inspired by everyday beauty Archives - Page 2 of 2

Magic

Well, the real term is ‘eco dyeing’, but it feels like magic. In my previous post about Summer camp, I touched on eco dyeing and promised I would elaborate later. Seeing as it is currently one of my favourite things to do, I have been busy and have lots of pictures to share!

Top: *Water lilies* Bottom: *wet blanket*

Water lilies are taking first place for my favourite eco dye leaves. Earlier, I used water lily leaves and stems on a dry piece of cotton, covered with a ‘wet blanket’ (cotton soaked in iron solution). I loved both the leaf print itself, and the impression that was left on the blanket. Interesting how the green of the leaves showed up, but I also like the dark impressions and detail on the blanket.

With visions of Monet dancing in my head, I was inspired to use water lilies in a bigger project. To start, I would have to gather some lily pads, so we set out in our kayaks to forage on a calm and sunny day. It took no time at all to fill the kayak with lily pads of all sizes. I may have overdone it, maybe a kayak full wasn’t necessary, but I would have lots to chose from.

Back on dry land, I put the lilies into a 5-gallon bucket of water to transport them home and kept them in the bucket overnight until I was ready to try the roll up.

I had recently purchased a 100% cotton sundress and could picture water lilies floating up from the hem on a cool summer day.

Enough of the dreamy visioning though, my mind turned to planning out the technicalities of how to turn my vision into reality. As always, I started with the end and thought backwards. You may think this is a trick used only in computer programming, or reverse engineering, but don’t let that scare you off. Thinking backwards is a great way to come up with challenges to solve. Basically, it means thinking of where, or what, you want to end with and then planning all the steps to get there. I try to remind myself that when you want a functional outcome, this crucial first step gives better results than just ‘throwing it all together and seeing what comes out’!

When thinking about my final piece, how it would look on a moving body; how it would fit into my wardrobe colour scheme; how it would wash; how to best highlight the beauty of lily pads; I came up with a few challenges:

How could I get a permanent, beautiful background colour, without the orange tinge of the iron dye interfering?
How should I lay out the leaves to give the desired effect of carefully balanced/random placement?
How could I work with a ready made dress that has pockets, neck and arm binding and a hem, each with a subtly different thickness and texture?
How would I print the front and the back of the dress, without the prints bleeding through and muddying each other?
How should I apply the iron water? Would it be better to use a wet blanket, or wet the leaves, or wet the dress?
How would I get the mirror image effect on the front and back of the dress, not on a wet blanket?
How would I roll the leaves and dress up for steaming without creating creases in my prints?

I can tell you, this took some thinking. As I played out the process in my mind, each challenge seemed to present another sub-challenge. I’ll spare you all of that rumination and just share with you the steps I settled on.

Oh yes, one final thing that I often have to do to move myself from planning to executing: Consider the worst case scenario. It could end up as one big mess. But, in this case, all I will have lost is a cheap cotton dress and some time. At some point, you do have to just plunge in and take the first step, remembering that this is all a big experiment, and it’s meant to be fun!

With the dress being a dress, it had seams, arm holes and a neck hole to contend with, and I wanted a mirror image print on the front and back of the dress so I had to figure out how to use the same leaves, keep them from bleeding through where I didn’t want them, and not waste their print on a wet blanket.

First, I soaked the whole dress in an iron water solution and wrung it out until damp. To make the most of the strength of the print, and to make sure it showed on the right side of the pockets (not the inside), I turned the dress inside out, and placed the leaves sandwich style between the front and back so they would have direct contact with both the front and the back. I started with the biggest on the bottom near the hem and floated up to smaller ones near one shoulder in a bit of a wavy drift.

I knew the print would come through to the backside of the fabric and didn’t mind that, but I didn’t want bleed through when I rolled up the bundle. I have been using saran wrap to block in my smaller pieces, but the dress seemed too big for that so I decided to try using parchment paper and it worked a charm. I laid out enough paper to cover both the front and the back completely. In essence, I now had a five-layer sandwich: paper, dress back, leaves, dress front, paper.

