Experimentation as Procrastination

Instead of, oh, say, finishing something, yesterday I did some found object printing. Fabric paint, since my earlier experiments with acrylic paint yielded acrylic paint crumbs in my sewing machine. Most objects failed, including styrofoam packing peanuts. Maybe if I had glued them onto a base...but that would have required planning ahead, so the glue could dry.

Successful objects include a Leinie's bottle:

There's usually one of these around somewhere. Very subtle markings, once I figured out how not to glob the paint onto the glass.

And a rotting onion half I found in the bottom of the fridge:

Very cool, although future onions will produce (hee!) slightly different patterns. The fabric smells slightly of onion; I will have to rinse it after I heat-set the paint (does that take a hyphen? "heat" modifies "set"....).

And now, if you are my mother, you want to know what I will do with these. As always, the answer is "store them somewhere until I think of something." Except the styrofoam packing peanut piece--that'll be a back or base of something, where it can never be seen by human eyes.

A Clowder of FUZZ

So, I had this picture of my cat FUZZ, and I ran it through Photoshop (Version 5.5, I bought it in 2000). Next, I printed him out on white cotton fabric and painted over the faces with translucent fabric paint.



I appliqued one head to the fabric before doing the background stitching, but it was a pain in the butt to stitch around the head, so for the rest I did the background stitching first.

These pieces are about 4" square, and need to be finished along the edges (also need beads or sequins or more stitching or all of the above). My plan is to let them ripen for a few days while I work with other images printed on fabric, most likely fabric postcards.

Snow Dyeing

I rejoined Quiltart as a lurker, and many of them are doing some snow dyeing this winter. I feel like a sheeple, but I have a little fresh snow this week. :-|



I used two colors of dye, "Royal Blue" and "Raspberry". The latter separated into component colors very quickly:



The concept is that as the snow melts, the dye will seep onto the fabric, creating interesting patterns--especially if, as I have done, you have used a dye mixed from two or more separate colors.

My results? I don't have them yet. After four hours only half the snow has melted. :-\ Stay tuned.

Try it for yourself: Snow dyeing instructions (pdf)

I should probably post once a year, or something

Does anyone still read this? It's been literally years.

I never actually finished anything 2010. Since my last post, I have:

• dyed about 40 yards of fabric (not all shown here)
• taken several thousand photographs of New York, Germany, Südtirol, and a bunch of other places
• plugged away at some tedious and long-term traditional projects
• bought a bunch of paint and fabric
• thrown out a bunch of paint and fabric
• made more aliens (but I've stopped scanning and uploading them)
  
• collected more beer bottle caps than I have ideas for using them
  

I'm back in Milwaukee, anyway, and procrastinating on making some curtains. Over the weekend I fiddled around with some scraps:



I don't know what I'm going to do with them, either. At least they're not aliens.