Makin' Fabric

I'm devoting the next two and a half weeks to deconstructed screen printing. I plan to take this fabric to QSDS and use it in the class I'm taking, a Master Class with Sue Benner. The class lasts nine days. I think I will be exhausted.

I spent the past weekend (in between doing Memorial Day Weekend stuff) soda soaking fabric that I pulled from my stash. For this session all the fabric I'm using will already have a color on it. This will introduce another factor into my dye color choices. I think I have about 30 yards of fabric ready to print (but that's just a wild guess). I strung up a clothesline outside to dry the fabrics so I wouldn't have to wipe up dripping soda ash from the basement floor. It was very colorful.

I also mixed up some print paste using Prochem's premix. I used this last summer and had a problem with the print paste rewetting on the screens and oozing. So far I haven't had that problem; I guess that's the difference between May and August. Once again I have probably overdone it on the amount of dye to use - I have 13 little dye pots - several reds, several yellows, several blues, and grey and black (which I probably will barely use.) It's not possible for me to resist all the different colors.

Last night I prepared the screens and this morning I used them. Right now the fabric is wrapped in black plastic and batching in the sun. The sun is getting low and behind the trees and they've been batching for at least 5 hours so I think it's okay to rinse them out tonight. I'm eager to see what I get.

When I was ready to begin creating the screens I had a mental blank - couldn't remember all the different methods I had used in Kerr's class and in later sessions. Spent a while hunting up my notes which once I found them turned out to be rather sparse. My friend Linda in Belgium and I traded notes last summer as we were both doing dsp so I read those also. It turns out that she's working on a new technique right now so we're trading notes again. I'm not going to describe what she's doing because it's for an article in Quilting Arts.

I also have Kerr's DVD on DSP and I think I'll review that also. I'll post some pictures when I get some results.