new scarf designs

i’m designing a batch of scarves to send to the folks in olafsfjordur.  i’ve got three ideas.

one is the northern lights scarf i already do.

the others are from photos i took while i was there this summer.  one up on the eastern valley where there’s still lots of snow and plenty of rocks,

and the other of the vatn of olafsfjordur and its ring of mountains, taken from the bridge over the river (on the very day i saw a hidden folk jogging toward me on the bridge, and then he wasn’t there).

here are the first tries at these designs (except for the northern lights one).  i am also testing my formula for making silk paints from mx dyes when i’m doing this.  and when i am done, i have three presents to send off to people.

now i have to refine them or reject them, and then do a production run of about a dozen or 1.5 dozen in all.  and preferably before xmas.

please let me know what you think of this latest batch.

wrap-up silk veils and scarves

okay i’m done with my projects in silk painting for now.  they’re all steamed and washed and ironed and sitting in ziplock bags waiting to be addressed and sent off.  wee hah.  and they didn’t fade as much as they could have.  the paisley scarf fared worst as far as fading goes.

above is the entire scarf.  as you can see, the yellow faded right away, so everything is a bit bluer than i would have liked.  it’s not deadly, but it’s an example of what can happen when you mess with dyes.  they do strange things.

in the details, you can see where all the dots and little lines i put in with sugar syrup stayed white, but also, in spots, did strange things when the water and dye mixed.  this isn’t the best case to show you, however, because i went out of my way not to splash water around, and the sugar syrup technique loves flooding.

here’s the large veil.  as you can see, there’s no black, really.  it’s all dark colors, but it’s full of light.  about this particular veil, a quote from the woman who ordered it.

Every Christmas, all over the world, bellydancers participate in something called Secret Habibi (Habibi means ‘sweetheart’ in Arabic).  It’s basically a Secret Santa type of thing.  Each dancer fills out a generic list, such as favourite colour, hobby, scent, etc.  One of the items is called Top Secret Item of Desire.  These are never fulfilled, or are fulfilled rarely.  Example: one year, I wrote something like ‘a Mitsubishi 3000-GT’.  Anyway, under someone’s Top Secret Item of Desire, she wrote: I would LOVE to have a veil painted like the Milky Way. So, that’s the reason why.  Only rarely are those particular wishes fulfilled.  Back at Christmas, I bought her a book on the art of Brian Froud (who did Labyrinth and the Dark Crystal), and told her I was sending her something else.  I’m sure she’s forgotten all about it by now, so I am hoping that she really likes her surprise!

the detail pictures show how many of the stars – blobs of sodium alginate resist – didn’t show up.  i must have put a thousand dots in with resist, and because i went over the silk again and again, eventually most of the dots got wet, dissolved, and flowed out and around.  but some survived. and there are lots of white dots when you look up close.

here is the smaller of the two attempts.  i’m not sure which one i like best.

project: foram / paisley silk scarf

this is for my buddy sam, who sent me a specimen of foraminifera recently collected in antarctica, which is somewhere i’ve always wanted to go, and about which i’ve done loads of research for a novel i’m writing. in thanks for his giving me my own little piece of the south polar archipelago, a sort of mascot for my novel, i’m making this scarf for him, for his next trip to antarctica, where he will be advised to wear it around his neck.

foraminifera, as you probably don’t remember from high school, are small, and they’re in limestone that comes from old sea bottoms.  actually they look just like bigger things, like seashells and the patterns in sunflowers, but that’s either because everything is fractal or because everything obeys a certain geometry in its form.  or some other reason.

anyway, sam studies these things, and they’re interesting, and beautiful.  and they reminded me of little seeds, so i decided to put them inside paisley figures, because they’re like little gourds.  the idea suggested itself.

now, i love paisley, and love to paint paisley patterns, even tho i don’t ever really get them right, because i don’t really understand their complexity, so i can’t really render them.  but i’ll keep working on it.  i used a silk shirt from the 80s, on top, and a faux pashmina shawl from the saru store, bought this year.

the next few pictures show in agonizing detail how silk dye flows on dry silk, and the way the resist lines contain the flow.

now, you never want to go hard up against a resist line, because you risk violating it, and then the dye will flow outside the lines (o happy accident, o production disaster).  you can see how i’ve come in a tiny way from the resist line of this plantlike foram, and then i’ve fudged where the lines are to the right, because frankly i can’t see them.  they’ve dried, and disappeared unless i’m at the right angle.  which i’m not, because the thing is stretched and in the middle of a table and it makes my back hurt to bend over that way…  but the point is that you can hedge if you don’t know where the boundary is.  you can put in a tentative line and let it spread, and then come in closer and closer until it spreads around a barrier.  and then you can come in and add more dye in the interstices, once you know where they are.  the brush should come to the finest point imaginable, and that means you can get into the tiniest cracks, if your eyesight is good enough, and your hand steady enough.  neither of which obtain in my case….

