Painted Thread, Painted Fabric

What a busy weekend!  My husband is away for four days, and the kids and I have been stuck indoors because of the rain.  This house is now one giant mess of toys and craft supplies!  The computers never went on at all. (hooray!)  Instead, we painted.  I attempted some more hand dyed sky fabric after being so inspired the last week.

There were lots of awful results, but you don't need to see all of those.  Here's one I did.

Ick. Not so great.

That might be useful.  * It might work better upside down actually!  Here's a sky that worked really well.  It's 2 big clouds and that will be great for 2 separate pieces of art.

Here is some canola fabric I dyed.  It's perfect.  I have yet to find the perfect thread.

I dyed some threads from a little batch of weaving supplies my friend gave me.  She's having a baby... like, right now!!  Waiting is so hard.

pale periwinkle and multi-yellow

Those are perfect for me to use as the flowers in the fields... flax or alfalfa and sweet clover.  It's interesting to see how the different colors work in different ways, even if the brand is the same.  I used some of the purple in my "signature color" challenge piece.  Here's a sneaky peaky so far...

My Signature Color (chartreuse)

Happy Monday!

Painted Sky

I have no idea how to paint or dye fabric.  I usually use blue sky fabrics that I can find in pre-cut fat quarters at Periwinkle Quilting in Saskatoon.  I really want to make pink, purple, orange, and yellow skies.  I want to try painting heavy clouds.  I did a bit of reading online, and thought I would try brushing a wet paint across a damp fabric.  I tired painting sheer, and I tried plain white cotton.  I used the Dye-ne-flo paints with a wet brush.  The Dye-na-flo is a liquid dye for painting silks as far as I understand.  It is permanent when heat set, and won't add the weight of oilbars.

I painted the sky just as it looked that moment out my window.  It looked so good!  Then I picked up the cloth and suddenly the colors spread and turned all the definition into mush before I could snap a photo.  :(  I should have known better and let it dry.  Oh well.  Live & learn.  So I put coarse salt across the clouds.  No harm done... I might as well experiment!

Where the single grains landed, the paint pooled around and it almost looks like it was flowing or something!  Look closer.

This will make a good sky piece to stitch trees over I think.  ; )  It has good colors, but it's a little too abstract for my work I think (unless i do some abstract work).  I won't throw it away.  You never know.

Here's some of my first samples from last week:

On sheer:

On wet cotton fabric:

On recycled / reclaimed unknown white fabric...

You can bet my next set of art will have color in the skies.  I'm doing fire colors tomorrow.  I'm booked again for Gardenscape this year, and that show is at the end of March.  That's not too long is it?  I had better get to work and stop crocheting doilies and coasters!  lol  (But it's so fun!!)

Happy Friday everyone! 

-50C and Sunshine

It's true.  Canadians to talk a lot about the weather.  But how can you not when there's a range of 90 degrees between winter and summer?  Seasons are a big deal here.  Though we cannot go outside, we are still enjoying the sunshine inside.  My daughter and I set up our workstations wherever the sun was.  This morning, it was the kitchen table.  She was complaining that she was too hot in the sun.  (lol!)  Here's what she worked on.

The big table sits near the patio doors, so there is glass between the snow & us.  And me... I made a couple hundred french knots into the canola field with shiny rayon thread.

It's only about 1/10 finished.  But after I did a hundred of them, they sure became easy!  I poked my finger a couple times while pushing the needle through the canvas without a thimble.  My daughter got quite upset and begged, "mama?  do I have to sew when I grow up?"  No honey, you can be whatever you want.  You don't have to copy your parents.  "Then I want to be an artist, but with paints."  : )  Sweet.

I put some chunky beads into the seaweed on this piece.  I love it - it looks like jewels and hidden treasure!  I'm still not sure how to finish it.  I feel it needs white.  This is interesting.

I used some more batiks to make a Spring Prairie Sunrise.  I only used them in the sky.  I've always wanted to do a big sky full of horizontal strips.  I wedged it all in and tried to make some curves, but I'm not sure if you can even tell there are curves.  : )  This is the pieced top in progress.

I recently discovered Anne Brauer's gorgeous pieces, and that's what inspired my sky here.  Anne makes hundreds of these as little blocks and puts 'fractured' pieces all together to create sunning works of art.  So I didn't want to copy her.  That's her thing.  ~By the way, I did email her about it and she was okay with me doing this.~  It was my attempt to use batiks effectively in a prairie sky.  It still needs to be stitched and bordered and I plan to work lots of blooms into that land.  It measures about 22x26" with the border.

I had an interested talk with my mother this morning.  She told me she had seen some of my work.  (She's a landscape artist, hippy, no internet, lives in a cabin.)  I think my nephew showed her pictures on his phone.  She said, "can I make a suggestion?"  Oh god.  Sure mom, I think reluctantly to myself.  Little walls go up.  She tells me, "Put wind in it.  Make the trees move and the branches sway and the snow fly."  I paused.  I told her I work from my photos and it wasn't windy out.  LOL.  And then I looked again at my stuff laying all over the place and said, "But mom,  I don't DO trees, just land and sky.  Trees get in the way."  And she said hollered, "WHAT!?  No trees?  We are definitely NOT the same then!"  Yeah.  : )  And that was the end of that.

Oh well.  Just a funny story there for you.  I did attempt to photograph the wind once.  Check it out here:

But mom, I tried!

~Monika

Blue Sky Ahead!

Oh this is working out marvelously so far (knock on wood).  My Janome is giving me a serious headache.  I don't like the way the tech set the tensions, so I fiddled with them myself.  I can't believe I have to take it back again.  It's like cooking with a broken stir-spoon.  But here's what I have so far.  First, the painted sky - watered down acrylics on cotton.

I air dried it and then pressed it with a hot steamy iron.

So far so good.  Then I placed it on the buckrum canvas and stitched it horizontally through the blues, with blue thread.  

It still lacked some "pretty", so I covered the whole sky with sheer ribbon.  NICE!  So that was 505'd in place and then stitched around the edges.  

Looks good hey?

Now for the horizon!  Can't wait.  I just need to remember to practice before every step on a scrap piece to make sure this machine is set right.  Yikes.  I'll take the 7700 in later when this one is done.  I can't handle the withdrawal.  ; )  Anyone have a good back up machine for me to buy?  

~Monika

happy & relieved to be making a landscape again!!