This is not my idea of fun

It's Friday night about 9 PM. I should be having a martini with Dan in some nice outdoor cafe, but I'm not. I should be at home sprawled on the sofa with a cat sleeping on my chest, but I'm not. Instead, I'm at work supervising a big computer system upgrade (software spread across several servers and about 150 workstations).

I got home at 10:30 last night and I'd love to be home that early tonight. I don't know if that's going to happen. Regardless of when we finish tonight, we'll be back here by 9 AM tomorrow morning to finish whatever doesn't get done tonight and do several hours of testing.

Not much chance that there'll be any art cloth created this weekend. If it sounds like I'm pouting that's because I am. This is just not soul-feeding work.

Work in progress from last weekend

I got some work done last weekend. This one's three overprinted layers of monoprinting. I'm not sure that the picture does it justice. I think it's more interesting in person. It's certainly not done, but seems to have the potential to turn into something.

The photos below show a piece that I started a couple of weeks ago and cast aside because it was too ugly to deal with. I decided that this would be a good test subject for Carol Soderland's overprinting formula. In a nutshell, if you can find a reasonable approximation of the color that you are overdying, then you can easily determine which colors you can produce by overdying AND the correct dye formula to produce the selected target color.

And here it is on the print table with freezer paper resist in place. Once I got the big white spirals in place I actually liked it a little better.

And here's the next stage after overdying and adding some linear detail with dye in a syringe. I think I came pretty close to what I wanted. Since I took this picture I've started stitching around the spirals. We'll just have to see what this turns into.

Newsy update

I'm a bit behind with the blog, but it's just the same old excuse: too busy. Last week I was getting over my killer cold and then there was church Thursday - Sunday. Somewhere in there--I think it was Saturday afternoon--I managed to finish assembling my color sample book. And of course there's always work and EfM to keep me occupied. This week's reading was about process theology, which is fascinating stuff, but not something that I can really explain (and probably not something that your really want to hear about).

I'm a little confounded that I haven't been able to find any studio time, but at least I've got some good ideas rattling around in my head. There's one piece that I started a couple of weeks ago that is currently too ugly to show. I'm hoping to begin working back into this weekend using Carol's color formulas to try to get it closer to where I wanted it to be in the first place. I'll have to see how things go. I'm already booked to spend Saturday morning with some folks from the church search committee analyzing survey results.

I got two wonderful packages in the mail today. The first was slides of my "Teach Us to Pray" quilt that I need for a juried show submission. I used a website called iprintfromhome.com. You upload your images and a couple of days later they send you mounted slides for a very reasonable price. I got 2 copies of 2 images shipped for about $10. Something worth considering if you find yourself needing slides made from your digital images.

The second package was a complete surprise from Candy, a woman who was in the color workshop with me. She works in a lab and sent me some great surplus equipment for measuring dye concentrate. The studio is really starting to look a little like a high school chem lab. Thanks Candy!!

Color Mixing: Day 5

It's Monday and I'm back home. I took the day off from work to try to nurse myself back to health, and I promise that I'll rest after I finish this post, but I do want to finish the story of the workshop.

The last day was a whirlwind: color play, evaluation of dyed cloth from Saturday, and taping up color gradation samples.

I'm 1/3 of the way through assembling my sample book. This is what the pages look like. I think I've got 42 more pages to go. Each one of those squares is 1" x 1".

The next three shots are sample yardage that I dyed during class. They are all low water immersion with wet soda-soaked cotton (Test 400M). The two purple pieces are part of an exercise in manipulating dye concentration. The multicolored piece is a "scrunch and pour" in which you apply dye concentrate directly to the fabric as it's being scrunched into a bucket. I love all of these pieces, but they need to sit for a while before I decide what to do with them or to them.

Finally, here's a picture of the whole class. I think this is the first time that I've gotten one of these. After a workshop I always regret not taking more pictures, but especially not having pictures of the group. I'm in the back row, 2nd from the left. You can't really tell that I'm high on cold medicine, can you?

And...my last words about Carol's workshop. If you are a dyer and you are interested in having better control over the colors that you produce or just want to understand how primaries can be mixed to produce a gamut beyond what you thought possible, then TAKE THIS WORKSHOP. You'll work hard, but you'll go home with valuable tools and information.

Color Mixing: Day 4

This has to be a short post. It was a great workshop day, but I'm not feeling much better than I was this morning--still sick, maybe sicker. I did everything that I could think of to avoid giving this to anyone else. I'm looking forward to tomorrow's activities, but I'm also looking forward to getting home to my own bed.

I continue to be amazed by the color tools that Carol has developed. Today we had several hours of lecture, evaluated some things that we dyed yesterday, worked on our sample books, started a new dye bath, and dyed a value progression of an individual hue.

Here's a picture of my progression drying on the table. The light values are pretty amazing. The darkest values are toned using the complementary color. Carol's numerical system allows you to find the complement of any color. Pretty amazing.