anyway.  i’m going to show one end of the scarf all the way thru, just as i did for the milky way scarf.  however, you should know that i took pictures of both ends and the middle, as well as a long shot of the whole scarf, for every round of development.  it’s just that i don’t feel like sizing 40 photos for the web.  so.

hard to see; sorry.  this is sodium alginate water-based resist applied from a squeeze bottle with a metal tip.  first i’ve drawn the forams, spaced out over the scarf and somewhat symmetrical.  then i’ve drawn teardtop shapes around them, and then gourd shapes around the teardrops, and probably another layer around that.  like a gourd cut in half.

then i went in and put leaves around each gourd, and as i went on the leaves got more and more fancy.

then i went in with sugar syrup and put in some interior details, mostly on the leaves but in this case on the capsule of the gourd.

first an orange (mostly yellow silk dye with a splash of magenta) around the foram, applied with a brush.  then a nice bright red (mostly magenta with a glob of yellow), and then a purple (duh magenta and cyan).  the red bled thru the resist in the middle one, and i went back in with the bottle and redrew the lines, which are dark because they’re still wet.  see those dots in the red areas?  they’re sugar syrup dots.  the dye flows around them, and when wet, the syrup flows into the dye, and makes cool runny effects.

now a green (mostly yellow with a touch of blue) on all the leaves.  this is still wet.

now a darker green (more blue_ over the sugar syrup lines, and down the middle of teh leaves.  and i filled in the little stones and details of the forams.  they use these tiny little bits of sand to make their shells, and this one in the middle sticks out pseudopods to nab food from the water.  too cool.

then a nice dark blue (cyan and black) background, and while it was still wet, i sprinkled rock salt all over it.  the salt draws the dye, making these cool splotchy marks.

and then i hit it with water.  very carefully, with a brush instead of a spray bottle like the last two scarves.  and carefully not on the blue background.  clear water over all the insides of the forms, over the leaves, and then over the gourds, making sure to wet the sugar syrup so it could flow, and violating the resist lines inside the gourd so that the colors of the layers would mingle.

and here it is, finished.  the salt is still on it.

since i took this picture, it has sat like that for a couple of days, and then got rolled up and steamed this morning, along with the second milky way scarf.  they’re hanging on the front porch now, airing.  and in the next day or so i’ll wash out the lot, and see what i’ve got.  very likely the colors have faded, and maybe past what i can tolerate, which means i will be repeating the process.  but until then i can bask in the light of my creations, and dream of running dye.

milky way veil 3

to finish with the bellydancing veil, after it air cured for a couple of days, which means hanging over the shower curtain, and then being gathered up and moved away from the water when somebody took a bath.  it was a bunched up mess when it came time to lay it flat and wrap it up for steaming.  first i needed help to unstick the thing.  it’s a real benefit that silk is so strong – they used to make parachutes from silk.  once you get sugar syrup all over silk, and crush it together, it takes a herculean effort to get it unstuck.  you can see by the creases how hard it is to unstick.  like when my sister put gum in my hair one night.

so i went a little crazy trying to get it unstuck and lain flat on the newsprint.  you need to wrap these things in layers of newsprint so that when they bleed, they don’t bleed onto the next layer of silk on the roll.  tho in this case it hardly matters.

after three tries and lots of wasted paper (because i had to tear the paper back off in order to start over) i had a  bundle that i could fit into my steamer.  the problem was that the silk didn’t roll up straight, and it’s already as wide as my steamer will take.  so i had to keep rolling it again, trying to make it straight.  in the end, i wrapped the roll in a piece of kraft paper and used masking tape to hold it together.

i put a hole in one end of the kraft paper, and ran a special-purpose clothes hanger thru it, then hung the bundle inside the stovepipe steamer i made.  topped with a towel, and with a few inches of water inside, the whole thing will boil and steam for a good 4 hours.  because there’s so much silk inside, i feel i have to steam it extra long time.  it’s all superstition, of course, because i’m not the repeatable science type, and am just hitting it with everything i got, like the idea of spraying it with vinegar.  how am i supposed to know what works?  i’m going to try everything…

so, while i’ve got my stretchers out, and my dyes, and some spare silk, i think i’ll make another one.  this one is much shorter, say 70″ x 18″ or so.  but i can still do a milky way on it.  there’s nothing like a blank canvas to start the creative juices running.

