be the lining for the striped velour drapes that Jerry sewed (!) for the bedroom and living room of the first house we bought in the Bay Area. We still have a pair in our bedroom here.

The Potato Dextrin Process, by Robert Ludlum

Okay, I'm kidding about the Robert Ludlum part. It just sounds like something he'd write. I know you were breathlessly waiting for a download from the art workshop I did last week, Working with Liquid Resists and Thickened Dyes.


First, the word "resist," used as a noun, means a substance or object selectively placed on portions of the fabric you're working with to protect it from the dye or bleach or other transformative medium you plan to apply next. The "resisted" (transitive verb; interesting...) areas will be unaffected by whatever happens to the rest of the fabric.

A resist can be as simple as a wood or plastic block, strips of masking tape, or string. Many forms of Japanese shibori use the fabric itself as a resist, folded, stitched or scrunched so that the indigo dye penetrates unevenly. Remember tie-dye? When you wrapped those t-shirts in rubber bands or lengths of string, you were preparing fabric for resist dyeing. Who knew? We thought "resist" had only one meaning back in the '60s.

In this workshop, we played with two types of resist new to me: corn dextrin and potato dextrin. Both are powdered starches that mix with water to form a gloppy paste. You can brush or silk-screen them onto fabric, or stencil or stamp or rub them on. All kinds of found and repurposed materials come into play -- construction fencing, computer parts, plastic mesh produce baskets, ravioli presses, potato mashers. Believe me, when you get into this stuff, you'll never look at a hardware store, or your own kitchen, in quite the same way.

Potato dextrin is particularly cool to work with because, as it dries, it cracks in very interesting ways, as shown in the following photo. You can just spread it around on your fabric in a random manner, and then comb it around a bit. It's very much like finger-painting.


When the dextrin is dry, you apply dye all over, in a color or colors of your choice. You can use a roller with corn dextrin, since it dries smoothly. With potato dextrin, you have to dab the dye with a brush, as shown below, to make sure it penetrates through all the cracks and onto the fabric. Potato dextrin is all about the cracking.


Below are four of my pieces, all glopped up with dye and ready to sit overnight. You can always tell my work area by the ubiquitous Nalgene water bottle.


You let the dye dry and cure, and then wash off the resist to reveal your pattern. The photo at the top of this post shows the same four pieces, all washed and dried. Here's a closeup of one of them showing the wonderful crackly texture.

More Messy Art Fun

I've spent the last three days in a workshop at OCAC, playing with thickened dyes. We've done some stamping and silk-screening. We've made marks on fabric using found objects like plastic nursery trays, circuit boards, bubble wrap and the highly coveted orange construction fencing. My favorite technique, though, is one I'd heard about but hadn't had an opportunity to try before this week -- painting fabric with potato dextrin, a paste that crackles as it dries. I'll document the process after school is out tomorrow and I have a finished product or eight to show. Gerrie, with whom I'm carpooling, has some good info on her blog, too. We used corn dextrin as well. It's a useful resist, but not nearly as interesting, behaviorally, as its sister in starch, potato.

This is one of those workshops that click in part because of the students. It's a great collection of people. Jeannette Meyer, the instructor, pictured above in surgical garb, is a goddess. We're all middle-aged women with the exception of Tamera, a gorgeous young woman who makes rugs. When she asked about dyes for flesh tones, something clicked in my mind. Sure enough, she was the artist whose "bare skin" rug I'd read about in the Oregonian. It -- I mean she -- was stolen from a gallery show and, three months later, recovered. What a saga!

Gerrie got a photo of me on the first day of class, and here's a shot of her with her signature lime green accent.

My turn to drive tomorrow. I think I'll have to line the car with plastic tarp in anticipation of all the wet dye-laden goodies we'll be packing home.

While I was out messin' around with art stuff, Jer was creating a masterpiece at home. This is polenta layered with heirloom tomatoes, mozzarella, grilled eggplant and pesto. It's supposed to be heated on the grill, but we're affeared that all those layers might topple into the flames, so we'll do it in the oven instead. Fresh snow peas from the farmers' market on the side. It's literally 100 degrees outside, but our little ranch house is relatively cool, and I'm looking forward to dinner.