Soup-er Bowl Sunday Continued

Cooking the lentils

Blended lentils spread on fabric 

Well what a crazy ending to the Superbowl! Back to the lentils...After soaking for 8 hours, I gave up on the first batch of lentils and decided to cook a batch instead. After cooking and adding some additional water, I blended them. They were pretty thick but there was no problem spreading them on the fabric. I will have to wait until they dry to see how they resist.

Playing in the Kitchen: Soup-er Bowl Sunday

In honor of the Super Bowl decided to try using lentils as a fabric resist. They're soaking now...will report back later...

More Salt and Glue

I finally finished the re-crystallized salt and blue glue gel piece (see October 30, 2011 blog entry) so I thought I’d share the results. I added another layer of blue glue using freezer paper stencils. Then, of course, to experiment, I had to throw a bit of table salt into the wet glue. After removing the stencils and letting the glue dry, I added another color wash and…of course…more salt!

Fresh Start

It’s Groundhog Day and like Punxsutawny Phil, I’m emerging… from a month of weekend workshops. It’s time to get back into the swing of this blog. This past month included the Power Point presentation for my grant project on kitchen resists along with two 2-day workshops. All were very successful, I’m pleased to report. I’m even more “psyched” to get back in the studio and get onto more resist explorations. But first is the big “dig out”, as I’ve written on my calendar. Time to sort through the piles in the studio, get organized…and clean the house (ugh!). It’s also time to clean up this blog. My two blog “angels”, Lesley Riley and Jennifer Coyne Qudeen have been making helpful suggestions and I am now on it! This blog will have a slightly new look with more of an emphasis on my work with resists. Starting with today…a bit of spring…blue glue gel resist with washes of Setacolor Transparent fabric paint and stenciled and printed with Setacolor Opaque fabric paint. Can you figure out the order of the layers? (Hint: The layer that “pops” is actually NOT the top layer.)

Wrapping Things Up

I can’t believe a month has gone by since my last entry to this blog. Actually, in truth, I CAN believe it’s been that long. I’ve been in the “thick of it” with my grant project. The presentation and first workshop are less than a month away (January 14, 2012). I’ve been photographing hundreds of samples and working on the Power Point. I’ve also been trying to squeeze in holiday shopping, wrapping (a whole day’s worth!), sending off gifts to various family members, birthday celebrations and baking Butterscotch brownies. Of course, I managed to throw a workshop at G Street Fabrics into the mix as well! Last Sunday, I taught an adult and child class called “Wrapped Wire Animals”. I’ve taught this for quite a number of years at G Street and at The Art League School’s summer camp. I was inspired by the brightly painted wooden animal carvings from Oaxaca, Mexico. The workshop is always a fun experience and one in which I always learn something new. I let the students create any animal that they wish. I’ve worked out the chenille stem “skeletons” for many animals, but there is always at least one student who introduces me to an animal that I haven’t done before. In this class, I had two new animals…a hippo and an otter!

 Students start out by creating an armature (skeleton) for their animals.

Next, they add stuffing to fill out the shape.

Then they wrap with a special gauze wrap that clings to itself.

I bring ½” cotton fabric strips to class in bright colors to mimic the Oaxacan animal carvings. The students use glue sticks to cover one side of the strip and wrap it around the gauze.

Some students add colorful wool yarn to their animals

Here are the completed animals from the class.

Flow

I’ve just finished up my 7 session “Exploring Surface Design” course. I had a really nice, hardworking group this semester…a real pleasure. The session before this last one, I brought in gelatin plates so the students could do some monoprints. I usually do this for the final class and it has been very successful. Students have really taken a “playful” approach and made some wonderful prints.

This time was amazing to me. It was as if the work flowed out of people. Print after incredible print. And each series so different, you could “hear” the voice of each particular student. To me the prints were like Haiku…beautiful, complete poems. One student began to place two prints next to one another..I read them as pages from a book. This was so very close to a spiritual experience. It was as if each student had found her “voice”.

We talked about the experience in the final class this week. I was not the only one who felt this way. It was if the whole class had been in synch. It was the kind of session every teacher dreams about!

My students have encouraged me to teach gelatin monoprinting as a separate workshop. This is something I want to pursue. I believe it could be a way to open up others to listening to their own voices, to connecting to some wonderful, natural, creative “flow”.

The photos below are a sampling of monoprints from that very special class.

Betty Ford

Janice Knausenberger

Janice Knausenberger

Mary Ellen Campbell

Mary Ellen Campbell

Mary Ellen Campbell

"Carve It Up!" Challenge

I spent some time today getting an entry together for the Cloth, Paper, Scissors Magazine, “Carve It Up!” challenge. In this challenge participants were asked to design a hand-carved stamp and then send in the printed image with information about the material carved and the tools used. I decided to send in a print of my shell design block. I also uploaded the design on clothpaperscissors.com to the “Carve It Up!” gallery. This is the first time that I’ve entered a challenge or uploaded something to one of their galleries. I noticed a “Swatch” gallery of fabric swatches. So that might be a future gallery on which to upload some photos. I know that I haven’t taken full advantage of getting involved with online “communities”. I guess I’ll have to think about that more while I’m getting together a book proposal about the resists. I contacted Lesley Riley and we will be working together again next year. I told her that I wanted to focus on a book proposal. I gave her my blog address and she is already making suggestions about how to improve it! I’m really looking forward to working with her again.

 Below is the black and white print I’m sending off to the magazine along with two pieces of fabric I printed using the block. The block design was based on sketches of a broken moon snail shell which I simplified to make it more “graphic”. I added the small snail shell design to the center for additional interest. I designed this block to be printed in quarter turns on fabric…which is something I enjoy doing with my symmetrical blocks.

Print on paper with printing ink of shell block design

Shell block printed on fabric overprinting an embossed moldable foam block design

Another piece of fabric in which I first painted color washes then printed with an embossed moldable foam block and finally overprinted with the shell block design