I have been taken to task by several people for not updating my blog. They want studio pictures and more. So I have been guilted into updating this. It would just sound whiny if I tried to make excuses, so I won't.

It is very difficult to get back into the swing of things when you have been away from it for so long. I spent many days organizing my studio and putting stuff away, hoping that I can find it again when I need it. I just couldn't seem to get into an art mode, so I made some sock monkeys, some pillows, and some curtains. Then I decided to give myself a kick in the pants by doing some surface design. I have not done any deconstructed screen printing for a very long time, probably several years, so this was my choice. Dug out the notebook with class notes and thought it would be a good idea to review the DVD that Kerr Grabowski did.

I know I moved that DVD over to the studio and there aren't that many places that it could be. Still, it took several days of thinking and looking before I located it.

One of the reasons I wanted to do this DSP was to find out if my studio was warm enough for the dyes to batch without having to add extra heat. They need at least 4 hours of 70 degree heat, preferably hotter and longer.

I worked on the first pieces and let them batch sitting in front of a south facing window. The studio itself is only about 64 degrees, according to the heat pump control. But with direct sun in the window, that spot gets warmer. Batched them for at least a day, then washed them out and they came out as expected.

I had an idea - I could batch the fabrics in the powder room and put a little heater in there. That would jack the temperature up way above 70. Did that for the second set of fabrics. But they did not turn out as expected - all were a lot lighter than I thought they should be. 

There are a lot of factors that could have caused this. Maybe I didn't put enough dye into the print paste. Some of the fabrics were from the first session and I was over printing them, so I had to put the soda ash fixer into the print paste - maybe I didn't put enough in. Or maybe I was using print paste that had exhausted already. 

I did get some great markings and after putting my original expectations out of my mind, the fabrics all turned out great. Or mostly great, and certainly useable.

Here are pictures of the studio. All along the left is my design wall - 4 sheets of 4x8 insulation covered with fleece, 16 feet of design wall. 

I have 3 work tables. For the one in the front I took a large piece of cardboard that the table was delivered in, covered it with rug padding, then felt, then plastic. Makes a nice print surface.

All three tables are elevated and on wheels. This turned out to be a tricky project. I've used pvc pipe in the past to elevate tables, but the pipes sat right on the floor and splayed out. This wouldn't work for putting them on rollers. Turns out that the tables legs fit snugly into 1" diameter pvc pipe, and so they could be seated vertically in a support with casters on the bottom. Then we discovered that the tables were slightly different in where the legs attached and how wide apart they are, and one was slightly splayed. Each set of rollers had to be custom made. I named the tables Amy, Beth, and Carol and wrote that on both the tables and the rollers. 

Looking towards the sink area. I love having this right next to where I'm working. So much easier than my old studio. And much brighter.

And now to a Before and After set of pictures. The Before pictures are from a Blog Post from June 27, 2005. I had just come home from QSDS and did a major clean out and reorganization of my basement studio.  See the pictures here.

This is what it looks like now - new paint job, new carpet, furniture. All of the grandkids toys have been moved down here and also the tv. This is the new play area. Still looks a little spartan, but there is lots of space for doing acrobatics.

And have you ever seen such a clean and un-cluttered basement? All my wet studio stuff was back here, plus lots of power tools, and a fair amount of junk. A ton of stuff went to the studio, another ton of stuff went to the garage, and two tons of stuff went to the dump. With new walls, a newly painted floor (that you can actually see), and lots of light, it could be an operating room. 

Let's see how long it stays that way.

What the turquoise did

Thanks for the great comments! Sometimes it takes me a while to appreciate what I've done and I know that each of these fabrics will be perfect somewhere sometime.

Linda asked what the turquoise on the blotter fabric went into. This is the piece. It's turquoise and also another deep blue, either Intense Blue or Navy Blue. With some pale yellow to soften the white. It's very difficult for me to leave white areas. Even a little bit of color is better than pure white.



This morning I took all the dye pastes that were mixed and used on soda soaked fabric and slopped them onto a piece of fabric. It looked very very dark. It's batching right now and it will be interesting to see just how much color was left in those pastes. Stay tuned.