this is the first application, put on with a brush.  you can’t see the dots of sodium alginate, and i’ve mixed up a nice medium brown and laid out the edges of the darkest clouds in a sort of underpainting.  then i put more star dots on top of that.  you can just see the barest indications of the lines in charcoal.  this time i’m mainly going to show the lower left corner of the scarf.

light blue, and then more dots of alginate resist, to reserve the stars.

then some light red spattered on with an old toothbrush, and then i start in with the darker purple i used at the end of the last scarf.

and more darks, and more dots.  this stuff is slathered on with a toothbrush, some of the splotches the size of a quarter.

now i’ve come in with sugar syrup, to reserve the lightest areas.

and i’ve gone thru and wiped the syrup with my fingers, smudging it on the surface so it’s not so linear.  and more black with the toothbrush.  at some point i came in with black in the brush and carefully lined the edges of the scarf with black.  have to be careful here because these are rolled edges, and it’s easy to leave the underside white.

here’s after spraying it with vinegar water.  note how all the hard edges have softened.

this is another part of the scarf, and it’s right after i sprayed it.  you can see the black running from the top half down thru the light areas.  it’s beautiful to stand and watch this process, it keep spreading and running, tho, so you’ve got to be ready to come in and lift it with a dry towel, or hit the fan on to dry the whole area quickly.

after it has dried, and this is a different area, so it’s hard to see the difference between how it was.

however, i can show the process again, from the end of the table.  and after letting the whole thing cure for a few days (until i finish the next one) i will steam it, and we shall see how it comes out.  it won’t be the same.  i wish i could paint them and never steam them, because they’re so much more beautiful before all the dye washes out…

milky way veil 2

in the last post, i did a lot of setup.  washing, stretching, putting down thousands of sodium alginate dots to represent stars later on.  then i took charcoal and outlines the shapes i could determine within the starfield.  humans make patterns out of random collections of objects.  i saw loads of figures in the milky way.  and someday i might just go ahead and draw in the figures i see, rather than draw in vague abstract shapes that remind me of figures.  today i’m starting the painting.  this sequence actually lasted two or three days, i’m not sure at this point.  but my feet hurt.

first down was some diluted yellow.  you can barely see that.  it dried, and then i put on some diluted magenta.  it’s still wet, and you can see the water spreading out around the spots, while the dye is staying in place better.  i’m putting on these colors with a toothbrush, thumbing tiny or large drops of color onto the silk.  what i’m doing is putting on the lighter colors first, as you would for watercolor.  you reserve the whites, which i did with the resist, then you put on the lightest colors of all, and work over them toward your darkest colors.  this works exactly the same way in silk, but more in the beginning than the end.  it’s really easy to get muddy colors in watercolor, and almost impossible to do in silk painting.  that’s because pigments are ground up bits of rocks, and dyes are chemical mixtures  (or maybe just way more ground up rocks, who knows at this point).

now comes the dilute cyan, and i’m seeing that i put it on over the still-wet magenta.  putting a color down over wet silk gives a different effect, a different rate of spread, than putting it down over dry silk.  and any silk treated with certain things won’t let the dye spread at all, or even catch into the threads.  it might be a science, but i treat it like an art, and get a different result every time.

and here’s the first black, diluted.  all the colors have been diluted so far, way diluted. because even when they blend all together, they’re going to be a light gray.  if you look closely at all the preceding photos, and the following one, you’ll see the tiny dots of more resist being applied over the fresh dye.  this way there’re going to be yellow stars, and blue ones, and red ones, and black ones, and purple ones, and brown ones and green ones.  all over the place.

now this corner of the veil that i’m showing is not one of the light parts of the scarf.  those are in the middle.  this corner is a mid gray, sort of bluish. it’s a mid gray when you’re seeing it from a distance.  it’s all colors when you look at it close up.  that’s what makes this kind of painting so difficult.  there’s no scale, so you don’t know how to judge it.  if you look at it from one distance, it looks like the worst piece of crap.  and if i’m lucky, looking at it from another distance conveys the exact image i had in my head when i decided to paint it.

that dark blotchy stuff near the top of the picture is sugar syrup.  i use it as a resist, but it doesn’t behave like the alginate resist – it moves.  it’s thick syrup, so it flows, and when you get it wet, it flows in really cool patterns.  so it makes a totally different kind of resist, and looks particularly good in nebula paintings.  i put it down over a red splotch and some almost white areas so they would stay the colors they are and not turn black as i continue dumping darker colors on it.

