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i set out to make a batch of cheshire cat scarves, because that’s what my agent, jennifer, has got an order for. some lovely person liked the sample i gave her and ordered one. so, cool. i was done with my last project, the encaustic painting of jupiter, which i still insist qualifies as pigment on fabric. i had not yet begun on my next painting, which is going to be an interior portrait of my sewing area, which i only now after months of treading thru piles of junk have gotten around to organizing. and is it organized, i am so proud.
i went and found my pattern that i had used to make the sample jennifer was carrying. actually, jennifer was carrying around a color chart that i used with my last silk painting class. it even had the color-formula numbers all over it, and the guy still liked it.
i was looking on the internet and saw another version of the disney character, this one when he’s in the process of disappearing. i’d forgotten about that, so i went out and got it and did a slight redraw that ended up with jim completely reconstructing the disappearing tail. thanks jim.
it was strange actually using my silk painting materials. it had been a couple-few months of not using them, when the table stayed set up but i never went near it, when i was getting used to encaustic painting and ignoring everything else including the housework (let it get dusty)
i did the first painting very rusty. and i had a lot of material problems. my materials had gone kerflunk. my water-based gutta, formula unknown, i mean proprietary, had broken down and was coming out all lumpy and watery. it spread out a whole bunch on the silk and made thick goopy lines. very dissatisfactory. can’t sell that. so i popped four scarves in a row off the clips and dumped them into the sink and hot water. then i found something else to use as water-based resist. it’s called presist and it comes highly recommended. it tastes like detergent, but it’s got a funky formula and you wouldn’t want to eat it. well, it breaks down with time, as well. useless, it was, i threw it out.
i’d been threatening for some time to do it the eastern way, and brew up a batch of some sort of starch. rice starch is what’s i’ve read, but you won’t believe how complicated it is.
i tried tapioca starch because that’s what i found at the indian grocery store in decatur. i boiled it up like cornstarch pudding, and it got admirably sticky and viscous. i stuck it into a little plastic bottle with a metal tipped nozzle. i stuck it down in by-now practiced hands – thin, smooth, perfect.
then i laid down some dye along the tail, purple like in the cartoon. and it bled right thru the line. well, that sucked. completely changed things. so i put clear water all around the dye and just let it bleed out and dry.
so i went over all the lines with school gel, which i’ve been told works real well. and it did. a nice bead of glue, works like a charm. what the hell went wrong with the tapioca starch, anyway? those streaky bits on the background are humongous pieces of salt. i tried for a dark green background by adding a bunch of black to yellow and some blue, but it never got beyond mid-lime.
then my kid saw the first one and suggested putting purple in the tail as a shadow, and i switched to a blue for the body and started playing around with making a rainbow out of the other stripes.
the original color chart used each pair of stripes as another color in the rainbow, each mixed using a precise number of drops of yellow, cyan, and magenta. i liked the effect.
but i abandoned the school gel, and that was a good thing, because i can’t remove the glue from the scarf, no matter how hot the water or how much i scrub. grrr.
i found some old water-based gutta in little bottles that my students had used. they must have refilled them from their own supplies, because it was still good, and i collected all the little bottles together and outlined the rest of the scarves using the fresher resist. i guess my stuff was a few years old. but tht just underpins the necessity to do it all myself, and not rely on expensive materials with shelf lives. cheap materials with very short shelf lives is better. cheap being good. free is better.
with the rest of the scarves, five total, i tried to fade out each stripe into the next color, but something funny happened with it every time i tried.
i also tried to make the blue fade out to way-pale toward the tip of the tail, but it never ended up that way. the blue is very strong.
i tried to lighten the blue stripes at the top and ran a thread of black along the bottom of all the stripes, as well as shadowing beneath the chin and around the arms and paws.
it’s really fun doing this. it’s like any design, most of which i’ve adapted from somewhere, my favorites being designed by jim. i’ve got a bunch of outlines that look good, and i can go progressively nuts or more refined, whatever, as i do four or ten of a subject.
my kid gets the first choice. my buyer gets second choice. i’ll give one to my sister for her birthday, and with luck will have one more left over for awhile until i have to do another batch.