*Bonus: the waste parchment paper was beautiful!*

The piece was now ready to roll so I chose the longest stick that would fit in my steamer. I carefully folded in the sides of the dress to make it as evenly thick as possible and about 12 inches wide. This was rolled onto the stick, and bound as tightly as possible with string. Next, I popped it into the steamer and waited, ever-so patiently, for 90 minutes…plus another half hour or so for cooling. Then, the great reveal!

The biggest surprise at this step was beauty of the waste parchment paper which had blocked the bleeding by picking up the print. I’ll definitely be using this later.

*Round one: lily leaves on iron rust background*

As for the dress itself, I was pleased with the basic outcome. The leaves were well defined in tones of purplish black. As anticipated, the main colour of the dress was a pale orange from the iron water. I briefly considered leaving it this way, but really the dress is for me and I am pretty much stuck on blues, I still had a water image in my mind, and orange wasn’t very ‘Monet’.

The easiest solution, given my recent foray into indigo dyeing, was to give the dress a few dips in the indigo vat hoping that blue over light orange might make a nice blueish green. Things looked promising when the dress was hung on the line, but after the first rinse and dry, the indigo faded quite a bit (possibly the vat had been tired), and too much of the iron orange was showing through muddying the colour.

*First over dye with indigo became much paler when rinsed*

*Procion mx dye: electric blue & sun yellow*

OK, one more try. Third time’s a charm right? I decided to deviate from the natural path and treat the dress with a bath in Procion mx dye. I soaked the dress in a soda ash solution for 20 minutes to ensure colour fastness, and then put it in the dye to ‘stew’ overnight. Next morning, a rinse in ice water, hand washing, line drying and a hot ironing finished it off.

Finally, the dress was finished! I love the blue/green background, and the front and back mirror image. A bit of the underlying rust shows through, but I think it adds to the richness of the water effect.

What do you think?

Summer camp

I’ve never been to summer camp. When I was about six or seven, I would occasionally whine, or beg, to be allowed to join the small groups of sunburned kids who were trailing behind their camp counsellors at the local beach, but it never happened.

My mother thought it was much more fun for us to have free range during the summer when our cousins came up for their annual visit from Toronto to Muskoka. Now, I think she was probably right. We lolled at the beach, lathered up with Noxema and taught ourselves to swim; tramped through the woods, braved black flies to gather plump, delicious raspberries for homemade jam; and made costumes and sets for basement productions of plays and performances.

But, the latent desire for summer camp has lingered.

Who says you are too old to attend camp as a senior?

This summer, the perfect opportunity presented itself. As a birthday gift, my husband/advocate registered me for a week-long fabric dyeing creative workshop offered at our local art centre (http://the tett centre for creativity and learning). The event was billed as a retreat, but I’m calling it camp for a check on my bucket list. It was a full five days of fun with like-minded friends, led by artist in residence Bethany Garner facebook.com.garner.bethany

Let the fun begin. About sixteen of us gathered at the Tett to experiment, play and learn, trying out a different dye technique or fabric treatment every day. I think we all arrived half and hour early, dropped off by our devoted spouses, or carpooling with friends. We each hauled in bags and carts of supplies, materials, and gear. We chose our tables, set up camp, checked out the hearty stash of communal supplies, and anxiously waited to dive in. Part of the fun was that each participant brought their own wealth of knowledge and area of expertise and even though each one of us was totally absorbed with our project of the day, no one hesitated to share information, or technique, or a special tool when asked. Great friendships were made and our collective creative network was widened….see, just like camp!

Let me take you through the week and share a few pictures. I’m sure I’ll write some other blogs on the specifics of techniques, or to update you on what I do with all the fabric I’ve generated, but for now, lets stick to the fun of playing and learning at camp.