here is some more sugar syrup. this is to reserve some of these nice mid grays while the rest of the place gets splattered with stronger and stronger black.  i’m still putting down dots even over these colors.  that’s because not all the resist is going to stay.  a lot of it is going to dissolve into the dye, and go away.  so i have to keep putting it on just to hedge my bets.

at this point i have switched to brushes, and i’m using a large one to put in ever darker blacks.  you can see the darkest part, to the right, is brushstrokes rather than drops and splatters.  i’m trying to make the central band of clouds in the milky way as dark as i can.  it’s not showing up very well in these photos.  and it’ll wash out, no matter how good it looks when i’m thru painting it.  that’s the bad part about silk painting.  it washes out.

the shiny stuff on the right is sugar syrup twinkling.  i’ve been flooding the place with blacks, and reds, and blues, in great amounts, hell even some yellow just dumped on there, running down the middle.  not that bad, i’m exaggerating slightly.  but it does get vigorous near the end.

and this is the last bit here, who knows what i’ve just put down, but it’s the last step but one.

here i’ve gone and gotten the whole surface wet, sprayed it with a mix of half vinegar and half water.  the vinegar is there to try to help the dye set into the silk.  i have so much trouble with my dyes fading, and i’m sure it’s because they’re old and i don’t keep them cool, and they’ve deteriorated.  so i’m making the whole thing acidic, and when i steam it hopefully it will make the dyes set nicely.  we’ll see.

what the spray does is to make everything blend and move.  it might have looked nice if i had left it without spraying; see the picture before that for what this looks like.  but by getting it wet i’m making the sugar syrup run, and this produces fluid motion in the dyes that i find fascinating and attractive.  so i always tend to run water over the syrup, and i tend to use the syrup in order to then violate the resist.

you can’t control anything when you do art this way.

this is the finished veil hanging out to dry.  the part you’ve been looking at is the lower left corner.  right now it’s a completely different veil than it’s going to be once it’s set and washed out.  the sugar syrup and the resisted dots don’t show up at this point, and a lot of the colors will fade out when i wash it.  we’ll see.  it’s got to rest for a couple of days, and then i’ll steam set it, and it’ll rest for a couple more days, and then i can wash it out.

next up: a much smaller milk way for a present, and after that a bunch of feraminafora!  stay tuned.

project: milky way dancing veil

i just finalized a commission that was originally planned for last xmas.  but these things happen.  it’s really cute; a bunch of belly dancers around the world get together and play secret santa with each other.  and one of them selected me based on a belly dancing veil i did for my friend asha.  and asked specifically for a picture of the milky way.  and i can do that, because one of my favorite things is to paint nebulas and galaxies.

this is the reference photo.  it’s beautiful, and doesn’t it just look like a dragon?

my plan is to put in the starfield with resist, then pain in the light colors, then put in more stars over the colors, and paint in the dark stuff.  sounds confusing at this point, but i’ll be describing it step by step as we go along.

this veil is 45″x108″  that’s three yards of heavier silk.  it will make a nice substantial flow when it’s waved around.  and this is my stretching solution.  when you’re working with silk painting, it’s necessary to suspend the silk away from all other surfaces, because the dyes will run and bleed if given even half a chance.  so i got two stepladders out of the attic, and used two 48″ stretcher bars, bungee-corded them to the sides of the ladders, then  threaded spring clips onto rubber bands, and tied them evenly along the stretcher bars.  the veil is suspended from the spring clips.  but i soon found that i couldn’t apply the resist, or indeed draw in my sketch with charcoal, while it was suspended.  there’s way too much wobble.  so i got out my handy-dandy door panel, put it across the two tables underneath the veil, and took the veil off the stretchers to lay down on the door surface.

so much better.  you can see what’s left of the charcoal resting on the reference photo.  the lines are basic forms i can see in the photo, indicated only very generally with the charcoal.  it will wash out of the silk when i’m all finished messing with it.  it’s really hard for me to tell exactly what area of the reference photo i’m trying to transfer to the veil.  most likely it’s the mid-lower right.

this is most of the veil fitting over the door.  i had to smoosh out my lines and redo them several times, especially at the beginning when it went off at the way wrong angle.

i’ve mixed up some sodium alginate resist and put it into a squeeze bottle with a metal tip, and here is what happens when i go around using it to fill in the stars inside these forms i see in the reference photo.  these are the stars that will turn out white.  the colored stars will be when i come in with the resist over dyed areas, and then overdye the surrounding areas.  it all looks rather crude, but this is only the first stage.  it’ll turn out brilliant, mainly because it’s designed to be seen from far away, and in motion..

