Fun Finds! Comparing Crazy Quilts at Sandy Spring Museum

The Sandy Spring Museum has some wonderful crazy quilts in their collection.   I was struck by the difference between two quilts - one created in 1870 and the other, I suspect, in the 1920-1930s.  I based my guess on the art deco embroidery stitch style and the fact that some of the fabrics are old enough to have deteriorated..  Wikipedia states that crazy quilting became popular in the late 1800s "likely due to the English embroidery and Japanese art that was displayed at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition."   Who knew? Thanks Wikipedia!

Quilt #1 - Crazy quilt made in 1870 by Elizabeth Trundle and Margaret Chiswell 

Quilt #2 - Crazy quilt donated to the Sandy Spring Museum by Lewis Moore & FLorence Grosso  (1920-1930?)

The 1870s quilt (Quilt #1) does show the satin stitching and heavy embellishment on seams and patches mentioned in the Wikipedia article on crazy quilts.  The move away from "boring" cotton to richer fabrics such as velvet and silk is typical.   The lack of lumpiness in the construction suggests that the patches were minimally overlapped.  The theme of embroidered flowers, berries and animals is beautifully unified by the same embroidery stitch in gold & white thread throughout the quilt.  A few of the patches are even painted velvet.  This quilt has a Victorian feel to it.

Quilt #1 detail - Note the unifying embroidery at the seams

Quilt #1 detail - Painted sunflower on velvet

The Brooklyn Museum had some interesting insight into crazy quilting too stating that "[crazy quilts]...were made possible by newly affordable luxury fabrics produced by the growing textile industry and encouraged by women's magazines dismissive of "old-fashioned", "dreary" cotton patchwork.  That's amusing to me as organic fibers are all the rage in America today.   Fabulous cotton fabrics in a bewildering array of solids, batiks, prints and so much more overflow my wonderful local candy quilting shops.  Quilts these days are only dreary if that's the feeling they are trying to impart!

Let's look at the art deco influenced quilt (Quilt #2).   This quilt feels more utilitarian.   It is less planned and more free form in construction and embellishment.  The maker must have had a basketful of strips - the design is more linear than the 1870s quilt..  There is less luxury/patterned fabric being used.  The maker offsets this by embroidering over whole patches.   It's hard to tell from the photos, but there are big lumpy overlaps in the construction.  The maker of this quilt focused their creative energies on an abundance of art deco inspired stitch patterns in many colors.   I wonder if it was a sampler inspired by yet another woman's magazine tracking the trends?   Whoever made this quilt, they had fun with it!

Quilt #2 detail - Many thread colors and stitch patterns are used.  Three patches above are covered in stitching.

Quilt #2 detail - more embroidery stitches and colors.  
Some of the embroidery stitches are similar to the stitch used on the 1870s quilt seams.

Quilt #2 detail - more embroidery stitches and colors because I couldn't bring myself to edit them out...   The same patterns are scaled up and down in size and variations of stitches are used to add interest.

Quilt #2 detail - the green stitch above was tantalizingly situated on the fold of the fabric, but I could tell that the motif was being reversed 180 degrees each time it was stitched 

Quilt #2 detail - here is another instance of the green stitching where all of the motifs are in the same orientation.   Sadly, you can see some of the disintegrating fabric.

Quilt #2 detail - my favorite stitch pattern!  The way the maker used two partial "trees" to fit the design into the available space speaks to Christopher Alexander's property of roughness that I talk about here in my blog.

The Sandy Spring Museum collection also contains a set of 1930's electric bills with advertisements on the back designed to sell more electricity.   I enjoyed reading about the latest and greatest appliances and services.   I want to use the crazy quilt format as inspiration to integrate the advertisements into a surface design piece.   It will give me the opportunity to have fun with the art deco inspired stitches too!   Are you thirsty after reading all of this?  Maybe you should get a chilled drink out of the refrigerator models below!