Day One Flat Dyeing. Admittedly, I had only a very vague idea what this would be, but it sounded like fun. Basically, it involves laying out pre-soaked pieces of cloth on a table, pouring dye on the fabric and moving it around with your gloved hands. A little like finger painting for grown ups.

*layer dyed pieces between plastic* *and let sit for at least 48 hours*

The wet fabric was wrapped and left to sit for 48 hours and the results were like surprise packages when unwrapped, rinsed and dried.

I am thrilled with the colours and the possibilities for creating fabric pictures with these pieces waiting for project designation. Good thing I like the results because I do have a bit of a stack!

Day Two Mark Making. Hmm, what would this entail?? Well as always with Bethany, lots of options were laid out and then everyone was left to take their own path. The intent was to make marks, on paper or on fabric, again with a big emphasis on playing. There were lots of fabric dyes, markers, pens, paints, brushes and books for available for incentive. My new friend Marilyn did a wonderful series of marks by experimenting with black inks and brushes.

I decided to try gelli plate printing. Sounds fun and easy, right? Well, this was my least favourite. It wasn’t quite as easy as it looked on YouTube. Rather than buy a commercial gelli plate, which was a bit pricey, I decided to try an easy homemade recipe using gelatin and glycerine. I should have taken it as a bad omen when in order to economize, rather than buying a package of knox gelatin, I went to bulk barn and put a hefty scoop in a bag. What I didn’t realize until I got home: 1. I only needed 30g, 2. one hefty scoop of bulk gelatin goes for about $15. Well, on the optimistic side, if I took to gelli plate printing, I’d be set for a lifetime supply of gelatin. Unfortunately, I didn’t take to gelli plate printing. Very early in the game, my homemade gelli plate split into pieces–likely not thick enough, pretty disheartening. My friend Marilyn came to the rescue and loaned me her commercial gelli plate, and I gave it my best shot, but my pieces just seemed to come out a mess. I was glad I was only practicing on paper. I will try again, because if you google gelli plate printing as I did, you will see lots of exciting possibilities. And it’s not like I’m short on gelatin.

Day Three Eco Dyeing. OK, I’ll admit it. I jumped the gun on this one and it is easily my favourite to be added to current obsessions. With no clue of what eco dyeing was, I started to prowl around on the web and a couple of weeks before camp, I started on my own. I was mostly inspired by http://MadeByBarb.com where you can find all kinds of recipes and directions. Eco dyeing is magic–or for those of you with a more scientific bent, a reaction between ferrous (iron) and tannins (found in foliage) catalysed by heat and pressure, which looks like magic. Of course being keen on both magic and science, I couldn’t wait for camp and jumped into experimentation on my own. The basics involve laying foliage (rose leaves, oak leaves, water lilies, sumac, worked best for me) on natural fibre cloth (I used old cotton pillow cases); adding ‘iron water’ (ferrous sulphate and water, or water vinegar and old rusty metal bits) either by wetting the leaves or wetting the fabric; rolling up around a fat stick as tight as you can; and steaming for 90 minutes. **Caution: if you try this you are playing with chemicals. Please wear a mask and gloves and use caution as always when cooking with steam. I promise I’ll do a blog with more specific directions later. The results are pretty magical.

Fellow camper and artist Shirley had great success using mixed foliage including horse chestnut and black walnut leaves.

Day Four Wet Felting. This was something I had been wanting to try for a while. As you know from Art with a view I recently tried dry felting and really liked it. Wet felting is a bit more tactile and I knew we were in for a treat. Felting is what happens when you toss a wool blanket, sweater, or socks into the washing machine by mistake and end up with a 3-4 times smaller, densely matted and ruined piece–we’ve all been there.

But, the good news is you can make beautiful art by purposely felting! You start with wool roving, which is fluffy, unspun wool, available in all colours and many different weights and textures. Felting happens when wool fibres tangle up together and shrink to form a tight mat. When you are doing a more controlled method than the agitation of your washing machine, you use warm water, liquid soap, bubble wrap and lots of hand agitation.