more stars, pouncing with the tip of the resist bottle while squeezing lightly.  it sounds like rapid fire flea scratching from the more highly wound of the small dogs.

doing a fresh area.  i had to keep filling in all i could and then letting it dry, peeling it up (the resist sticks to the table), repositioning it, and filling it in some more.  this is definitely the right hand side of the reference photo, because there’s the right seam of the veil.  the white stars are thickest in the lighter areas of the galaxy, near the horizontal midline, but they’re surprisingly thick toward the edges where the dark gunk clears out, and even there are stars peeking out of (in front of) the dark gunk.  so i didn’t feel too pressured to get the right density of stars in any particular place.  i just held the thing up to the light to find the bare spots until all parts of the veil were covered with stars.  this is partly insurance.  some of these little resist dots won’t end up resisting.  i’m going to be putting many layers of dye over these little dots of algae.  the dye is going to absorb in, or the resist is going to dissolve out, and loads of these little dots won’t end up visible in the final veil.  so it’s okay to put in too many at this point.  i can always scrub areas with dye to mostly dissolve the resist.  what i won’t be able to do is to bring back stars after i start dyeing.  and actually that’s not true, because i can always come back with thiox and bleach the stars back out.  but i won’t go to that length, so i’ll hedge another way.

tomorrow i will start dyeing.  i’m not sure if i’ll use a splatter, a sponge, or a brush to apply the color.  i’m going to start with the very lightest colors, as you would for a watercolor.  i’ve already reserved my whites using a mask, which is what resist is.  now i’m going to go in with light blues and light violet and light orange-yellow, and a nice light reddish brown.

i’ve got to say how happy i am to be turning my hand back to visual art using fabric.  for six months now my creative energies have been going to a completely intangible form of art – at this stage.  i’m writing a novel, and haven’t even begun the writing part of it because i’m still doing research and working on the plot structure and chapter outline.  but there’s nothing visible going on except whatever document i’m working on at the moment.  with this commission, i can tear myself away from my literary efforts, and concentrate on making deep meaningful statements with color and form, rather than words and mental images.

project: banana neckties

several years ago, we decided to do something nice for our brother in law.  he’s a hard-working businessman who made his way up in the fruit and veg market, and he’s by far my favorite in law (no offense everybody else).  jim painted him a portrait, we did a painting of his kids together (we painted it together), and i made him a tie, featuring bananas.

well, bless his heart, he actually wears it now and again.  personally, after all this time, i think it’s horrid, but he doesn’t seem to agree, and in fact, tho made much sport of in his circles, some of his colleagues either like it so much, or annoy him so much, that he’s asked me to make him some more that he can give as presents.

as for me, i don’t care.  it gives me another chance to make a tie, which is a project with all its own challenges.  the first one is making it not turn out dorky.

so i ordered ties for his colleagues, and one more for him, and decided to way update the design.

i searched for ‘bunch bananas’ and these are photos i found that interested me.  i don’t want to just picture bananas this time, i want to find an interesting repeating pattern that says bananas, and crop it really close, so that it approaches abstract.

these are the ties.  nice thick silk, interesting nonwoven interface, silk thread.  i saved the thread.

the last time i did a tie, i forgot how it came apart, and had a hell of a time putting it back together again, especially since the silk shrank way more than the interface did.  this time i’m not above trimming the interface.

the photos of this part of the process are just for me.  i need to be able to see such details as the foldover at the bottom of the tie, and the place where the two ends are tacked together, and the placement of the tie bar.

the thread goes all the way the length of the tie in long stitches, ending in tacks at the corners where the triangles are.

when the ties were apart, i washed them in hot water and synthrapol, even the interfacings, let them dry, and then gently ironed one of the ties back into the folds it had, or at least, the folds that fit the interfacing.  the silk had shrunk a lot, and going to be impossible to use the old folds, but that’s okay, it’ll still fit.  just use smaller margins.

the drawing was next.  i cut out a tie shape from a piece of paper and messed with the collection of banana pictures until i found some interesting patterns, then tore off a sheet of kraft paper and drew the designs in pen, later using acrylic and a brush to make the lines dark enough to see thru the tie.

when i was done with that, i mixed up a new batch of sodium alginate resist and laid the ties out, and transferred the designs onto the ties.  then stretch, and ready to paint.

note my ingenious stretching strategy.  it’s all clips on rubber bands, and then i’ve got clips joined to clips clipping two ties together, and in one instance, there are two clips clipping the inside of the ties together using a rubber band between.  the variations are endless.

