Next we have a picture of the workshop I took at the SDA/SAQA Conference in Philadelphia last week. There were half a dozen speaker presentations on Saturday, a tour of the Philadelphia area fiber shows and other places of interest, and a 3 day workshop. I've mentioned already that I was taking Judy Langille's Whole Cloth Composition class, which involves thickened dye, silkscreens, torn paper resists, and thermofax screens. Judy's fiber pieces are whole cloth, something I have not done, and it requires a fair amount of pre-thought and brain processing, which is totally foreign to me. (That didn't really come out right...)
Anyhow, the first 2 days we all were making yardage, not a bad thing in itself, but not the idea of the class. On the third day it began to click and thoughts of composition surfaced. We only had half a table on which to work, so nobody could do anything large. There was a problem in that the weather did not lend itself to pre-soaking the fabric in soda ash (which fixes the dye) and so it was added to the thickened dye. In retrospect, not a good plan because the dye spent itself very quickly (or else there wasn't enough soda ash) because everything came out very pale. Luckily we were able to do some soda soaking before the 3rd day and fabric done then came out as expected, i.e. color saturated.
I expect that the pale pieces will have to hibernate in my stash for a while before I can use them - I need to forget how I expected them to turn out and be happy with how they actually turned out.
This is a picture of the bathroom wall at Snyderman-Works Gallery, where the Fiber Biennial was hanging. Cool.
And these are spools of thread used on weaving looms at the Design Center at Philadelphia University. What a cool place! They have everything from old weaving looms to digital printers. Wouldn't it be fun to be a student there!
