Gelatin Monoprinting

So I've got Frances Allford's article in the latest Quilting Arts, on monoprinting fabric with fabric paints on a gelatin plate; and I've got a book about monoprinting paper with water-based inks on a gelatin plate. The only thing is, I want to print fabric with the kind of multi-layered, dreamy images shown in the book on paper.

These are what I got from two weekends' experimenting with thickened dyes on gelatin. The first weekend's work was so pale it washed out. The second time I mixed really strong dyes and the color was so strong I could hardly see what I was doing; when half of that washed out, I was left with these results.

Part of the problem seems to be that the dyes sink into the gelatin; my gelatin printing plate was totally saturated with color by the end of each day. I suppose it's time to get on the dyers' list and ask if anyone has had better results with this method, or suggestions as to how to get the dye onto the fabric rather than into the gelatin.

Raku/PMC necklace

I finished this piece just before we left for Nova Scotia, but didn't have time to photograph it until this weekend. It's built to showcase the round bead dangling at the bottom, a true masterwork combining raku with PMC which I bought at a bead show a couple of years ago. The large rectangular bead just above it is titanium-sprayed drusy quartz, and the tiles on either side are raku beads in green and copper (bottom rows) and abalone squares (top row). The fringe on the neck strap took forever to do. At least I didn't have to bother with a clasp; this one is a keeper which I will never ever sell, and I don't like clasps because they get caught in my back hair, so the strap is one continuous piece of free peyote from one side of the front piece to the other.

With, as I said, lots of fringe. Possibly a little too much fringe - it certainly felt like that when I was working on it!

The Tidal Bore

...was something of a disappointment. a 2-3" "wave" of muddy water ambling its way to the very top of the Bay of Fundy; ok, it's traveling uphill and scientifically I daresay it's very interesting, but I did not get the major kick out of it that all the Canadian tourists seemed to get.

Apart from that and from not getting to go through the section of Cape Breton Park where meese are said to abound, Nova Scotia was very nice and a welcome refreshment from Texas in summer. Lots of picturesque rivers , old houses and barns,
fishing villages,
and the good fortune of being in Halifax on the day the Tall Ships were there.

I had a bunch of ideas for the new bead embroidery book and scribbled madly in a notebook in the evenings; now we're home and I'm implementing the first brilliant idea, which is "CLEAN UP THE STUDIO SO YOU HAVE A PLACE TO WORK ON SAMPLES."
It's amazing what came out of the piles of "Miscellaneous Stuff" between the beadwork station at the right end of the table and the kiln at the other end; the details are now mercifully blurred in memory, but I distinctly remember some pictures of Sarah in her short-red-hair phase, which was at least 7 years ago. And that was only halfway down the layers of Stuff. I was half expecting to find a couple of my old college roommates at the bottom of the pile, but no such luck - just more Stuff that I should give away or use.

Summer Needlefelting

I haven't had anything to say for a while because the unending succession of triple-digit days has made most of my brain cells sweat out through my skin. There ought to be a medical name for this condition. Dog Days Dumbness? I have a feeling that "dog days" are supposed to be associated with August. Well, so are daily temperatures of 104 and up, and we're getting those now. So.

I've been working....slowly and as you'll see, not very intelligently... on making a handbag from needlefelted fabric. Started with some truly glaring red felt left over from an old project, foiled bits of that and covered some of the foiled bits with synthetic sheers. Yeah, yeah, I know, it's not supposed to be possible to needlefelt synthetic sheers to acrylic felt, but you know what? The sheers pucker beautifully and the needling helps to hold them in place for the next step.

At this stage it's still pretty ugly.



Then I collected a basket of silk scraps in pinks (salmon to hot), golds, oranges and greens - some opaque and some sheer - and needlefelted those over the naked felt, the foiled felt, and the edges of the synthetic sheers. Here's a half-and-half picture. The left hand side has been covered with silks, the right hand side is still waiting for its second coat.



After that I couched a couple of yarns in hot summer colors - the variegated yarns that inspired this color scheme in the first place - still using the needlefelter. Which isn't supposed to work to attach synthetic yarn to synthetic felt, but it does...at least temporarily.