Deconstructed Screen Printing once again

I've been working on some deconstructed screen printing again, hoping it will provide some inspiration for new work. I have to pull out my notes from previous sessions so that I don't spend days relearning what I already know but have sort of forgotten. In spite of that, I still did some things that produced less than satisfactory results. So here are some of my new fabrics. You can click on the images for a larger view.


I like this one. The dot images are from some kind of tape that I got at Home Depot. I have no clue what it's supposed to be used for but it makes a great screen image. I used a Deep Cherry Red to make the screen and then used a yellow print paste for the release. Or maybe two yellows.


Torn paper for one image and a design I drew on the screen for the cross hatch lines.


Furnace filter screens for the big circles, bubble wrap for the small circles, and hand drawn circles for the medium sizes red circles.


Torn paper striping, a thermofax screen made from a previous session with torn paper, and some squares made with regular screen printing and torn paper.


This was from a screen made with big bubble wrap and it didn't work too well because the print paste covered the entire screen. So not much of the bubble wrap design showed through. And the red was an experiment in doing a monoprint by putting the dye paste on some plexiglas, pulling a striping tool through, then putting the fabric on top. It smushed the dye paste so that the stripes disappeared, so I tried putting the dye paste directly on the fabric and using the striping tool. Which sort of worked but not very well.


Blotting fabric - when making the screens I used this piece of fabric to blot up the dye paste that goes through the screen. What I find so interesting (besides the fact that it's a pretty cool piece of fabric) is that this fabric doesn't get the special batching treatment that the printed fabric gets: wrapping in plastic and sitting in a warm spot. It just sits by the side of the work table, drying out, not covered, not warm. Obviously, it's humid enough that the dye is reacting with the soda ash that is in the fabric.


One of the first pieces I did. I had an idea for these overlapping rectangles with intersecting blue rectangles (which of course turn green on the yellow dye). Not sure this worked out all that well, but I can always cut it up.


This is construction fencing and it deconstructed really well. The first pulls started at the bottom and there is a good image of the fencing. By the time I got to the top of the fabric it's only a small portion of the original image left.


Not exactly sure what I did here, but I think it involved some direct application of the dye paste.


More dotted paper and torn paper. This turned out alot lighter in color than I expected it to. I violated one of the cardinal rules of screen printing with thickened dyes. Once the dyes in the print paste come in contact with the soda ash soaked fabric they begin to react and lose their strength. Any used print paste put back into the unused print paste will begin to react. So even though the color still looks good and strong, in actuality there is not much dye left to react. I was putting the used print paste back instead of segregating it. Live and learn.


Another blotting fabric, given the same treatment as the first one. Some really interesting sections on this one also.


Good color, the way it's supposed to be.


I might have gotten carried away with the dotted paper.



Very pale background. I thought it was coming out much darker but this was using spent print paste.


I thought I was screening with a gold color but only the yellow I added to the spent paste showed up.


This is the color it is supposed to be. The dye paste on the screen was medium blue and green and the print paste was clear. So the background color is what was released from the color on the screen.


Another one where the background was supposed to be a lot more golden. I guess I won't be making that mistake again.

I still have some good print paste left, but I think I'm going to finish it off with some direct dye painting onto the fabric. And using some thermofax screens also.

Done for the moment

I had to finish up this week because tomorrow I leave for QSDS. Just when I was really starting to get the hang of it! The last batch of screens was almost exclusively torn paper stripings. I really like these alot. I made some thermofax screens from some of these torn paper results and combining these with the DSP makes some really interesting designs.

This piece of fabric was somebody else's in my class at QSDS last year. For some reason she didn't like it and threw it out. I grabbed it. It has really nice feathery lines which are the background. The strips are my torn paper and look how cool those outlines are.

One more. I learned several things. In order to see the deconstructing outlines of the shapes you have to screen with a color that is lighter than what's on the screen. A second thing I learned is that leaving the paper stuck on the back of the screen while doing the pulling makes for even more interesting designs. Good outlines but also terrific patterning.

More of the holey paper strips.

And this is an image I used to make a thermofax screen. It really captures the look of the wrinkly paper. I had to enhance it a little in Photoshop so that there is a little more definition between the wrinkles.