1930s Advertisement on the back of a Potomac Electric Power Company bill

Strong Centers, Boundaries and Contrast

Strong Centers, Boundaries and Contrast are three of the Fifteen Properties of Wholeness defined by Christopher Alexander in his book "The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Book 1 - The Phenomenon of Life."    These postcard sized embroidered collages are my attempt to grasp each principle.

Strong Centers - Good Example

Strong Centers - Bad Example

After reading about Strong Centers, I created the piece on the left.   It started out alright with some tidy circles and lines, but took a sharp turn down ugly lane.  The piece displeased me - the lines are messy, the embroidery doesn't seem to relate to the collage below and the dead center placement leaves that bullseye floating awkwardly alone.  If you've read some of my previous posts, you'll know that I've given myself permission to risk making ugly art in my explorations.   (I just don't plan to post most of it...)   I decided not to attempt to fix this piece.   Once you've pierced the card stock collage, you're stuck with a hole.  I cut extra collage paper blanks for this eventuality.  On the right is a piece I consider to be much more successful.   Besides  pleasing me aesthetically, it demonstrates the principle of Strong Centers more fully.

My design group of 6 fiber artists has decided to study one of Christopher Alexander's principles each month.   Happily, we discussed Strong Centers in November.  We brought examples of the principle we're studying to kick start the discussion.  Some examples were challenges.   Does the example have a center(s)?  What constitutes a center?   What makes a center strong or weak?   We had a lot of opinions.  We dug back into the source book.   My understanding of Strong Centers was too limited upon my first reading.   Group discussion broadened my thinking.   The piece of the left is just a bullseye sitting in the middle of open space.   Yikes!  This did not result in beauty or wholeness to my eyes.   The idea that multiple supporting centers can strengthen a design and build to a strong center made the piece on the right much more successful.   I used 4 small orange circles in the corners bisected by a partial frame and additional circles around the small black circle to achieve a Strong Center.   I purposefully did not center the design on the postcard sized paper to remind myself that's not necessarily the kind of "centering" we're seeking.   I can identify several more principles in this design - Roughness, Levels of Scale and Contrast.  I suspect this design also qualifies for Positive Space and Echoes.   I'm looking forward to revisiting these pieces as I learn about each principle to see how many of the properties I've used unwittingly.

Boundaries

Boundaries was a fairly concrete concept after dealing with Strong Centers.  I've always liked designs with strata and clear delineations.   We'll see if my understanding needs adjusting when the design group reaches boundaries!   This design is a thick frame around a center area.

Contrast

Contrast was another concept that came to our design group easily.  We were used to thinking of color contrast, but were able to broaden our thinking to find many other kinds of contrast.  We brought more examples than we had time to review.   Contrast is everywhere!   We had good discussions on the necessary degree of contrast for effectiveness.   We pondered contrast in themes - summer/winter, apples/oranges, wet/dry, dogs/cats, rain/sunshine, male/female, etc...   It was fun to play with contrast in the piece above::

• light and dark
• odd and even
• shiny and matt (hard to discern in the photo!)
• open and closed shapes
• thick and thin (1/3 to 2/3 proportions taken up by shapes)
• overlapping versus non-overlapping shapes
• filled versus unfilled shapes

If you've read this far, you'll know I'm way over my word count goal:-)  I'll just finish by saying how valuable it is to view design from a new viewpoint.   It's interesting to contrast the traditional elements and principles of design with Christopher Alexander's vision.

New Color Mixing for Dyers - Tool Acquisition - Hello Turquoise!

One goal of my grant is to acquire the tools of a working artist.   Here's a glimpse of the color reference notebook I made last week in Color Mixing for Dyers Part 1 with Carol Soderlund at PRO Chemical & Dye    This close to Halloween (O.K., I admit to procrastinating on putting out this post...) I can definitely say it's a resource of monster proportions.   

This sample book of Procion MX Reaction dyes includes 3 different color families created from different combinations of yellow/red/blue pure dyes.  We dyed over a 1000 color swatches in the workshop!