After wetting down the fibres with warm water and soap, you massage it with your fingers to do the initial ‘bonding’. This is the fun part, a bit like sensory play.

Next comes a bit of work. You roll your piece up in bubble wrap and start to roll/slam/knead it, first in one direction, then in the next until it has been thoroughly rolled in all four directions. When you are done, ta da, more magic, the piece has shrunken in size and matted into a nice piece of felt.

Now if you were paying attention, you noticed that in the early stages of this piece I was planning on a dark blue angry sea and wispy white clouds. Well, in the vein of Things rarely go as planned, I ended up liking this better upside down and it will now be a snow scape with dark winter sky. I’m intending to go back to this piece to hand stitch some silver stars and use a bit of machine over stitching to define detail.

Day Five Choose Your Own Adventure. Let’s face it, one of the reasons my mother knew I wouldn’t cut it at summer camp is because I have difficulty following prescribed directions. So, day five was my kind of day! I decided to veer off and work with all the handmade paper I had generated in June –see previous Art with a view for details of that adventure. Inspired by how earlier in the week while flat dyeing the clean-up paper towels had absorbed the dyes so beautifully, I started playing around with dyeing my rough paper. I don’t know what I’ll use these papers for, but I sure had a lot of fun making them, and one woman’s mess is another woman’s ??? I may transform them into cards, or journal covers or who knows what!

The End. All good things must come to and end, and much like any campers we were exhausted, but fulfilled. We learned new skills, shared ideas, forged friendships and imagined the possibilities for future get togethers. A good time was had by all! Thanks to everyone who contributed to a fantastic week!

Art with a view

L’ile Verte, Quebec “Island Inspiration”

Just back from a fabulous vacation on the rugged and inspiring I’ile Verte, Quebec.

We have missed our annual visit for the past couple of years, but were back this June to enjoy walking, and exploring and cycling–enjoying every minute of the great outdoors.

I always find inspiration in the beauty of the island with its rich flora and breathtaking views. Before embarking on our trip this year, I organized with my friend ‘the islander’ to play with art for the three full days of our visit. Paper making, print making and dry felting were on the menu.

As always, we enjoyed daily walks to forage on the beach and in the woods–this year, we were collecting ideas and bits and pieces to incorporate immediately into our art pieces.

The paper was a bit disappointing, but we had lots of fun and as always, were surrounded by beautiful views!

The first day, we started with something neither of us had attempted before–papermaking. In my supply box I had toted a blender, shredded scrap paper, frames, deckles and pressing boards. The process of blending scrap paper with water and then straining it through mesh before pressing and drying it was fairly simple. We had lots of fun mucking about, but our results were a bit disappointing. We added dried flowers and experimented a bit with thickness of the slurry, but most of our pieces turned out the consistency of slightly embellished egg cartons. It was a good learning process though and next time we will: use single colour scrap paper, keep the layers thin, and perhaps venture into using more plant materials. In the meantime, I’m sure we’ll find a use for our first-run sheets–maybe sew or paint on top of them?

Onward to day two for a stab at block printing. This is currently one of my favorite media, but as I’ve explained before, it takes some doing to get your head around negative space, mirror imaging and left/right reversal. More specialized supplies are needed as well. Lino blocks for carving, lino cutters with assorted blades, block printing ink, brayers (fancy name for rollers), and various papers, pencils, and implements for pressing. Unfortunately, Gail’s supply shipment hadn’t arrived on time, but luckily I had a separate printing supply box with lots of everything for sharing!

As you know, I have been practicing quite a bit with cutting, inking and printing and with this bit of experience under my belt I was happy with my three pieces. All three scenes are from photos taken on previous visits the island: I printed on cards and am delighted to say that they are now available at Boutique du Bout d’en Bas, on the Island.

