project: cheshire cat silk scarves

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.

susie’s xmas present

since she doesn’t read my blogs, she won’t notice before xmas, so i’m safe in putting it up now.

when we were at the beach this summer, my sister got me to make her a sea turtles crawling out to sea t-shirt. so when jim designed me a sea turtle scarf this fall, i figured i just might as well make an extra one because susie was going to want it. so.

it’s a design that uses a lot of wavy waves, and a lot of sandy sand, with seashells and sea turtles on the shore and marching out to sea. not the seashells, marching. so i was going to get to use my favoriet technique – karo syrup resist – and i was going to have to figure out how to do sand.

fotunately, i had on hand a jar of presist, which is some sort of paste resist (tastes like boiled detergent, but they never tell you what’s in these things) that i had never tried. so.

i got out a sea sponge, and put down a layer of resist, sponging it on haphazardly all over the sand area. at the same time, i put in my water resist lines, very gloopy sugar syrup that i then let dry. when the syrup was down, i started putting in various blues for the water, and left a strip of white to represent the shoreline foam.

 after dousing the sand with water

over the presist, i put in a golden yellow with a brush, trying to avoid the resist where possible. i didn’t yet understand the properties of this resist, and found that it was very reactive with water, which means that it wouldn’t hold at all if i brushed dye over it. but after the stuff was dry i couldn’t tell where the resist was, so oh well.

i sponged resist onto it on top of the first resist and the first dye, and when it was dry i put a deeper brown color over the first bits. when that was dry, i sponged on the resist again, and put purple bits on. it looked very cool, but more like a pebble beach than a sandy one, and sea turtles, i’m sorry, don’t like to make their nests in rock. so.

 running dye

then i turned my attention to the turtles and the shells. they’d been outlined in regular water-based resist (rice paste???), and i painted the turtles green, and the shells red, with various water color type treatments.

 ain’t it beautiful, suze?

and then i put water all over the water, violating the resist lines. this had the effect of dissolving the sugar syrup, and the dye moved in tendrils and swirls into new areas, making a wonderful loose mess of color. that’s why i love this technique.

 look how the dye bleeds across the sugar resist

over the sand, i washed clear water, hoping to move the resist in a similar way. it didn’t do anything like the sugar syrup did when i put water on it, but instead washed everything into soft blended color. it kind of washed the color out, actually, but since i was aiming for a sand look, that was alright. for the four scarves i did for sale, my sand goes thru several different versions, depending on how bold i was being with both resist and color, and by the time i got to my sister’s scarf, i was about at my limit for going outside the lines.

once i had the scarf steamed and saw how it all came out, i wondered what i should do with it next. my sister isn’t the type to actually wear my scarves. she hangs them instead. so i figured why not make a backing for it and give her a wall hanging. so.

 mostly finished

i was over in marietta a while later, showing a friend this great quiting fabric store, and ran across a batik of sea turtles. it was in lime green, which i detest, but i figured i could overdye it and make it more green-blue. but i overdid the overdyeing, and it came out bluish black. so i tosseed it in the wash and cycled it thru three or five hot water washes, and it faded out enough to where you could actually see the sea turtles. so that was okay.

 batik backing, note the green turtles. the original fabric was yucky lime green. the outlines are quilting of objects in the scarf.

i had to cut and piece the batik, and i had just enough flannel to cut out the batting, so i sandwiched the thing together and started sewing. i was undecided whether to quilt the waves, and in the end i just quilted the turtles and the shells and left it at that.

now i have to figure out when i can mail it so that she’ll get it for xmas. if i sent it to her now, or in early november, she’ll just open it, and the xmas present part will be ruined. if i send it to her husband, he’ll put it aside and leave it at work. timing is everything.

 finished wall hanging with turtles and shells quilted

and to my other sister, who does read my blogs — lise, i’ve still got to fix something about the way your wall hanging hangs, and then it’ll be on the slow boat to you. and i must tell you, allison doesn’t think it’s very good at all, but susie loves it.

some of my silk scarves this year

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.