Each team of dyers was assigned a pure yellow, red and blue dye to combine to create a unique color family along with some fun side assignments.  The process went a long way to increasing my understanding of Procion MX Reactions Dyes.   One of the families used Deep Navy as it's blue component.   I picked Deep Navy as my blue for the grant as I liked the deep shades it could dye.   However, it turns out to be a bully...a little Deep Navy goes a long way!   It's a bit limiting too...and my head was turned by the lighter, brighter blues used by the other 2 groups.   So pretty, so tempting, so much more available range in brighter colors... Carol suggested that I add a "cousin" to my dye family of Tangerine, Strongest Red and Deep Navy.   Hello Turquoise!   Welcome to the the extended family of color happiness...

Turquoise dyed at  different strengths

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.  - Ralph Waldo Emerson

All About Image Transfers with Jane Davila - My Favorites

The Potomac Fiber Arts Guild hosts speakers at our monthly guild meetings.  This month it was Jane Davila who gave a great talk on the elements of design.   I was only in town for one of her workshops, but happily "All about Image Transfers" was the most useful for my grant work.   Here's the class description:   

  "Learn direct and indirect transfer methods to add images to your projects. Transfer Artist Paper (TAP), acrylic paint, solvent and medium transfers, plus direct printing on a variety of fabrics, will be covered. Students transfer images from their own photos."

I used the B&W and color images below taken from the Sandy Spring Museum archives as my test samples.

Illustration from "Indians of Early Maryland" by Harold Manakee (not sweating copyright issues because the sketch was created in the 1600's and reprinted by Mr. Manakee)

Homeopathic medicine kit bottles

We used Transfer Artist Paper (TAP) in class.  The directions were simple.   I goofed on my first TAP transfer anyway...   Being impatient, I peeked after a bit of ironing, then continued to iron.   I pulled the TAP off half way, but got distracted talking to a friend.   The TAP cooled down and didn't transfer well.   I tried again *following the directions* with excellent results.   This process was more involved than directly printing an image on prepared fabric sheets, but the image can be transferred onto fabric, paper, wood, glass, canvas, metal and more according to packaging making it more versatile process.  I think that this will be the easiest transfer process to integrate into my work.   I'm looking forward to spending time with TAP!   I hope I remember to reverse the images before printing them as this indirect method produces a mirror image.

TAP test - Top left photo of fabric is first attempt with timing issues and top right is TAP paper after transfer showing how much ink wasn't transferred.    Bottom left shows second attempt on fabric with the TAP paper at it's right almost completely transferred.  Only a shadow of ink remains untransferred.  

Direct printing onto Jacquard Inkjet Fabric Sheets worked just as well as TAP.  We tried out silk and cotton.  I missed out on trying the ExtravOrganza Digital Textile sheets, but knew I had squirreled some away in my stash to test at home.   Jane Davila advised us to use an Epson printer with Durabrite ink for best results, so I've added one to my artist tool kit.   The trick will be figuring out how to integrate these fabrics as another layer of the surface design.

Jacquard Inkjet Fabric Sheets - cotton on top and silk on the bottom

The final method that I want to use is a laser toner copy and acrylic paint transfer method.  Once again, it was quick to do and the results were great.   Once again, the question is how to integrate the image as a layer in the composition.   This is an indirect transfer method, so the image printed in reverse.  I loved this method because I already have the necessary supplies at home.

Laser toner copy and acrylic paint transfer method

Image transfer techniques have come a long way since I experimented with Bubble Jet Set in early 2000.   It was great to have Jane Davila walk us through a variety of  methods showing us the various effects that we could expect.   A sample speaks a thousand words...   Some artists in the class preferred methods that gave less perfect results.  The partial transfers lend themselves to softened, mysterious and aged looking images.  I loved the processes that gave complete transfers.   I cut down on my own experimentation time dramatically thanks to Jane's tips and tricks.  I recommend the class and Jane Davila as an instructor if  you're interested in doing image transfers.

