Dyeing to Discharge: Day 5

Well, actually this post is more like post-day 5. I'm home in College Park and exhausted. I can't figure out what I did to be so pooped except that I must have worked harder this week than I thought.

Yesterday was mostly finishing up any work in progress, washing out, cleaning up, and doing the end of class discussion. I'm still doing wash at home and will press, photograph, and share some samples over the next day or so. I'm pleased with several of the things I brought home.

My takeaways from this week include the following:

• First and foremost: I've been ignoring a really valuable design tool--discharge--because I was squeamish about the safety, mess, etc. After a week of working with this stuff and never feeling any ill effects I feel well prepared to do more discharge work, and to do it in a way that's safe.
• Tied for first: This stuff is great, but anyone using any form of bleach or reducing agent needs to wear a respirator when using it and work outside. [That goes for using Tilex in the bathroom too. Close the door, open the window, turn on the fan, wear an acid/gas respirator, leave the room when you're done, and don't come back until the smell is gone. Don't laugh. I'm totally serious. I've made myself sick in the past from chlorine and I will never do it again.]
• I'm going to try a few more experiments with MX primary combinations and work on developing a vocabulary of discharge colors, effects, and marks that speaks to me. In a lot of ways workshops like this one are like going to a wine tasting. You taste some things you like and some you don't, and after a while your palette needs a rest to recover from the over-stimulation.
• MX acid process for silk! I've got to do more of this. I've got all of the supplies; I just need to fine tune my technique. [Of course Carol teaches a 5-day action packed class just on silk, but I can't think about that now. Too tired.]
• I want to work on black and white textures through discharge. Is it really possible that there's a pleasing combination of MX primaries out there that discharges to white? It doesn't seem that way, but...
• I'm going to experiment with potato dextrin as a resist and see if I can use it in a way that works for me. I'm not really interested in slathering yardage and waiting for it to crackle, but the stuff washes out so much easier than some other resists that it's worth playing with.
• Finally, I bought some monagum [the giant PRO Chem order should arrive on Wed] and I'm going to make my own thickened bleach discharge paste from now on. No more dishwasher gel.

Bottom line: I learned some new things and a lot of good safety tips. I definitely recommend this workshop for anyone interested in working with discharge techniques. Yes, you can figure this stuff out on your own, but this is a great way to jumpstart the process and get a good and SAFE start.

Dyeing to Discharge: Day 4

Yesterday was the 4th day of class. Time is flying by--faster than usual. The sample books are all done and it will be a valuable reference. As I was replaying the day in my head last night I started thinking about the work hanging on my design wall at home. One of the things that I wanted to accomplish this week was to work on new ideas for how I would add complexity to that composition through discharge. I've got some ideas, so mission accomplished.

Yesterday we did more immersion discharge with both bleach and thiox. I also did some dye painting and printing so that I would have pieces to discharge today. One piece is a 22" x 80" piece of silk habotai that I stretched over the ground in the parking lot and rolled with thickened black dye. It's fantastic. I'm going to need to find a cracking asphalt surface at home to work on--discretely of course.

Well, I promised photos, so here's a shot of two severely bound pieces of silk before going into a thiox discharge bath.

And, this one shows two shibori poles wrapped with T shirts in a bleach bath. The brown one is mine. It has since been overdyed while still on the pole. Speaking of which, I've got to run to the studio now for the last day of class. There's lots of washing out to do this morning. Should be an exciting day with so many pieces coming to completion.

Dyeing to Discharge: Day 2

Another good day, but that's not really a surprise. I think I could actually take this class at a faster pace, but the group is a mixture of folks who have previously studied with Carol and some who haven't. Everyone has had some MX experience, so that's helping move things along.

Today we focused entirely on bleach discharge on cellulosic fiber using clamped and bound resist. All of my samples were Pimatex and Rayon. Here they are clamped and ready to be discharged.

...and then after the discharge bath and neutralizing.

The rectangular bundles are both cotton, which discharged to a rust color. The others are rayon: some from Dharma and some from Testfabrics. They discharge to totally different colors. I love that pretty much everything will discharge somewhat in bleach, but I'm really looking forward to working with thiox tomorrow because my commercial black samples discharge closer to white, leaving many more options for overdyeing. After taking the photo above all of these pieces were overdyed while still in their clamps/bundles. I'm looking forward to seeing them tomorrow morning.

And finally, no discharge workshop is complete without the view of the class hard at work with respirators on. Here we are on the loading dock at PRO Chem, which is being affectionately referred this week as the "lanai.".

A week in Fall River

I'm in Fall River at PRO Chemical for a 1-week workshop with Carol Soderlund called "Dyeing to Discharge." It's hard to believe, but this will be my 5th class with Carol. I'm going to have to ask for a degree soon.

Discharge is a dyer's term for removing dye from cloth. Think of it as the dyer's equivalent of an eraser. It's among the most basic techniques, but not something that I've ever really felt that I could control to the level that I want. That's what the next 5 days will be about: really learning to control the process with different types of chemistry--reductive (thiox) and oxidative (hypochlorite)--to get predictable, reproducible results.

If you're not a dyer, a chemist, or a nerd (or a little bit of each) this might sound tedious, but I'm really looking forward to it.

Stay tuned this week to hear how about what I'm learning.

"Unexpected Patterns" opens today

"Unexpected Patterns" (aka "Unexpected Patterns: Quake!") opens today at the Worcester Center for Crafts in Worcester, MA. If you're in the area check out my piece in this show along with the other outstanding work by members of the Art Cloth Network.

