100 Day Project 2018

June will see the start of my 100 Day Project for 2018.  A 100 Days Project (or Challenge) is really just what it says - 100 days in a row of doing something creative, again and again and again.  I've completed two 100 Days before and I've found them immensely rewarding.  I've also found them frustrating and challenging, but that's all part of the package!

Day 1-20 of 100 Days of Scissors.

Last year I completed 100 Days of Scissors, where I cut paper and formed collages.  I developed my composition skills and now I have a sketchbook full of ideas and inspiration.  I also realised that I prefer to cut to a drawn line rather than free hand!

My first 100 Days was 100 Days of Faces, with the intention of getting comfortable with sketching faces and using them in my work.  Again, I have a sketchbook full of ideas and inspiration and I'm much more confident with my face drawing skills.

Sketchbook page from 100 Days of Faces

This year, the organisation that has previously hosted the 100 Days Project NZ is taking a break, so I'm working with Lisa Call and Kate Hartmann of Tutere Gallery, who have jointly developed their own 100 Day program.  I thought about working on my own, but I know myself well enough to know that to stick with it and commit, I need the accountability and community that a group can offer!

There are different tiers of support with Lisa and Kate's program and I believe the in-person programs are full, but there are still spaces to join the on-line program running through email and Facebook if you'd like to jump on board and join in.

One of the hardest things about 100 Days is deciding what sort of project to do.  It has to be small enough to complete EVERY SINGLE DAY, challenging enough to stretch you and interesting enough but easy enough to stick with over the course of more than three months.

Then you need to think about what you want to do with the final works.  Are they just inspiration for future projects?  Do you want to have a body of work to exhibit or sell?  These decisions will also influence what project you decide to do.

To help me make some of those decisions, I got out my trusty pen and paper and did some brainstorming.  What did I want to get out of this year's project?

• help me get into a regular studio habit
• get me working with joy and curiosity
• find something new
• a body of work or a collection of inspiration

Then I brainstormed ideas for projects:

• flora printing
• botanical drawing
• bird drawing
• clothes making
• fabric collage
• colour - dyeing, painting, colouring fabric
• free-motion quilting
• surface design
• art on the iPad
• improv piecing
• drawing patterns

Then I put those two lists together and I've come up with something that I think will work on all levels for me.  My intention is to 'renovate' my hand-dyed fabric stash.  This means that every day, for 100 days, I'll take a piece of my hand-dyed fabric and I'll add another layer of surface design to it. Whether that be another layer of dye, a printed pattern overlay, perhaps taking colour away with discharge dyeing, or even drawing straight onto the fabric.

  

Either way, after 100 days, I'll have 100 surface design samples; I'll have tried out lots of new ideas and practiced old ones; I'll have got back into the habit of regularly wet studio time and I'll hopefully have had lots of fun!  

Now I just need to come up with a funky title for my project and a hashtag that I can use on Instagram to collate my images.  #100daysoffabricrenovation is a bit clunky.  Any ideas?

And have you ever done a 100 Day Project?  Are you doing one this year?  What were your challenges and triumphs?  I'd love to hear from you.

Results of my wheat flour resist play

So later in the day, my fabric (previously covered in wheat flour resist) was dry.  And there I learnt my first lesson.  Pin down the edges of your fabric really well.  It curls as it dries and if the edges curl too much it's hard to paint.

On my first piece I painted the shapes with runny fabric paint.  I had some turquoise Jacquard Dynaflo, which is quite liquid and I added a little black Jacquard textile paint to darken it.  I crackled the unpatterned part of the fabric and painted those marks too.

On my next piece I painted household bleach.  Uh oh.  Nothing happened.  This was hand dyed fabric, dyed with procion MX dyes so I just assumed it would dishcharge.  But I didn't do what Jane Dunnewold says to do - TEST YOUR FABRIC!  

I didn't want to lose my written pattern, so I painted over the bleach with some slightly diluted purple fabric paint.  I'm cutting that section off in the above photo because I wanted to wash the plain bleach section off.  You need to leave the fabric painted pieces to cure for 24 hours seeing as you can't iron them to heat set them.

I thought the lack of reaction to bleach may have been because my bleach was too old.  I have a worm septic system, and worms and bleach don't go well together so I don't use bleach very often.  So I folded, tied and dipped some commercial black homespun in the bleach.  Nope, my bleach was fine.  Instant reaction.

And it ended up a really neat piece of fabric!  It's just been rinsed in vinegar water in the pick above.  Vinegar neutralises the bleach and then I put it through a rinse cycle in my washing machine.

And here is a closer pic when it's been dried and ironed (ish!).

So here is my first fabric paint piece.  Nice crisp patterning with a few crackly bits.  The crackle section is interesting too.  I was a bit nervous about crackling it too much, but I could have been a bit more vigorous.

You can just see a faint pattern from my bleach discharge.  Lesson learnt - test your fabrics.  

 And here is the writing piece.  Nice texture.  Doesn't really look like words!  I think my paste was a bit goopey and thick.  I might try again with a thinner coat of paste and I might try with cornflour paste - less gluey.

For all that effort, I question whether I could have got similar marks from stamping.  Probably with the square/circle marks.  But I can't get the crackle or the writing texture - unless I want to start playing with batik and wax - so I think it's worth it for those sorts of textures and I'll stick to using it for that.

But fun was had and that's the most important part!