Neutral Color Study Courtesy of Carol Soderlund

I'm still using the invaluable information I gained in Carol Soderlund's "True Colors" Workshop for mixing dyes.   I used her method for creating neutral colors from the three dyes used for the grant (tangerine MX# 112, strongest red MX# 312N and deep navy MX# 414).   My first thought was that I wasn't using much dye, so I doubled the amount of dye concentrate.  The color swatches came out really dark, but lovely.   I should have stirred more, but even with the mottling I can see the colors...  The colors look lighter on my screen than they do in person even without using flash on my camera, but I photographed all the studies at the same time in the same location.   Hopefully, the viewer will get some idea of the comparison.

I decided to use the original amount of dye for the next study, but I got distracted and left the swatches sit for four days.   This second test came out very matte looking compared to the intensity of the swatches above.   The beauty of using ProChemical & Dye's MX reaction dye deep navy #414 is that it allows you to get really dark values.  Apparently, I'm being less than subtle whacking everything with the navy stick...

This leads me to wonder what the swatches would look like with half the dye strength added.   Now that I'm all set up with Tyvek labels on pins, a dedicated set of cups and dye concentrate made up, it's easy to do more studies.   There were two surprises.   The colors were deeper in shade than I expected.   Also, each color didn't necessarily look like a paler version of the previous test.   The blue dye dominated in many cases.
                           

This study prompted me to try another study.   In this case, I used the original strength for yellow and red, but cut the blue down to half strength to see what the colors would look like without blue dominating.  The red component showed thru in this study in a satisfying manner.  I got some richer brown, green and cranberry shades for variety.

One of Carol's messages is that her classes are just jumping off points for further exploration.   I'm  taking her up on that idea...   One of the purposes of these studies was to find a good outliner color for my Deconstructed Printing Screens (DSP).   I found a dark navy and rich chocolate brown (1st and 3rd samples on left below) that I loved.   I tried for a dark green (rightmost sample), but came up with a really rich medium green that I'll be using for sure.   I used a lot of dye for this color, but it was almost all tangerine, so not a dark shade after all.   I'll be relearning that lesson regularly I fear!   I came up with a lovely dove grey (color #2 from the left) by accident.  When you're cutting stacks of fabric strips for swatches, sometimes the fabric glues itself together on the edges.   I didn't realize that I'd dunked a pair of swatches into the dye until it was too late.   I immediately removed one, but liked the color so well that I tucked it into it's own cup to batch.   How to replicate that color?!   So, I've earmarked that color recipe for a value gradation study.  My "true colors" are happening!

I'm so grateful to have had the chance to study with her!   I've signed up for her Neutral Territory: 50 Shades of Grey and 50 Shades of Brown with Carol Soderlund class at Pro Chemical & Dye in April 2015 to continue focusing on color work.

Screen, Dye and Discharge

One of the things I initially loved about Deconstructed Screen Printing (DSP) is the orderliness of a row of prints.   Watching the prints change as the dye dissolved was fascinating all by itself.  However, one of my goals for the class was to learn to move beyond the grid composition.   Also, there was general interest in the class on how to unite print blocks in a piece.   Here's a demonstration by Kerr which shows the typical grid composition.

Kerr's garment fabrics show a much more sophisticated use of DSP.  She talked about how she's moved on from the basic techniques she taught in the 2007 "Deconstructed Screen Printing for Fabric and Paper" DVD.   So, she guided us to discover answers for ourselves!

One simple way that we moved away from block printing was to paint hot wax on our screens to break up the edges.

I've used a similar resist technique in other types of screen printing where you tear a strip of masking tape down the center and tape it to the sides of the screen to give an organic look to your print edges. Hand torn newspaper masks can do the same thing to frame a print.   Please comment if you have other ways to manipulate edges on your screen.

I shared this piece of fabric made in the workshop "Screen, Dye and Discharge - Enlarging Your Markmaking Vocabulary with Kerr Grabowski" in a previous blog.  It shows a single layer of screen printing using different colors and values of thickened dyes.  I laid down the prints at random changing the orientation of the screen.   One of the great tips from Kerr was to unify the individual screen prints by painting in thickened dyes around them.   Yeah!  This works really well.  I found it so appealing that I turned it into a fingerpainting exercise ...with gloves on of course...

