Dreaming Spirals

Phew!  Just got back from a long weekend in Somerset and am now raring to go! 

As I was saying last week, I am having a big clearout of fabrics because I want to concentrate on dyeing and painting wholecloth fabric rather than using small pieces of miscellaneous fabrics for patchwork.  So, if you want fabric and thread for embroidery, patchwork, collage, layering or whatever, here’s your chance! 

I have sorted them into bags of roughly 300-400 grams (12oz to 1lb) .  The fabrics are mostly in pieces which are fat quarter or fat eighth size, some more, some scraps, some with bits cut out but still plenty of good usable stuff.  I think all the bags have at least some hand dyed cotton and/or silk fabric; there are also pieces of organza, chiffon, silk, scrim, velvet, etc.  It’s all a mixture, sorted by colour.    A real lucky dip!!

I am selling them at £18 per bag plus postage – UK is £2 and you can use the Paypal button at the end of this post. 

Here are a few examples of what you will get in a bag:

This one is mostly blues – 340gm.    There is some turquoise metallic organza, about 5”x19”, about a fat quarter (maybe more) of grey-blue hand dyed cotton, just over a fat quarter of turquoise stretch velvet, just under a fat quarter of pale blue cotton, a fat quarter of blue-green batik fabric with fish on, about a fat eighth of blue-turquoise mottled cotton fabric, approx fat quarter turquoise vintage Laura Ashley cotton fabric, same amount blue tulle,  about half a yard of Michael Miller zigzaggy fabric (the colourful one in the foreground), just under fat quarter of blue fabric with little ferns on, piece of navy blue cotton, some scraps of indigo dyed cotton, piece of nepalese hand dyed lokta paper, about 2 metres of blue satin ribbon, several lots of thread.UPDATE – SOLD NOW

This one is 330 grams and mostly greens (veering towards yellowy or browny greens).  Here we have some hand dyed yellow-green scrim or cheesecloth, about 12” by 30”, some green cotton fabric just under a fat quarter, green tulle about the same size, hand dyed green velvet roughly 12” square, acid dyed yellow-green silk dupion about 8” square, about half a yard of green rayon fabric with little diamond pattern, fat eighth or so of green cotton fabric with watermark effect, three pieces of various shades of green cotton, one with swirly pattern, hand dyed green-brown felt about 20” by 8”, strip of hand dyed cotton oranges, purples, turquoises, 4”x28”, hand dyed green silk rod, 4’ 1.5”wide green organza ribbon, various hanks of thread.

These are 330 grams, again, and more greeny purples.  There’s about a metre of green metallicy lace with daisies on it (very glittery!), some funny shimmery green/purple fabric, four different hand dyed green cotton fabrics (fat quarter to fat eighth size) … can you tell I’m getting bored with measuring things?!! – about a fat quarter of silk crepe which I bought in France, hand dyed with green and flecks of magenta and orange, some silk dupion, a very spectacular 9” square piece of silk habotai which I painted with pink and green silk paints using salt – it looks a bit fireworky, scraps of hand dyed silk rod and silk fibres, about a fat quarter of hand dyed green/purply-pink butter muslin, some very shimmery greeny polyester organza good for dragonfly wings, about a 9” square piece of hand felted fibres with silky threads trapped in it (green), some darkish green cotton fabric with a black overall swirly pattern on it.SORRY, SOLD!!

That’s all I’m going to describe because I can feel myself wanting to put it all back again and keep it for myself but I must clear it to get some space to create more!!! 

£18 plus £2 postage (UK) – if you are overseas, email me and I’ll send you a Paypal invoice with amended postage. Give me your colour preference in the ‘Message to seller’ box. Or leave a comment if you have any problems!

UPDATE: I have now put photos of all the bundles with Paypal buttons (postage to UK only) on this permanent blog page.

The colour combinations I’ve got are: yellows/greens; red-purples; blues/blue-greens; yellow/oranges; reds; golds/browns; purples; orange/blue; black/white; reds/dusky oranges; blues/browns; sea greens/blue; greens; and blue/turquoise. Ask me if you want to know more about them.

I layered the collages a bit more yesterday – I worked fairly quickly and improvisationally because I was sitting there umming and ahhing and not actually glueing anything down so I decided just to get on with it and then see what I thought of them!

Here’s the blue one – I wanted to do something with leaves as I am so drawn to them at the moment.

I may add more or do something else to this one.  Not sure yet.

This is the one with the brown background.  I like this better in the photo than I did yesterday looking at the original!

This is as far as I have got with the green one but it isn’t finished yet…

I also made another background.  This uses some of the mulberry paper as well.

In the latest studio reorganisation I turned my table 90 degrees and put all the paints and related stuff into an old vegetable rack.   I like this.

You can see how much clutter there is on the ‘collage table’ at the moment!  Plenty of stuff to keep me going for a while!

And of course moving the paints left some shelves free for my ‘inspiration’ files and notebooks…

I have got as far as the collage backgrounds with the tissue paper… I tore up various tissue paper colours and glued them with gel medium on to art boards.  Now I am going to watch the DVD again and add stuff (textured paper and found objects or whatever feels right to me) to the top once I have had a good look at them to determine where I want to go with them.  What Carrie Burns Brown calls ‘happenings’.

Here is another Picasa collage of the collages. 

Here is a collage of some of the tissue paper I have been painting.   (I did this in Picasa, not in cutting and pasting real paper!    Not yet, anyway.)

This is a photo of some corrogated card which I painted.  It looks like a Picasa collage on its own!

And, a bit late, here is the best rusted piece from the baking tray which was up in the loft catching the drips.  It is ironic, really, because it is a practice piece on which I was trying to transfer a picture printed on Lasertran (not very successfully).. but I think it looks like one of those old medieval maps.  Pity I could never repeat it if I tried! 

I read today in the local newspaper about an artist in Newcastle who had decided to make an artwork from all her junkmail. She has a spike outside her front door on which she piles it all! Apparently she started it on January 1st and it is now more than 5 feet high! Although I think if I took all my family’s junk mail, plus the catalogues I get sent from every company I have ever ordered anything – I especially hate the one which sends me stuff every month or so when I ordered something ONCE for my mum a few years ago – it would be quite a bit higher than that. I wonder if she is going to present it to the Post Office when she has finished?!

I bought a DVD by Carrie Burns Brown last week on Watermedia collage and have so far watched it about 3 times. And have been painting lots of tissue paper and other textured paper to make some collages…. I took loads of photos this afternoon so I will put some of them on the blog as soon as I have uploaded them to my computer. I think I have come to the conclusion that painting and glueing gets me creating much faster than sewing does. At least this year. And dyeing and surface design…. I have also been reading my copy of Jane Dunnewold’s book, Improvisational Screen Printing, and I want to try her interfacing stencils so hopefully lots of photos of that will be forthcoming! Children and other activities permitting….

I haven’t been getting many comments recently so I think I will go back to my old system of emailing commentators directly rather than on the blog. But I will leave the subscription plugin so you still have the option of getting further comments on a particular post.

I found a great tutorial on screenprinting with paper stencils – I did this at college a few years ago when I screenprinted my Dennis the Menace window blind for City & Guilds, for my son Barnabas. Here it is:

I used newspaper to make the stencils for this because the image was so huge but I notice she uses freezer paper, which would be more durable. She has also posted a tutorial on using a Thermofax machine for those of you lucky US readers who can get them fairly readily! I have found a couple of people who sell either custom-made or ready-prepared Thermofax screens for people who don’t have access to one…

Claire Higgott – Thermofax Screens
Marcy Tilton

Let me know if you know of anyone else who offers this service. Thanks!