this last one got nicely dark green. i didn’t use salt, which attracts dye to it and obscures teh fact that each little area you put dye on gets an edge immediately, and you can’t put on dye fast enough over a large area to keep it from being streaky and uneven, especially in colors with a lot of black in them, which is the only way to get a dark shade of anything in silk painting. i know that in watercolor and oil you can avoid black, but with dyes you can’t be subtle. it’s partly because you’re only working with three colors and dark. it’s partly how dyes go on versus how pigments go on. i haven’t figured it out and i’m not scientific but there are resources if you’re interested.
the background went on streaky and the only thing i could do since i wasn’t using salt was to add more water and scrub the damned thing to obliterate the hard dark edges. so all the darkness migrated to the edge of the drawing and the sicdes, and that’s fine. worked pretty well.
this being the fifth scarf, i didn’t do it in the batch of the other four because i steam four at a timein my stovepipe steamer. i saved this for another batch of four, but i got so tired of inking in little lines that i did a bunch of nebula scarves instead, and didn’t want to steam them with a cheshire cat in case the cat end up with big splotches of blackest space bleeding thru the newsprint. nonono.
next, going from kitch to an interior scene – my sewing corner.
every year i make a batch or two of scarves, with dyes on silk. they’re habotai scarves, 11×60, and i sell them around atlanta, and give them away as xmas presents.
i’ve been painting on silk since 2003, and my designs have gotten progressively more colorful. they’ve never been precise, i’m more interested in the happy accident and the leakage of color than i am with straight lines and other boundaries.
this year, to an unprecedented extent, my husband jim is designing most of my fall line (i almost need to put quotes around that). he started out several years ago designing a dragon scarf, and then a snake one, and then i had him do me a dragon for a kimono, and a stream and crane for another kimono, and now i’ve got him drawing fairies and toadstools, and fish and seaweed, and sea turtles in the ocean. and he’s just asked me to cut 4 more templates so he can do designs he hasn’t even thought up yet. (paisley)
i’m making the scarves in batches of four each design. i’m saving the templates. each set is more wonderful than the last. he’s drawn me some real works of art, and these will be my top of the line scarves.
he’ll help me with the wall hangings when i get around to making them.
so here are some of my new fall collection. i’m still in production; i bring the week’s output into my class on thursdays, and i’d like to enthuse about how i got some effect but they’re still grasping the basics so i’ll try to tone it down.
but how can you not be enthusiastic about designs like these?
these are this year’s dragon design. i use karo syrup resist for the scales and spines, and salt in the background.
this is fish floating around among seaweed fronds.
these are portraits of a pair of russian blues that i originally did as a present for my friend gretchen, their mom.
detail. they adopted a stuffed floppy dog to sleep on, showing the natural domination of species.
but wait. there’s more. i haven’t taken pictures yet but each one is more beautiful than the last.
a collection of recent fabric work, mainly so you don’t have to scroll endlessly thru posts.
unable to leave well enough alone, i volunteered to make wedding gifts for all the guests. strictly family on both sides, we were talking about 35 people minimum. so i narrowed it down.
i was originally going to make pocket handkerchiefs for everyone, but since nobody bows their noses on cloth anymore, i thought it would be a useless gesture. then i thought about totebags, after seeing a friend’s daughter’s wonderful version. i said, i can do that, and the project changed just like that.
so now i was doing tote bags. this would work for the guests, because the vast majority of them were married, which meant that half of them were women, and women know what to do with a totebag.
but what to put on it? my sister to the rescue, sending me a cute little picture of an adorable catholic church in the west of ireland, st james church in cashel bay, connemara – near our wonderful hotel. so i drew out a 9×9 pattern, and did 2 dozen silk paintings on lengths of silk left over from the kimono.
i got the instructions for making a padded tote bag from this website, gathered some spare batting, hand-dyed some cotton for the lining (sorry, no picture), bought 2 yards of denim, and got to work. of course i ran out of denim after only 2/3 of the straps were done, but not to worry, i used the dyed cotton. i figured nobody would care.
after 2 dozen bags, i now know how to assemble them in my sleep. the rest of the paintings i stretched and framed, for those single men who wouldn’t appreciate a pretty tote.
