Fiber Art Play Date

We members of the CT Fiber Arts Collective love to play with our art.

Today one of our members,  Carol Eaton, threw open her home, outside and in, for a fiber art play date. And she opened her stash to us, making materials available for ice dyeing, confetti dyeing, shibori dyeing, stenciling, sun-printing, fabric painting, and stamping.  These are fiber artists' playthings, and this is what we do for fun.

Carol's quite the expert on fabric dyeing.  Take a look at her work:
http://carolreatondesigns.blogspot.com/.  Here she's demonstrating something to Karen and Christina.

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Our member Roz had been experimenting with rust dyeing. Carol is helping her take it one step further.



 I'm daunted by procedures that ask people to wear masks, but I did it today to do confetti dyeing.   Carol uses a deluxe model:

Karen made this knockout piece by tying balls into a piece of fabric with elastics, then dyeing.  Isn't it cool?

And Christina used a combination of folding and confetti dyeing to create this image like birch trees.  I told her it reminded me of the cover of an LL Bean catalog.

Here's Linda with her creation:

We had a grand and wonderful time, and a lunch that included gazpacho, green salad, pasta salad, no fewer than than two kinds of deviled eggs, and biscotti for dessert.  Sweet.

The shot above doesn't show every one of us, but I can tell you that of the ten members of the CT Fiber Arts Collective, nine of us played today.  Our tenth member, Carol, was on vacation in Ireland.  She would have loved this!

That's Mary Lachman on the left, with the white shirt.  She's just put out a book of poetry  by her grandfather, a country dentist in Indiana in the '30s and 40s.  http://www.marylachman.com/

I worked on several projects today.  I made these shibori pieces:

Shibori is a Japanese dyeing technique traditionally done with indigo dyes, which is what I used today.

Above is a closeup of the piece whose pattern I like the best.

This one is pretty cool too.

And how do you like this?  I have the indigo skin to show I've been playing with my art!

 I managed to get it on my lower leg and ankle.  Both of them, actually.  Any guesses as to how that happened?

I also did some sun prints.

The one on the left is an attempt to get an image something like that in the photo on the lower left.

 I created this sunprint with Pimatex cotton, gauze, two colors of Pebeo Setacolor paint, and some round sequins, all of it left out in the air to dry.  The inspiration photo is an aerial view of a wildfire in Colorado, with its wild colors  I used orange paint for mine and don't know why it ended up yellow.

The one below is the latest iteration of my occasional celestial theme:

I made this one with black Pebeo Setacolor paint on Pimatex cotton, with starry doodads strewn all over it.

I also made a spooky night sky using the confetti dyeing technique, which basically involves sprinkling powdered dye over wet fabric.

What a time we had!  So many thanks to Carol Eaton for sharing her dyes and her expertise!  Not to mention her home and driveway.

And thanks to all the rest of the ladies of the CT Fiber Arts Collective!  Do we know how to have fun or WHAT!?