Welcome to my new blog! The old one, Poetry and Quilting, which you can still find here, will remain archived there for those who might be interested in the beginnings of my journey into fiber art. The new blog will include all aspects of fiber art, explorations in dyeing and writing I’m exploring, not just quilting and poetry. This is also a new website that will do a better job, I hope of letting me share work with you.
I want to start by sharing with you some images from a workshop I recently took with Claire Benn at the Crow Timber Barn. We worked with raw earth pigments, which we made fabric paints of with soy milk (which we made every day). Here’s an image with most of the pieces I worked on at this two-week workshop.
You can see that the color palette is limited, but I was surprised at the shades of reds, yellows, blues, and greens. The pigments are heavy and will often sink to the back of the fabric so that you can sometimes choose whether you like the front or back better. We used thick, blunt brushes to apply the paint, and I liked the painterly effect the technique gave.
You can really see it here, in a gray/black piece I dyed and intended to use for a backing, but found I was intrigued by the nuances of color, and may do something else with it.
You can also see this “painterly” effect below, in a piece I painted using all the shades of red ochres, then putting them all together at the end. I’m working on a project where some of the fiber art I’m doing will be in conversation with poems I’ve written. For the one below, I’m thinking of my poem “Reasons to Live: the Color Red” from The Small Door of Your Death.
I also like the way the browns and blacks moved into the reds in the piece below, in process, which I’m calling “Recovery.” I’ve done some hand stitching on it with the word “recovery” hidden within the stitched symbols. I don’t plan to quilt this one but will do some invisible basting on the backside to attach the black backing.
I was working on the stitching for this piece at another workshop I took this summer at Shakerag with Susan Brandeis when one of the participants who is in long term recovery looked at my piece and burst into tears when I told her what it was called. She said it was exactly like that for her, being muddled in the much and moving into something lighter. It felt good to feel that something I had made echoed in a deep and genuine way with someone.
I liked this medium so much that I bought some earth minerals from the company Earth Pigments and am now working on making samples and playing around with the pigments. Here are some experiments hanging in my studio (when you work with earth pigments and soy, you have to let the fabric “cure” for about a month before stitching or doing any further surface design. I let mine hang.
I’ll continue to post on my experiments with earth minerals, but I’m not giving up on dyeing and painting with Procion MX dyes, so stay tuned.
A little lagniappe. We harvested our first bananas today!!