i set out to make two japanese kimono for a wedding, starting from individual measurements. these measurements late r proved to be wrong. i’ll get to that later.
i used silk fabric for the robes and cotton for the lining and hand died and hand painted and cut and pieced and sewed everything. did i mention i designed it? because i didn’t. my husband jim drew the designs for the paintings, i used a make your own japanese clothes book to construct the costumes, and i took it from there.
it’s for my sister’s wedding. i told her i was going to make her something special, and she immediately guessed, so i hemmed and hawed and told her that no, i was actually making them a pair of matching silk ba…twings. batwings.
and ever since i’ve been telling her little details of what i’ve been up to, without describing the article of clothing i was making. or completely lying, things like ‘i’m working on your little claw right now, and i had a hell of a time getting the wing struts the right tightness.’ but in the meantime, i took pictures, and i’m glad i have, because this simple task, which balooned all out of proportion, ended up producing not just two elegant matching garments of surpasing softness and exquisitely decorated by myself, but also a pair of silk pillow sheets made from the cuttings, as well as what has become a production line of silk scarves, all of which aare drawn from two sketches that my husband jim, also an artist, provided me with.
The idea
Design ideas started with my sister’s, ‘well, i hope my batwing has a dragon on it, right?’ because i’m always making dragons on silk. something my husband jim has helped with, because i take such bad care of the patterns that he keeps having to make me new scarf sized dragons that i use in making one of my favorite scarves. i make loads of them, and they end up selling pretty well, but i don’t keep track.
my sister gets the dragon ‘batwings’. her hussband is not ldragonlike, but softer and more of a watery disposition. so we ran thru all our japanese art books in our shelves and then went to the library and google images. and he designed me a lovely flowing stream with a crane and a bunch of irises. very nice.
so i got her to measure herself nad her husband, -to-be, of course, and sent me all the measurements. really strange things like the distance from your neck to your belly button. but i feaar she wasn’t paying attention, because her husband’s arms end up being 80 inches long by her measurements, and that just won’ work. anyway, i finally got measurements off an actual bathrobe that fits him well, and i ended up adjusting the size of his batwing accordingly. which means i end up with scraps off a mostly-completed garment that i get to make pillows with.
anyway, i got the fabric, a nice silk noil and the heaviest habotai i ccould find, and i made measurements and cut stuff out and pieced it together and didn’t start sewing. i took the body of the clothing dwon to the studio where i stretched it, traced jim’s drawings on, and then painted with silk dyes, actually acid dyes (i’m not up on the chemistry). then i steam set them, and then i fit them together and sewed them. but not without trepidation. both of the linings started out way too bright. this is a middle aged couple here, don’t want to expose them to bright colors first thing in the morning, especially with hangovers. so my sister’s lining, which started out irish-tourist green, and my brother in law’s lining, which was fuscia red, got sewn, then folded up and stuck in a plastic tub, weighted by bricks, and a mess of black die went all over them. thus the richly textured patterns, see below.
i thought sewing it was going to be easy. it’s such a straightforward pattern – attach the sleeves to the body. attach the sides below the sleeves. that’s it, you’re ready to sew in the lining.
but every time i sewed something, i sewed it wrong, and i had to rip stitches out of half of my seams and start over again.
when i sewed the lining in, it didn’t fit the garment, even tho the lining was exactly the same size and shape as the garment. so i had to tear out the stitching on the red lining and completely redo it, and i had to remove the stitching on the dragon kimono and redo the shoulder seams to fit the lining.
things like that. very frustrating. and i was doing both sets of batwings at the same time, so i repeated a lot of my mistakes twice.
and in the meantime i took jim’s patterns and traced them out on silk scarves, and made silk paintings of them. theyy were exquiisite. and then someone at choir asked if i was doing any silk painting, because sometimes i bring my stuff in and fire-sale it to the girls, and it turns out she needs something special for some family members who are recovering frmo surgery, so okay, i’ll do a bunch of dragon and water scarves.
and you know, i haven’t gotten to the symbolism behind the two designs and what i did with them.
but never mind that, i’m going to upload a bunch of photos of the work in process.