Saving the hopeless quilt: Part 4

Now for the final panel in this triptych.

The center panel was always different from the other two and in the end I felt that I needed to accentuate that difference rather than trying to suppress it. The answer I came up with was to go dark on the background rather than light, but keep the same pieced construction.

As I began to assemble it I realized that the little piece of the curved middle strip that was extending below the rest of the design was something to which I'd become attached. From the purely practical perspective of construction, this was not the best time to come to this realization because it meant even more seam ripping than I was already doing, not to mention scavenging through the scrap pile in search of bits of fabric that I was out of.

In this shot you can see how I managed to preserve that little bit at the bottom.

And finally, this is what the completed quilt top looks like cropped.

Now I just have to commit to doing the quilting to finish the three panels that make up the entire composition. I've already got an idea of where I want to show the finished work and the deadline is in early summer. I guess that's far enough away, but just close enough for me to feel a little sense of urgency.

Although this project isn't done yet, I think that I can say that I did learn from it. Don't through out those difficult pieces that you just can't seem to make work. Put them away, get some distance from whatever it was that was blocking or frustrating you, then pull them out and reconsider. Cut, paint, print, overdye--transform them into something that speaks. In this case I chose to transform the piece through restructuring alone. I was sorely tempted (especially in the beginning) to go the surface design route, but I think resisting paid off in greater learning and a better final product.

Saving the hopeless quilt: Part 3

I can only sustain suspense for so long so here they are: 2 of what will be 3 panels.

I think they stand alone well and I think they are going to work well together when they are joined by the 3rd panel. I intend to keep them as separate quilted pieces of roughly the same size. They aren't a series in and of themselves, but they are part of a growing series of triptychs. Having created another piece that's close to 70 inches wide and struggled with the size and hanging issues, I thought it might be time to explore the idea of a single work in parts.

The middle panel is a variation on these two. I finished piecing it today, but you'll have to wait for another day to see the pictures.

Saving the hopeless quilt: Part 2

Picking up where I left off with the last post...

I was able to piece together 2 curving lines in the same color combinations then spent some time looking at them on the design wall in a horizontal orientation. I felt good about where it was going, but I figured out early on that I wanted to rotate it to vertical. I also knew that I didn't have enough pieces to work with to create any sort of real composition. At the very least I needed another element--a 3rd line.

It also needed some variation. The center line below is built from the same original strip sets as the other two, with another one worked in. Here I aslo introduced other printed fabrics that related to colors in other parts of the composition.

There's a sort of rhythm, undulation to this that I like.

Checking the values with a grayscale photo (below) helped me workout some figure-ground problems. But, looking at this photo I realized that needed something else. I struggled to figure out how the join these 3 pieces into a whole. I considered several options for filling in the spaces between the irregularly shaped columns. In this photo you can see a trial strip between the 2nd and 3rd columns. It seemed like the start of something, but there were value and scale issues.

The question that I struggled with was how to unite these three columns in a way that maintained the three distinct entities in the final composition--not just the curved lines but the background of each line.

Over time I began to feel like that I needed to treat these three lines as distinct objects and not try to unite then, but rather to transition between them. I needed to interrupt the vertical flow with some horizontal lines. After a lot of rearranging and discussion with friends I started to assemble the first column.

The more I fiddled, the further the three lines move apart and asserted themselves as individuals. So I changed my approach. I would "unify" the whole quilt with a common light background.

It's a little hard to see here, but the background that's starting to come together is pieced from strip sets that were all white, or slightly red or yellow. There are also occasional bits of brown. The plan was to build the quilt from left to right.

Maybe you can figure out what comes next...and maybe you can't. More to come.

Saving the hopeless quilt: Part 1

Back in October I returned from two weeks of workshops in a sort of mixed up mood. One week produced some good samples and good ideas, the majority of which I've yet to explore. The other week produced bits and scraps of a failed design that quite frankly were just a nagging reminder of something that didn't quite turn out as expected. They can't all be home runs, right? Sometimes teacher, student, and the planets just don't align the right way at the right time. Learn what you can, remember the love, try to forget the angst, and move on.

So, moving on...

I've dug in my heels and I'm determined to make a difficult experience into something positive. The next few posts will show where I started with that failed design and where it's going.

The original composition started with strip sets, like the ones shown below.

We were given an assignment to create a strip quilt by restructuring these strip sets--really a very basic task. I got thoroughly bogged down in a the linear design and the "strips" and just couldn't seem to resolve any of the obvious design problems; like the fact that it's a BAD design. (You can read more about the experience in earlier posts).

I liked some of the restructuring that I'd done with the strip sets, but knew that the only way for me to get a fresh start with this quilt was to start breaking up some of those straight lines. Knowing that I had nothing to lose, I cut the long restructured sets into smaller pieces and started combining them with curved piecing.

That was interesting, but not enough on it's own to create much of an engaging design. The next step was to cut up and recombine these sets. Now things started getting interesting.

I hope that's enough of a teaser to get you to come back and see what happened next. I should have another post in a few days.

Recently finished

Just in time for Christmas, I finally finished a commission quilt that I started *months* ago. Thanks for being so patient Jennifer. Aaron, I hope you like it. By the time I was done I almost didn't want to let it go. That's a good sign.

Here's the full quilt...

and two detail shots.

Oh, I'm forgetting the title: "The Winding Path is Often the More Interesting Choice." A little something for him to reflect on later in life. :) His older brother's quilt is titled, "Don't be Afraid to Color Outside the Lines". It all seems very appropriate to me.