I created a second DSP screen using pipe cleaners, string and part of the textured placemat for the next layer.   Wish I'd thought to get a photo of it before printing!   There were enough pipe cleaner petals to make a loose flower shape.  Once again, I printed the screen randomly in different orientations to unify the design.  You can see the whole piece down below.

Detail shot of the pipe cleaner flower and texture from placemat and string

Now that I'd tried out the screening and dyeing portion of class, it was time to move on to discharging.  I wanted to create a focal point this time.   I cut a large freezer paper stencil and ironed it onto the fabric.  I used a screen to squeegee on the discharge paste.   Sadly, the screen wasn't big enough to cover the entire stencil.   I applied the discharge paste in 4 quadrants.   I was initially surprised to discover that the center of the stencil had discharged beautifully, but the outer edges had not.   It occurred to me that the area in the center of the motif was where the 4 quadrants overlapped...4 times the application of discharge paste.   So, the mystery was solved and I brought home an object lesson!   Who knows, someday this fade technique may be just what I'm looking for...

I still like the overall piece.  Notice how the discharge paste didn't work on the blue dye at the center of the freezer paper stencil.   I got a hidden color from a mixed dye showing through to add interest.  The transparency of MX Reaction dyes is so wonderful to layer.   The fact that the discharging wasn't completely successful was disappointing, but it's an opportunity to work back into the piece.   Kerr routinely works back into her pieces which is another chance to unify your design.

As I was glorying in all this color and busyness, I peeked over at the neighboring table to see Andi creating a gorgeous piece using white space and a simple DSP background of lines to unify her piece.   Wow!   This elegant design speaks to me of serenity.  Andi's piece doesn't read as a grid composition, so she broke out of the block syndrome too.

Janis's whimsical piece is alive with color and movement.   I can see blocks in the background, but they aren't the dominant feature of this design.   She's unified her prints using repetition of shape and rhythm.  I found it interesting to compare this piece to other pieces on her blog.

The blocks in Cindi's piece are integrated into the design giving it a feeling of fracture and layering. The analogous colors and nautilus motif also work to unify the piece.   After thinking about the successful ways that people integrated their prints, I think that it comes back to good uses of the principles and elements of design.    

Fiber Artist Studio Tips

I picked up several useful tips from Kerr Grabowski's class at Pro Chemical & Dye...

The first tip Kerr claims to have learned from a student in a previous class...   Cut the plastic lids for your containers so that you can leave the spoons in place.   I've reluctantly cleaned spoons in the past when closing up shop for the night, I've tried covering the tubs with plastic wrap to get around cleaning the spoons and I've found tubs left open overnight with that lovely scum layer dried on top to skim off...   I'm very fond of this tip!   Perhaps you've struggled with cleaning up versus being ready to roll the next day too?

Never clean your spoons before you're done with a color again!

The second tip came from my table mate, Lois.   She brought a pressure sprayer (typically a gardening tool) to spray our table and make dye paint clean up a breeze.  Thanks Lois!

The third tip came from Cindi and it was something completely unexpected!  Cindi uses car washing bucket inserts in her studio.   The "grit guard" allows grit to settle in the bottom of your bucket while sponges and rags sit on top of the guard.   Cindi turns the guard upside down and uses it to keep fabric submerged.  This would work well in your soda ash bucket or while immersion dyeing.   The "grit guard" would likely stamp or rub well too.   Love those dual use tools!

The final tip from Kerr was better T-pins.   I've been conserving a 50 pack of  blunted, bent 1.5" long chunky *one-size-fits-all*  T-pins sold by the local sewing store.   Who knew they came in different sizes?   My tablemate shared her dainty size 16 t-pins.  They were sharp, thin and vastly improved the experience of pinning down the fabric to the print board.   She didn't gasp and dive for each pin if one landed on the floor.   You can buy them by the half pound here!   This was the first thing I purchased when I got home from the workshop.