Wheat flour resist on fabric 1 (and given up resisting a self-portrait)

I realise I haven't got many photos of me on this blog - my excuse is that I'm the one behind the camera.  But I can hold the camera and take a photo of myself, it's not that hard.  And I figure I'm getting a bit old for the self-conscious, avoid photos at all cost act.    So that's me folks, getting ready for some surface design play!  

I was out for a walk this morning when Hubby drove by with the kids in the car - he was taking them off for a couple of hours - excellent!!  I almost ran back home because I'd had this surface design trial in mind, but I wanted to do it unassisted by children.  I'm a mess magnet at the best of times, and this promised to be a disaster if the midget mess-magnets helped too.

It's a sunny day so I decided to work outside to keep mess to a minimum.  I pinned out my bits of hand-dyed fabric out on a polystyrene sheet, and spread out my reference book.

Are you looking for an excellent surface design book?  Art Cloth:  A Guide to Surface Design for Fabric by Jane Dunnewold, you won't regret it.  There are soooo many things in here I want to try.

Today I was trying a wheat flour resist.  It's easy - mix up flour and water.  I started with a cup of plain white wheat flour.  I ended up using about 3/4 cup of cold water.  You want a batter-like consistency.

I don't own a squeegee so I used an old credit card!  Pin your fabric at one end, smooth a thin layer over the fabric and then pin down the other sides.  Lumps are a bit of a problem, so keep your batter as lump free as possible.

So when they are nicely covered you can get to work making marks in the resist.  I had plenty of resist left over after covering the fabric.  My fabric size is probably a bit more than a fat quarter.

Hubby owns an engineering shop - very convenient for pipe off cuts!

I wrote in it using the blunt end of a kebab stick.  I think my resist layer was a little thick - it wasn't as easy or as clear as I thought it would be.  I was going to wait and try more writing when it had dried a little more, but I forgot.

I learnt to have a rag handy for wiping your stamp off between stamps.  If you don't, the print gets bigger and more uneven as the goop layer on the stamp gets thicker and picks up more of the resist.  You can see that happening above with the row of circles stamped from left to right.

All stamped and done.  I left some blank areas to play with the 'crackle' effect where you scrunch it up once it's dry and then your dye/paint/discharge mix goes in the crackle lines.

Now it has to dry completely.  Tomorrow I'll be doing the next step.  Stay tuned!

Ghostly

Here's a sequence of photographs showing what happened to one of my white fat quarters.  You can see the black lines drawn with a fabric marker in a rough grid pattern underneath.  Then I scraped on red fabric paint with a tiling tool.

I diluted some of the red paint with water and used a foam brush in another grid pattern.  I put it out to dry with bits and pieces on to try and get a sun print but that didn't work.  No matter.

A week or so later, my daughter was painting with acrylics and squeezed out way too much.  So I mixed her colours up with some textile medium, ironed down some leftover freezer paper shapes I had and rolled (using a brayer) the paint over the shapes.  

That technique wasn't so successful.  The brayer would catch the edge of the freezer paper and roll it up around itself and so I couldn't go back to cover the shape entirely.  

But I'm still really happy with it.  I like the ghostly image.  The not-quite-there glimpse, which is similar to the flash of bird you often see in real life.  Just an impression as it flits by.

What do you think?

Rust dyeing 2

I thought I'd show you the results of a second round of rust dyeing.  I re-soaked and re-wrapped my two fat quarters round a big 'ol rusty piece of scrap and this time I was better pleased with the results, a little less 'nasty rag' and a little more 'rust-dyed fabric':

So then I thought I'd try my next experiment with one of the pieces.  I read on dip and stain that tannins will change your rust marks to black.  Tannins got me thinking about tea and so whilst I was having my morning brew, I pleated and folded and layered with round tea bags, poured on some boiling water and there you have it:

I have to say, I was much more impressed with the result of this than with just the rust.  And so easy to do.

I said I'd show you my next two base pieces.  And that's them above.  White fat quarter(ish) size and all I've done so far is draw straggly lines on one and write illegibly on the other with a fabric marker.  But it's the layering of different effects that counts in surface design, so this is just the first element to provide texture and interest.  

I'm having fun with this, it's neat to discover how much you can do really simply at home in five minute stretches.

Rust dyeing for distraction

At the moment (well, in the few moments I have squeezed around all the other things that seem to happen at this time of year) I'm trying out some surface design techniques to make some samples for a surface design round robin that I'm planning to run next year.

So when the kids came to me with a fight disagreement, I employed my favourite parenting trick - distraction.

"Muuuuum, she broke my spaceship!"

"But Muuuuuuum, he wouldn't give me back my battle droid!"

"Really?  Oh dear.  Well, how about you come outside with me and wrap vinegary fabric around this big rusty metal thing?"

So they did.  Then I wrapped plastic bags around the wet fabric to keep it wetter for longer and took a cheesy photo of the kids.  It took about five minutes and, what do you know, the fight was forgotten.

Two days later, this is what we had.  Nobody was particularly impressed.  I think it looks like they are rags I've used to wipe up something nasty!  So I soaked them and wrapped the whole thing up again.

But it is only the first layer of surface design after all.  I'm aiming to do another four layers/techniques so I'm sure it'll get better.  I have two other pieces of cloth which I'm twiddling around with too, guess I might have to show them to you tomorrow.