Sun printing

I've been working on a group project and doing some sun printing to make fabric. With some leftover Setacolor paints I painted a piece of lightweigh silk habatoi and put some leaves and other stuff on it. There's a real trick to getting the paint on the fabric and then getting the leaves placed before the sun dries the fabric, especially something as lightweight as silk. It's fun and the results are usually wonderful.

The piece is actually a little lighter in color than this image shows. I took the picture in natural light without a flash. Those vertical lines are the result of air bubbles between the fabric and what it was laid on, a piece of melamine. I'll have to figure out something else for the substrate, but you have to be careful because the texture will become part of the sunprint. I had used an old cutting board that was white and had darker inch markings on it and the inch markings showed up on the fabric. Worked well with what I was doing but it's not something I would like to have on everything.

Holy cow - where have I been?

The time has sort of slipped away. I didn't realize I had been neglecting my blog so badly. It's not that I haven't been doing anything art-wise because I have a few things to post.

The first piece is a ceramic mask that I covered with fabric to donate to the Johns Hopkins Shriver Hall Concert Series Face the Music benefit. The masks will be auctioned off next Spring to raise money for their new endowment for education. I used fabric, yarn, and beads and stitched them to a batting. I used gloss medium to adhere the fabric face to the mask and it worked quite well.


It's titled "Fiber Girl". Hope somebody pays lots of money for it.

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The other piece I worked on is another in the circle series. There are so many variations on circles and it's so interesting to explore them all. This piece is entitled "Inner Circle". The size is 28" L x 38" W. All the fabrics are hand dyed, then covered with more circle type images printed with thermofax screens that I've made.



And here is a detail shot.




We're getting ready to go on vacation in a few weeks and I'm going to try out an SLR digital camera, the Canon EOS 10D. I need to read the manual before we go and get familiar with all the settings. I use an SLR for doing my slides so I'm already familiar with some of the stuff, but this camera is way more complicated.