New Fabric, Part II

Thank you all for being so patient--well, not all of you were--to wait for Part II. Some of the fabric you will see in Part II has already made its way into a new series I'm tentatively calling Cosmos.

All the pieces remind me of photos I've seen of cosmic explosions that have been in magazines like National Geographic. But that's not where they started. I think they started with good fabric gone bad-- redyed, discharged, redyed, discharged--that eventually got better.

Here I am working on two small pieces, getting ready to discharge them.

Here's the one on the left, above, with discharge on it.

And here's that piece after discharge, with embroidery.

Here's another piece before discharge.

And here it is after discharge. Not sure where this is going.

This is the piece that started it all and will be the first in the Cosmos series.

Another time I'll show you how the little piece on the right in the first picture is evolving.

Stay tuned.

New Fabric, Part I

It was such a beautiful day this past Saturday, I grabbed the opportunity to discharge some fabrics I had recently dyed.

On the left is the blue-ish and red-ish fabric I had dyed and then discharged. On the right, I've added various colors. This all started in March and April.

On the left, in June, I screened on several colors and shapes. On the right is what it looked like after washing and ready for more discharge.

On the left is after discharging and on the right is after washing.

And this is what the whole piece looks like now. (The sun is shining on some of it.) Don't know what I'm going to do with it yet, but I think it's done. This is one of the largest pieces of fabric I've worked on.

I generally prefer to work with smaller pieces of fabric (more of those in Part II), but no matter what the size, you never know what you are going to get, and for me that is a big part of the fun. It took me a while to let go and enjoy whatever resulted. I learned that, after all, if you don't like it, you can always go back and do more. Thanks, Rayna.

For example, I made this fabric with all the leftover dye. When I screened a grid with discharge paste, I just put it in the sun. The grid turned purple. Of course I really loved it and so when I washed the fabric, the purple was gone. I may have to go back in with purple dye.

Stay tuned for New Fabric, Part II.