Joy of Surface Design

I recently watched my new DVD from Quilting Arts, DIY Surface Design: Printmaking Made Easy with Everyday Objects with Leslie Tucker Jenison.  I loved it!  I especially enjoyed the sections on screenprinting with thickened dyes, gelatin monoprinting, and soy wax resist.  These are techniques I already use; what was unique about Leslie's approach was her use of everyday and found objects.

A great DVD!

I pulled out some of my vintage kitchen utensils with red wooden handle(1930's?) .  I hesitated just for a moment, but realized that getting soy wax on the metal parts wouldn't damage them.  In fact, maybe it will prevent further rusting!  (Note:  Any tools used in surface design should be dedicated to that purpose and never used again for food preparation or eating.  Same goes for this electric skillet -- it's dedicated to melting wax for batik and for encaustic work.)

My vintage kitchen tools for soy wax batik!

I love using soy wax for batik!  It has a very light, pleasant smell, but doesn't give off any harmful fumes so there's no need to ventilate.  It also has a lower melting point than traditional batik wax, so it melts quickly.  The biggest plus, though, is that it's easy to remove when the next step (dyeing the fabric) is completed.

Wax applied to cotton cloth using potato masher.

I stamped several pieces of cotton with wax designs, and my final piece was my favorite.  It was randomly stamped with the bottom tines of the large fork:

Soy wax applied with this large vintage fork.

My other accomplishment was finishing the painting on my glue-resist piece.  I'll let the paint cure another day or so before I wash out the glue.  I'm excited to see the final result!

Painting finished on my blue glue gel resist project.

Spending time on surface design projects is very satisfying to me, almost equal to the sense of abundance I get from using my own surface-designed fabrics in a project.  There's still more to do: deciding what color to dye my soy wax-stamped fabric.

Mushroom dyeing: once is enough

My most recent surface design (dyeing) experiment turned out to be a stinking mess!  When I saw these weird mushrooms in my backyard last weekend and noticed how they'd stained the grass around them, I thought FABRIC DYEING!  Don't they have an interesting "border" design? 

Mushroom in my yard.  Type???

 I harvested more than a bucketful!

Shroom Family

An 18" garter snake was hiding under this crop, below.  Just to prove I could, I caught the snake by the tail and proudly showed it to my husband.  Sorry, no photo!

"Turtle shell" shrooms!

Big Daddy Shroom!  (12" across)

I took some of the harvested fungi and placed them on my PFD fabric.  Wearing rubber gloves, I smooshed and smashed them into the cloth.  They were juicy!  Next, I rolled the fabric into two bundles, with the mushrooms still inside, then double-bagged them in plastic.

Shrooms smashed and bundled in PFD fabric

After 2 days on the backporch, I thought my project might need heat to yield better results.  After photographing it, I placed the mushy bag on the hearth in front of our gas heater.  (I wonder if the word mushy has its origins in mushroom?)

After 2 days . . . yum

Last night, I turned the bag over one rotation.  Five minutes later, I saw that it had begun leaking a thin, dark brown liquid onto the hearthstone.  I quickly cleaned up the mess and decided to stop the experiment.  Back on the porch again, I unwrapped the bundles and nearly gagged from the smell!  I persevered and got the fabric rinsed out, and the rest of the nasty mess went outside in the trash.

The result. 

This morning I studied my mushroom-dyed fabric.  It's not pretty.  It IS organic, though, and does look like some of India Flint's experiments in her wonderful book, Eco Colour.  I'm not sure how or even IF I'll ever use it, but I'm pretty sure I won't repeat this stinky experiment again!

More surface design play

Lately, I'm wondering if I'm still a quilter.  Since my Viking desperately needs a tune-up, I'm avoiding any freemotion quilting and spending most of my creative time in surface design.  And I'm loving it!

Here are some of the results from last week's play.  My favorite:

My golden batik.  Waxed designs were drawn with an electric tjanting.

Another evening was spent screenprinting.  I tried a deconstructed screenprinting technique from Susie Monday's Mixed-Media Textile Art CD from Cloth, Paper, Scissors/Interweave Press.  I drew some simple designs on my funky homemade screen using Caran d'Ache crayons, as shown below.  (Note: the rust-colored stain on the screen didn't print, thankfully!  The frame was made from recycled sheer curtain fabric in an old wooden picture frame, tightly wrapped and sealed with duct tape.)

Screen ready to print.

The prints were made using Golden's GAC 9000 textile medium, which you can see on the printed fabric, outlining the dimensions of the screen:

Experiments with deconstructed screenprinting.

Last of all, I used another clean screen and pulled these leaf prints from a hand-cut stencil attached to the back of the screenprinting frame.  The stencil material?  Half of a cut-apart clear poly page protector. (Quick, cheap, available!)

Screenprints of leaf design.

Now, what to do with the prints???  My sewing machine wants to know.