this is the first coat.  it’s yellow, by itself, full strength.  i’m using my silk dyes now, they’re left over, and i’m using them up before i start making my own silk dyes.  i think these particular ones are tinfix.  they’re proprietary, i don’t know what’s in them, they smell funny, they’re completely standard and you get the same results every time (except you don’t).  anyway, i’m using them up.

you’ll be seeing these three triangle-ends of the three ties a few times, as i complete the  process.  don’t know why i documented all three ties, but there you have it.

okay then, moving on.

this is after a second and third pass, the first one with red and the second with blue.

for the red, i only wanted a hint of red, so i used 7 pipettes of clear water, and three drops of red.  same with the blue, except i only used 1 drop for the first pass, and in these photos it looks like day-glo yellow.

now i’m getting a little bolder.  you can tell with the red.  and you can see how the new coat moves the old coat, making an interesting texture that i’m not sure i’m going to keep.

at this point i’ve started to put the black on.  in silk painting, if you want any darkness at all in the resulting color, you’ve got to use black.  otherwise it’s the most amazing rich brown or whatever, but it glows, not glowers.

the black i used, however, was 7 pipettes of clear water and one dropper of black.  so i had to go over the spaces between the stems of the bananas several times to make them dark enough.

and after the line of black at the edges of each banana, i came across with a brush of clear water and softened up each line.  i can only stand sharp edges under certain circumstances.

for this stage, i used a lot of much stronger blue.  i think i put 4 more drops into the same water.  and just kept going over the areas i wanted green.  eventually they turned as deep as i had the patience for.

at this point i can’t do any more before putting the background on.  and without restretching, i can’t put the background on the narrow ends of the ties, so i’m going to put it on the front parts, and then later, take them off and redo them.

wet

i made up a nice large batch of 4 droppers of blue to 2 droppers of black with 4 pipettes of clear water, and later put in 4 more pipettes of clear water, and added another 2 droppers of blue and 1 of black.  a nice, thick, dark blue.

i painted it on between the bananas, but first i went around with my resist and redrew all the edges of the background.  this is because it’s pretty important not to have blue bleeding all over the yellow.  so i was very careful to outline everything as often as i needed to.

while the dye was still sopping wet, right after i got finished painting that section, i grabbed a large pinch of coarsely ground salt and sprinkled it on.

dry

it takes a few minutes to act, but as the dye evaporates, the water is drawn to the salt crystals, and moves the dye with it, so you get these long trails of lighter colored fabric when it’s finished drying.  and the longer it takes to dry, the more intense the effect.  up to the point where the salt melts into the accumulated water and the entire effect washes out (i’ve done it).

the tie in the middle has almost no background.  none that’ll show when it’s all folded up around the interfacing.  i hope that’s not going to be a problem.  i hope one of those guys likes wearing green yellow.

here everything’s been restretched, and i’ve finished with the background dye and salt treatment.

now i’ve hung them over a board to have a look at.  i don’t think the lines are bold enough, and think, based on the right hand one, that they can stand to be a bit more marked up.

they’re just that little bit bland.

and when i fold them to their approximate width, they lose most of the background and become jumbles of yellow.  so back onto the stretchers they go, one at the time for this final round.

and here they are.  a good deal darker and bolder.  they may get laughed at, but nobody else will have anything else remotely like it.

of course, we have to set them and wash them and press them and sew them back together again, so it’s not like they’re finished or anything.  but until they wash out and i lose all my work, i’ll continue to think hopefully of them.

project time:  two days, all day, 8 hours the first day, more like 6 hours the second.  they’ll need a three hour steaming.  so 15 hours labor and about ten bucks for supplies (and water and fuel to steam and rinse them).  result?  maybe crappy, but you can’t buy them in stores, and you’ll be lucky to get me to make you one.

***

well, i inadvertently published.  i was going to wait until day after tomorrow, when i set the dyes and see what the final product is.  so check back then and i’ll update this post with a final picture.

continuing with the silk scarf thing

i’ve been to a lot of blogs that start out well and then just trail off, because the writer got tired, or the essay was of the moment and they lost the trail, or they moved off to youtube to cruise for a couple hours after the dose kicked in.

i’m afraid some of my fabric posts are like that.  and that’s a shame because i’m trying to show how to do stuff, and if i don’t ever finish documenting it, then there’s some poor schmuck in the middle of trying to make whatever unique thing i’m trying to redesign my way, and what’re they going to do – improvise? – when i never come back to explain how i made it look that strange way that the photos don’t really show.

right now i’m thinking about the double-apron artist’s smock that i never posted another thing about after my computer crashed and i lost all the process photos.  thanks for helping, ex husband.  not.  stupid comment about never meeting your obligations mutter mutter.