I will admit that after all this embellishing, for a final step in the fabric creation I moved over to the sewing machine, put gold thread in the bobbin, and stitched freehand gold circles all over the fabric, just to make absolutely sure that nothing pulled loose. This stitching had a serendipitous side effect; the synthetic yarns had a frizz of fine shiny threads around them, and the stitching held those little shinies down close to the fabric and made the whole thing sort of gleam.



Finally, having made the fabric, it was time to line the two pieces I'd cut for the flap and the strap, assemble everything, and put the magnetic purse snaps in.

Do not try this at home on a day when your brain has melted and run down to your ankles. I tried to get away without measuring, using the eyeball algorithm instead, and as you can see, the purse came out distinctly lopsided!



What the heck - I love it anyway, and I'm going to take it with me to Nova Scotia, where we're headed to escape the Texas summer for ten days. Mmm. Seafood, glacier-carved coastlines, seafood, Cape Breton fiddle music, seafood, whale watching, chances of a close encounter with a moose, the tides in the Bay of Fundy, and did I mention seafood?

Bronze Age is over!

And here you all thought it ended around 600BC, if not earlier. Nah. The real completion occurred in June 2009, when I finished sewing the sleeve on this quilt and took some final pics (not that good - I am continually amazed at what inconsistent results I get despite using photofloods and a camera that is many megapixels smarter than I am). I'm calling it "Bronze Age Settlement With Artifacts."

Here's a closer look at some of the artifacts:



A hoard of silver coins, a Goddess figure, 2 plates - one terracotta, the other polychrome - reconstructed from potshards.











Another look at the polychrome plate, and two bronze spear heads. They've got a lovely greenish patina on them; too bad it didn't show up in the pictures.





A feast of anachronisms. The little fat Venus figure is Neolithic, but I like her so much that I decided this style lasted into the Bronze Age. See the patina on her? Then there's the ax head in the upper right, which came out looking more like iron than bronze; well, my husband says that some bronze age metal workers accidentally made tools and weapons that were a funny color and harder than they expected, due to "impurities" in the ore. Let's chalk this one up to impurities and not assume my people were so far ahead of their time that they had an iron forge in the woods.



And finally, a look at the outermost building, where the messy work was done, and where two bone implements for scraping leather hides were found, along with the remains of a terracotta plate. The wealth of this household (as evidenced by the silver hoard) probably didn't make it back to this outbuilding where the poorest farm laborers lived.

The Fearless Felter

I've quilted the Bronze Age quilt, I've bound it, I've made a bunch of itsy-bitsy "artifacts" with polymer clay and patinas, and now I'm sewing them on....and it doesn't look that much different from the last picture. I do plan to take a bunch of detail shots of the "artifacts" when that job is done.

But...I've got pictures today. Have I ever got pictures! I just finished editing some photos of my friend Vivian Mahlab's quilts. Vivian usually works on so big a scale that, not having the side of a barn to play around with, there's no way I can photograph her work. But when we went to Jane Dunnewold's workshop in January she brought along some old place mats which she dyed and screen-printed along with her Big Serious Fabric pieces.... and then she came over to my house and embellished them. Vivian will needle-felt anything to anything, and if the two materials don't cooperate, she'll gently urge them together with some teased-out silk fibers. She grabbed pieces apparently at random (I'm sure there's some plan, I just can't figure out what it is) out of the Silk Scraps Box, applied them to the place mats, then took them home and quilted them and had four totally stunning small quilts.

Felt Solution

All the dithering about whether to use black cotton or black and white striped cotton on BronzeAge came to an end when it dawned on me that I could probably needlefelt black felt pieces to the background fabrics, and then they would be securely attached and there'd be no fraying and I wouldn't have to quilt over the edges to keep them in place, which I'd also been worrying about because black thread would show too much on the reddish background and red thread over black elements might look like a design element of its own instead of fading into the background as I wanted it to. I love this solution; it's elegant, in the way that a three-line, mind-illuminating mathematical proof is elegant.

Now all I have to do is find the black batting, pick a backing fabric, put the sandwich together and quilt it. (This is the stage where I wish the Quilt Elves would come in at night and finish the job.)

Oh - and binding. I think I'm going to use the black and white striped fabric for a binding.

And,possibly, artifacts. I'm thinking about adding some little wire coils and polymer clay "potsherds" and other doodads to the quilted surface, as if they were objects found on an archaeological dig.