Here's Carol holding up a sample of her hand-dyed cloth.

Color Mixing: Day 3

Actually, as I write this it's about 630 AM on Day 4 (Saturday). I've slept all I can, such as it was. So, here I am in Fall River for this much-anticipated workshop and I'm sick, sick, sick. I think it's just a really bad cold, but I feel like complete poo. To put it in perspective, if I was at home and this was a week day, I would be calling in sick without a moment's hesitation. But, I'm not at home and I can't blow off 20% of a workshop--not this one, that's for sure. Besides, spending a day in bed at the lovely Hampton Inn Westport might just make me feel worse. Yesterday I popped DayQuil gel caps every 4 hours and soldiered on. I'm afraid today might be a little uglier.

OK, enough of my sob story. Yesterday was a 12-hour day with two short breaks for meals. I continue to be amazed with the system that Carol has put together and with her level of organization. When I finish assembling this sample book I'm going to have a terrific resource--one that I never would have taken the time to figure out and compile all on my own. Yesterday we had several hours of lecture and demo, cut up our dyed fabric into strips and organized them, then began assembling the first the pages of our sample books. We also did one low-water immersion dye bath with 1 yard of cotton. I've made the most beautiful mottled purple. Pics tonight I hope.

Here's a picture of some of the pressed and sorted cloth at 830 AM yesterday.

Here's a picture of the my first sample book page, which I think I finished around 830 PM last night.

By the time that I finish this book, I will have stuck down 3,087 little 1" squares. Between this first page and several other pages that contain portions of this series made from duplicate squares, I have so far stuck down 147 squares--that's about 4.8%.

What does all that mean? I means I've got a busy day ahead of me. The alarm just went off. Time for a shower, some more DayQuil, and a lot of coffee. Please take a moment to pray for me to be delivered quickly from the grip this virus, which has arrived at a most inopportune time.

Color Mixing: Day 2

It was another busy day. Today's picture is not particularly interesting. My camera battery died just when I was getting ready to snap a shot of the huge piles of fully dyed 1,000+ ten inch squares. What you see in this picture is a room full of folks all working very hard.

We all worked from 8:30 AM until 6:30 PM and there wasn't much down time along the way. By the time we left the studio, all of individual squares had been washed, pressed, and sorted, ready for cutting tomorrow.

We've got another long day tomorrow, but we get to start working on yardage--the fun stuff!

Color mixing: Day 1

Yes, it really is going to be over 1,000 swatches! I've seen the swatch book that's going to result from all this work and it's pretty amazing. Carol is organized beyond anything that I've seen in quite a while, but she's organized without being uptight. That's nice. So, we do two straight days of dying/overdying--Yellow, Red, Blue--in regular, bright, and earth tone families. Then I gather that there's going to be quite a good bit of ironing, cutting, and assembling of pages.

This picture picture tells the tale: graduated cylinders, buckets, and spoons. We're dying even solid colors so every bucket needs to be stirred for about 90 minutes. I'm actually a little sore. (Not enough gym time).

OK, off to dinner with a big group. One of our class, Michelle, is local and she's leading a bunch of us to an out-of-the-way Asian place. Funny thing...I met Michelle the last time I was at ProChem for a workshop...nice to reconnect.

Installed at Hampton Inn, Fall River

I'm in Fall River, MA this week for Carol Soderlund's course "Color Mixing for Dyers" at Pro Chem. I'm looking forward to the results of the class (hopefully better color control), but I'm wondering what it's going to be like to create 1,000 color samples in 5 days--at least that's what the course description promises.

The supply list is 1 1/2 pages of office supplies--notebooks, sheet protectors, stapler, tape dispenser, etc.--and odd things like empty soda bottles, party cups, and plastic spoons. It's such a pile of stuff that I ended up buying a cheap laundry bag to carry it all. I found it at--gasp--Walmart where I was buying 2 liter bottles of soda to pour down the drain. I certainly wasn't going to try to carry all that on Southwest.

Here's a picture. The full bad is only slightly smaller than the hotel nightstand! And I'm going to distill all of this down into 1 notebook of swatches?

Rayna sighting

I attended my very first guild meeting this morning--Potomac Craftsmen Guild. I've never belonged to a guild before so I'm still in the easing-into-it phase, trying to figure out how I'll fit in. It seems like lots of knitters and weavers, but there are definitely quilters and dyers in the bunch. The special guest for today was Rayna Gillman herself.

Here we are together. I think it's the only picture I have of us together. At least she looks good. Me, well, I'm happy to have a picture of the two of us.

Rayna gave her "Oops" lecture about making art out of mistakes/accidents. It definitely fits with my mode of working. If I threw away everything I made that went awry then I would have very little to show for all of the time and effort. I think there's a great deal to be said for sticking with a difficult piece until you get it right. Though I have to admit that there does come a time when enough is enough, and it's better for a piece to go in the trash can than back into the dye pot.