i had this great idea for a smock.  i looked and looked for artist’s smocks that looked okay.  most looked like the xxxx shirts kids wear these days.  then there was gustav klimt’s smock.

but i didn’t want to be walking around in a sack.  i don’t look good in sacks.  to tell the truth, i only look good naked, and only if you like renaissance painting.

so i took a regular old restaurant apron, which i actually kind of like wearing, made it so there was one apron on my front, and one on my back, added sleeves, and i was off.

and then it sat there half finished for over a year.

so i still have to detail that.

but i can go forward with the scarves i’ve been making for gifts and to wear underneath my sweater to keep my neck warm.

i had four patterns that jim drew for me.  two were little wee fairies frolicking in the flowers.  you’d say too cute, except jim’s cute turns out very sinister and twisted.  the other two were puffins, who inhabit the islands where i’m going to be.

i started off with the puffins.  it had been about a year, maybe more, since i’d done any scarves, and boy what a learning curve there is.  it’s mainly simple, painting on silk, but things can go wrong, and you’ve got to prepare for it.

i forgot.  things like how easily the silk takes up the dye and why don”t i use a drop of alcohol in the damned mix instead of either not having enough dye or flooding the whole scarf with it.  things like the use of sugar syrup for interesting effects that can sometimes look lousy.

anyway, i hated the first two scarves.  they looked horrible right up to the end, when i was splashing dye on and violating all the lines.  somehow this helps my work to look better, to overpaint and then pretend it was my intention all along.

i really screwed up the first fairy scarf.  putting sugar syrup all over the fairies’ wings and clothes was a good idea, but the dye i painted over the sugar syrup was too strong.  plus, it was humid and i waited too long for the syrup to dr, which it won’t when it’s humid.  it just sort of melts and runs, and then it’s as if you used no-flow.

this is why i stopped posting the progress.  because to me it didn’t feel like progress.  it felt like a mistake.  the kind you hide in the corner.  but i only had the one scarf of the puffins, over colored, and i wasn’t happy with that.  the first fairy scarf was ruined, so i had to proceed.  so i whipped out jim’s template and inked it in using homemade water-based resist (alginate print paste), and started in on it using the lessons i’d just absorbed fucking up the first two scarves.

everything went in pastel at first.  a basic light green, a dilute magenta, yellow, a dirty orange.  then i developed the colors a bit, adding a tip of yellow to a magenta flower, etc.  then i deepened the greens with blue.  notice i avoided painting any fairies until i was happy enough with the half-way stage of the flowers.

the fairies got an underpainting of dirty yellow where their bodies are, leaving the drapery floating out away from them untouched – the white of the scarf.  then i went over their skin with dirty orange, and made sure to smear resist all over their faces so that later i could apply eyes and mouths with a fine brush, like makeup on a tiny doll.

i put sugar syrup over their clothes and wings, tho not their hair like i did last time.  i didn’t bother letting the syrup dry, which takes hours, because it’s been damp lately and i knew from recent experience that it would only get worse the longer i left it on there.  so i came in over the sticky wet syrup with a brush full of medium dark purple, and put it on the wings, with magenta on the clothes.  and then before it had a chance to do much, i flooded the whole area with water, so that the dye would hitchhike on the back of the syrup as it flowed and made cool patterns.  neat trick, and just the thing to make the fairies seem ethereal.

but it didn’t work with the flowers, which were pale and pastel.  i hated it, and put it over a door to dry out, moving on to the second puffin template.

this one went pretty smooth, because i didn’t take so many hesitant starts.  i just went ahead and put in a medium blue on the water, and diluted black in the clouds, coming in much earlier with the rich tones, being a lot more heavy handed with the blacks.  i like this result better.

so then i went  back to the fairy painting, and went ahead and got bold on the plants, putting in black for shadows and strength.  normally you wouldn’t use black, silk is one of the few mediums where black is necessary to get any kind of dark at all.  it’s more like light than pigment.  it’s like printing when you use the four colors and everything in the range is represented with those four colors, white being the paper, the substrate.  that’s why i have so much trouble using white paint, because i expect the substrate to supply the lightest values, and in silk painting, the white silk blank does just that.

so i got bold, deliberately going outside the resist lines, flooding the area around the plants with clear water every time so that the overs would fan out and spread.  and slowly the whole thing got richer without looking like a disney poster.

and the whole thing looks much better.  and even if the intended recipient thinks my scarves are touristy as hell, she might like the colors, and she might deign to take one from me as thanks for all she’s done.  or else i’ll just wear them myself to ward off the cold.

