Just for kicks here are the previously made and available for purchase 12 by 12s.

Twelve by Twelves

I have been working this winter on making 12 x 12s. These are 12 inch by 12 inch fabric pictures that are then attached to a 3/4 inch deep framed painter's canvas. I use velcro to attach them so they can be exchanged or rotated in case you have several to match the season of the year. 

You can see in this first picture the one on the bottom right is still in the process of fabric selection. 

Most are not based yet but all are getting ready to under go the stitching process. 

They are all made with my hand dyed fabrics. 

Once finished these will be for sale on my website. 

Enjoy!

New Work

Three new pieces of fabric. FIrst one made with a pork chop bone. 

This one was made for a customer.

This last one is a close up of the cloth. Made the screen from a photo of a sculpture taken in DC.

Some of the dye was exhausted do the colors faded into something I wasn't expecting.  

Here it is full size with two matching fabrics that coincidentally (i.e. unplanned) I also made in the last two weeks.

New Work

This fabric I am going to reproduce in blue for a client.

end of the first week, Crow Barn 2012

 Above is a shot of the whole piece of cloth, Hope #2 . Below is a closer view of it. Notice the beams above us holding up the barn in the top picture.

 Below is a shot of the whole piece of cloth, Hope #1. I discharged much of the maroon/brown top layer that I posted a day or so ago,  by screening the word hope in many languages with discharge paste (takes out the color). I laid it in the sun for several hours to create the heat activated chemical reaction.  You can still see the very faint japanese characters for hope in the 1/3 left portion. I may go back in and highlight these lighter spaces with color.

 Below is a close up shot of Hope 1. I screened the various translations of hope in the vertical and facing both directions so they can be read by tilting your head to the left or the right. I used japanese, latvian, turkish, french, english, greek and hebrew

 These next four pictures are pieces of cloth that I made to go together.
This first one is made using a credit card

 This one is a mono print. I brayered the color on a plate then scraped it off using a curving motion with a credit card. It creates these nice wavy lines. I call it my Kandinsky piece.

 This one below is also mono printed. I brayered the dye on a plate then used the fingertips of my gloves to make the marks then I laid the print plate onto the fabric and the dye moved over the cloth in the pattern I had created. Mono printing means you make one print each time you lay the print plate on the cloth. You rebrayer and then put the plate on the cloth again. Very labor intensive. You can also put the cloth on the print plate but that is for larger pieces of cloth.

 This final picture is of a piece of cloth that is also mono printed. I swished the credit card back and forth across the print plate several times then applied it to the cloth.

What a great week this has been creatively. I have been making marks in a totally different way than previously and expanded my knowledge and ability for using several new tools in new ways.

Tomorrow is a day to go for a walk, get the laundry done, do some drafting for possible compositions for next week, and visit with my daughter Rachel. 

I am rethinking my ideas of what I wanted to work on while I was here during the second week and may end up going in a totally different direction.  We shall see. There is something about making a piece of cloth from marks your hand made vs using a screen or thermofax. So much to think about.

Crow Barn 2012, second post

 So I am working on pieces that portray hope. The piece above has the japanese characters for hope.
I put a soywax resist on the cloth and scraped over it a maroon/brown color. I left a few places where the original cloth shows through. There is a detail of one of the peaking through bits below.
I am going to remake this cloth because it was just beautiful and I could use it for piecing.

 This piece of cloth is in process still. I scraped two colors as the first layer with a credit card.
The second layer is the word hope written all over the piece in a pale value of turquoise using a needle nose bottle. Then I masked some areas and using a needle nose bottle again wrote on the top half with maroon with a touch of brown dye.  

 Here is a detail shot of the top half. You can see the turquoise hope behind the maroon words
"daily manna, seek my face,  living water"

I have switched the masking tape and will rewrite the word hope on the bottom with a stronger value of turquoise. Then I'll decide if there is more to do on it before it is "done.

the two pieces I showed yesterday I added another color to them. Once they are batched and washed I'll post pictures of them as well.

Crow Barn 2012

I just completed my third day of work at the Crow Barn Studios and Retreat Center.

The piece above is the darker piece  that originally was going to go with the blue/green one below.

the top one was the sad piece and the bottom one is the hope piece. 

I am going to have to add something to the bottom one so it blends better or perhaps they are now stand alone pieces or will go with others for a pieced composition.

The three pieces below are from the sheet of mark making exercises we did the first day.
Some other mark making exercises resulted in four more pieces of cloth that are a part of a palette of cloth. They are drying for one more layer of color to be added tomorrow.

I am working on a new series of pieces that communicate hope. More to come!
Karen