New Surface Design Group in South Florida!

An initial start-up meeting will be on Saturday, September 28th,     1 pm at Stitchcraft, 399 S. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. I'm hoping to get there for this meeting! If you live in the area I hope you'll attend.

Above are photos I played with in Photoshop some years back when I still had a working Photoshop program. At the very top is one of my fiber studies with petals and yarns,  stitched to a thin sheet of copper. Below is public art at the Palm Beach airport in Florida. From a distance I thought it was clay but when I blew up my photos I realized I was wrong. It is a beautiful installation. 

Sun Dyeing

When a friend wrote and asked which products I had used for sun dyeing, I didn't know. I'm not very good at recording my experiments. (note to self, remember that when it comes time for New Year resolutions) So I decided to try out some sun dyeing and take photos of what I use.

These are the three paints (two paints, one dye, all acrylics) I used on some plain white cotton. They are all very old fabric paints/dye, probably from the early 90's. I diluted them and spread them around my fabric. Then I spilled my water container all over the table and fabric, so the fabric was super wet.

I scrunched the fabric in a few places, and laid pine needles, and various leaves on its surface. After just over an hour in the afternoon sun it was dry. I carefully pulled the leaves off, unscrunched it, and gave it a press. I was pleased with the results. The photos are taken from the same angle so you can see what made which design.

The very clear leaf designs came from fresh camomile leaves that adhered very securely to the wet fabric. The more blurry designs came from dried leaves that simply sat on top of the fabric. The pine needles also gave a similar print. I was very happy with the valley and ridges created by scrunching the fabric.

Sun dyeing is so easy and fun, if you haven't tried it what are you waiting for?!