*view from mid-island*, *through the pines to the river*

This was not Gail’s favorite activity. To be fair to the activity, it was her very first try and I’ll repeat that it is a bit tricky to figure out the technique. She wasn’t happy with her result, but I think she was being too hard on her 1/1 print. I loved the result. She chose an iconic scene from the island, and she mastered the right/left challenge!

After ignoring everything (and everyone) else for two days of total absorption in our creations and daily foraging walks, we finally came to day three: dry felting.

I recently took my first felting class at the Tett Centre here in Kingston, and as the instructor promised, dry felting is easy to set up, and clean up, and can give admirable results even to a beginner. All we needed in the felt supply box were an assortment of coloured roving, or unspun wool; felting needles with sharp barbs to catch and tangle roving into matted felt; pieces of wool fabric for the base; and a dollar store sponge.

Gail hit her stride in this session! Using the gorgeous view of the river out her dining room window for inspiration, and with the pressure of our last day looming, she set to work non-stop and created a stunning waterscape.

So there you have it. Two life long friends spending three glorious days creating: inspired by everyday beauty. Highly recommended for both the heart and the soul.

Baa, baa, black sheep

I’m getting used to thinking in reverse and carving mirror images–a very good workout for the old brain!

This week I decided to try a more challenging block print. I combed through my extensive photo pile looking for one that spoke to me and of course, I settled on a scene of grazing sheep.

These sheep were spotted on Ile Verte, QC, one of our favourite spots to visit our besties Gail and Paul. This small island in the St. Lawrence, just past Riviere du Loup, is accessible only by ferry in summer, and by helicopter in winter. The peaceful, rural island offers everything: beaches, whale watching, forests, open wind-swept fields, fish smoke houses, farms, and isolation. A perfect milieu for walking, cycling, and photography.

We try to make it to Ile Verte once a year, but our last trip was September, 2020. On that visit we had some beautiful walks, changing terrain at least five times as we walked over rocky shoreline, along a wide sandy beach, up through the pine forest, down a long country road, up the spikey shale bout d’en bas, past sheep and smoke houses, and over rosa regosa covered fields.

One of my favourite photos was of three sheep, quietly grazing in the sunshine. I love this picture not only because I love sheep, but because it shows textures, and shades of wool, and variations of light. This would be an excellent challenge to translate into a block carving!

One of my new rules for block carving–or in fact for any interpretational art–is to consider the value of translating the subject into a different art form. If the medium does not transform, improve, or enhance the interpretation of the original, is it worth the work? To achieve this, you need to think carefully as you choose the right material and technique to suit the subject. For example, wooly sheep might not come across as well with fine silk embroidery as they would with fuzzy, thick woolen threads. But, would woolen thread be too close to the original?? That I guess is debatable, depending on your purpose.

For this particular block print, I settled on the sheep, for the challenge of textures, and to translate my photo into a reproducible format that can be printed on paper, collage and fabric. Transforming it again and again into new interpretations –prepare yourselves, there could be a lot of sheep coming!

*Still getting caught by that mirror image effect, but I do like the variation in wool textures!*

Let it snow

This is the time of year when most people are desperately seeking spring. Although I admit that on the wettest of dreary days I do pine for the sunshine and growth of spring, for the most part, I actually love winter!

Overall, if it comes right down to it, I prefer cold temperatures when you can bundle up and feel the freeze of your cheeks and thighs when out walking. This year, to my taste, has been great for the amount of snow we’ve received.

Earlier in the week, the snow had cleared, the sidewalks were gritty, and the smell of wet grass was in the air. “Ahh, its coming,” we all thought as our spirits buoyed and our paces quickened. But this morning, we awoke to a glorious sight.

There is nothing more beautiful, and inspiring, than naked black tree boughs under a burden of fat, fluffy, new snow. I couldn’t resist posting this series of backyard pics. I know they will inspire me for quilting, or needlework, or printing…or something, but in the meantime, I’m going to go out and breathe in the freshness of what very well could be our last snow of the year! Enjoy.