another silk scarf

i really do love to paint on silk.  the whole staying inside the lines thing that i get to violate to my heart’s content.  the brilliant colors, the way the whole thing is made out of light, rather than darkness, as with pigments on paper.

this is the composite scarf.  there’s a lot of white in it, but not for very long.  i did the usual outlining of all the flowers, and started painting on them with various greens and flower colors.  that’s going to be the easy part.  the difficult part will be the fairies.  i don’t want them too strong, but i dislike pastel colors, so it gave me a few fits before i figured out what i need to do.

sugar syrup.  karo syrup.  in a squeeze bottle.  it does interesting and strange things to dyes.

so i put sugar syrup around the fairies’ clothes and wings.  i’m leaving them under the fan all night to dry (hopefully, as it’s quite humid here), and then tomorrow i’m going to hit them with some fairly strong dark dye on top of the sugar syrup.  and when i hit them with water later on, they’ll do very interesting things.   the ephemeral touch i’m looking for on the fairies.

* * *

in other news, i’ve just started a test watercolor on a piece of clayboard, and it’s producing nice results.  more later.

a couple of silk scarves

i need to make a present for the woman who administers the residency.  she’s been so kind to me, and put up with all my fool questions, and she deserves something for herself.  and since i have no money – duh – i must make her some art.

jim designed me a couple of scarf patterns with puffins, and a couple with fairies, and they’re so complex that i’ve never made scarves of them.  the puffin scarf is simpler than the fairies, so i started on it first.

you can’t see much in the photo above, but it shows the setup.  80″ stretchers and 18″ stretchers, fabric clips and rubber bands.  i’ve already inked in the lines with the resist.  this was difficult because jim’s lines are delicate, and you’ve got to have very dark lines to see thru the silk.  in fact, i couldn’t see thru the silk, and had to keep lifting the scarf off the pattern in order to see it.  consequently my drawing isn’t the best.  i’ll use a different technique with the fairies.

here’s a closeup.  you can see two birds, with an island behind their heads, and the top of a rocky hill at their feet.  there’s the line of the ocean, an another line for the cloud base.

since i’m practicing for my art residency in cill rialaig, i’m using all the same materials i’ll be using out in the back of beyond, so the resist is made of sodium alginate, mixed up by hand and squeezed out thru a plastic bottle.

the moment i started on this scarf i decided to take all my silk supplies.  i had decided against it because silk is kind of equipment-heavy.  namely, you need a steamer pot at the very least.  but if i keep my silks dry and wrapped in paper i should be able to keep them until i bring them home at the end of my residency and steam them once i’m back.  i can do it.

so that’s more i have to pack into an already stuffed bag.  not the steamer, fine, but 4 little bottles of fabric dye, and i’d sure as shit better wrap them up tightly in case they burst in the luggage.

here’s the first stage.  i’ve taken three shots of the scarf at each stage, and overlapped them to make a single image.  you can see the acid green base i put down over all the land features, the first of many applications of black on the birds, a blue-black on the sea and in the clouds, and a nice sunset orange for the bit of sky you can see in the distance.  the same red adds texture in the hillside.  it looks pretty bad at this stage.  unfortunately, it continued to look bad all the way up to the end.

altho it doesn’t look like i did much, i worked on the landscape a bit, indicating the landforms.  and deepened the ocean and sky colors some, too.

here’s where you can see some changes.  i haven’t been happy with the dirt/rock part of the landscape yet.  it’s too unformed, too stiff.  the birds suck, too, because of the awkwardness drawing them in.  the island in the background isn’t looking too bad, but that green is really awful.  american tourist green.  this is the place where i complained to jim that i was struggling constantly with it, and his recommendation was that i start on the fairy scarf instead.

which whipped up my desire to finish it.  so i darkened everything even more.  blue went over the green until it stopped glowing.  black went over the sea until it had some movement.  black and more blue went over the clouds, and i muddied the area above and below the sunset band of light.

this is the place, where if it were a watercolor, i would start splashing paint everywhere in an attempt to hit the end point by an overwhelming margin.  it works much the same way in silk, except that you can’t make mud.  if you add too much color, it simply gets richer.

so this is where i took it off the stretchers and let it hang over the back of a door to cure for a day or two while i start on the fairy scarf.  we’ll see which of the two of them i’m not ashamed of.  because it’s really difficult to know what to give an irish arts professional.  the subjects i’ve chosen – puffins, fairies – are cliches, irish tourist themes, and it could be considered insulting to try to make a picture of something thousands of miles away and then pass it off as serious art and not just a kitchy picture postcard ripoff.