So now the fabric is packed in a box and all my stuff is packed into my car. I'm leaving tomorrow morning at 7am and driving to Martha's house. Then I will have to reload my stuff into her car, and we will be off. We usually arrive in Columbus around 3 or 4pm, depending on how many stops. I should probably research in which state the gas will be cheapest since we hit Maryland (of course) then West Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia again, then Ohio. Our first pit stop is always at Sideling Hill which is a huge gouge cut out of the mountain so the road can go through. It exposes a very interesting geological formation and there's a very informative display in the Exhibit Center. I like geology so this spot fascinates me.

More fabrics and an invitation

I received this postcard in the mail yesterday. It's from Images 08, held at Penn State University. This used to be Crafts National but they've changed the eligibility to artists in the states surrounding Pennsylvania. I don't know why since they didn't include me in the decision making process. But they did choose to put my piece on the postcard - upper right hand corner. It sort of doesn't go with the rest of the works on the postcard, but I'm not going to complain.

The show opens on June 11 with the reception on Friday the 13th. Hmmm. You are invited. I won't be there as I will be at QSDS for the Master Class with Sue Benner. Nine days of class - I think I will be very tired.
And here is more fabric. The smudgey background on this is from the deconstruction, but then I used a thermofax screen to directly apply the cross hatch pattern.
On this piece I took the hole-y paper strips that had dye paste on them, wetted them slightly, then pressed directly onto the fabric. There was enough dye paste to transfer the design but not so much that it's very obvious.

And more...

I really like this one. I used torn paper strips to create the vertical stripes in a deep blue/green. In the open area between the stripes I used a curved tip syringe to draw a thin line with dark cherry. Screened with a yellowish-brown paste. When the green began to deconstruct it showed a crystal-like pattern. Difficult to see in the small picture, but click on the image to view it larger.

The storm drain cover again. Makes such a wonderful pattern.

I found a roll of stiff paper with little holes in it at the hardware store. I have no idea what its intended use is, but it makes a great resist. The little tiny holes are really cool.

Here's another view.

I have alot of fabric that has been painted and I wanted to see if the paint will resist the dye. The answer is "sometimes". This fabric had blue scribbles all over it and they were fairly heavily drawn. Where the dye overlays the paint scribble, the dye is a little lighter. In some places it's totally resisted. Also, washing this fabric softened up the paint; there were some stiff sections where I had globbed the paint on and these are much softer now. I think some of the paint might have come off. The fabric was ugly to begin with and I don't I've improved it very much. But maybe in small pieces it will work somewhere.

More results

A few results from the previous session. This screen was made using a storm drain cover placed under the screen and then I pulled the dye paste across it. The dye color is dark cherry, which is nearly black. The fabric used here was pale blue and I screened used yellow print paste, which resulted in green. The dark colors are the dark cherry deconstructing. The edges are fantastic!

This is the fabric pictured in my previous post after it's been washed. There is a considerable amount of lightening up, alot of which is due to the fact that the previous picture is of wet fabric, which always looks darker. I would have preferred the darker color, but then I always do. Some great deconstructed edges on this one also.

And another section of the same piece of fabric. You can see faint outlines of the circle furnace grid that I also used on this piece.

Well, it's time to get back to the dyepots!

First results

Here are some results of the first DSP session. Some of these pictures are blurry, sorry about that. I should know better. This first piece started as a pale yellow fabric, which you can still see in the areas between the screened stuff and in the blocked out area of the centers. I'm getting some good edges here.

This is construction fencing. The base fabric was a pale purple and the dye paste was a dark purple. Excellent edges here.

Base fabric might be pale blue or green, I don't remember. The print paste was brushed onto the screen with a paintbrush in no particular design, so it just makes an interesting texture as it deconstructs.

The background fabric was a definite orange-y low water dye piece. The screen was red print paste in a scribble with a curved tip syringe. The first pulls produced pretty faint outlines but they became much more obvious as the line began to deconstruct. Very interesting images here.

This last image is of a piece with the print paste still on. It hasn't been washed. I want to be able to compare the before and after to see how much disappears during the washout process. This started as white fabric. I used two different screens and then covered most all of the fabric with a goldish wash. I suspect that the wash color will nearly disappear.