Cardboard Auditioning Frame and "The Luminous Ground"

The life cycle plan for the museum exhibit fabrics is to turn them into tote bags to sell in the Sandy Spring Museum's store.   I've been dyeing larger pieces of fabric to make sure there is coordinating fabric available for handles later.   I attempted to work with two extra strips of fabric for handles for the first piece and it was a pain to pin all 3 pieces down, so I quickly learned to simplify!

Another lesson in simplification has taken place.  One goal of the grant is to start working bigger.  No longer will 4 pieces of random printer paper work to frame up a piece for auditioning!   What to do?   Thank goodness for our local Plaza Art store.   They will give you a huge cardboard folder if you purchase a bunch of their fabulous fancy paper sheets.  I treasure the paper *and* the cardboard folder.   Today I sacrificed a cardboard folder in order to make an auditioning frame.   Ahhh...so much easier to use this free tool to gauge the right place to print the next layer.   I'll mark the edges with an erasable fabric marking pen before moving the frame.   

Blue shibori background for a Civil War piece

After doing Elizabeth Barton's exercise, "The List of Important Features", to learn about my personal voice, I determined that I admire designs based on grid structures.   I decided to fold and dye a simple shibori pattern that I knew would give me a grid structure to add interest to a background.   So far, so good!    The next challenge will be to integrate the printed and TAP layers with the shibori background. 

Carol Soderlund introduced me to another Christopher Alexander book - "The Luminous Ground."  This is the fourth book in his "The Nature of Order" series and deals with color.   Christopher Alexander proposes eleven color properties that relate directly to the first book's fifteen properties of wholeness (beauty).   Happily, shibori automatically creates the property "echoes" where similar patterns are created thereby echoing each other and building centers.   The corresponding color property is called "Family of Colors."   Shibori involves resist techniques where parts of the fabric receive the maximum amount of dye, resisted areas keep out dye to remain their original color and some areas only get a bit of dye resulting in tints.    Hence, you get a range of colors.   Shibori dovetails nicely with the project goals.  

"Love what you do and do what you love.  Don't listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it.  You do what you want, what you love.  Imagination should be the center of your life."  - Ray Bradbury