Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Text'Art cottage excursions

Here are a few photos from an excursion to the Tomifobia trail - a lovely converted railway bed that runs from the border in Beebe to Ayer's Cliff.  It's nicely groomed and wild flowers, brambles and trees grow beautifully along it.  


Chicory.  Now if I could only make it grow in my wild flower garden!

Cut hay - hopefully this will be great background for something in photoshop.




Milkweed

Canada Lily

More texture - peeling paint.

It was hard to get close to this little guy but we could here him loud and clear.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Text'Art at the cottage

Five of us met at the cottage for 4 days of rust dyeing, colour vie, and dye painting, and swimming, rowing, eating, talking...... 

This is part of the workroom

 The drying room
 The dye mixing room
 And more work
 work by the others - all rust dyed

 These are my results with Colour vie after it had been iron-set and washed.  The white lines show the crocking that occurred in the wash - good thing these were cut up pieces.  It's a good way to apply paint that looks like texture, but it only sits on the top of the fabric and gives it a stiff hand.

 These are grey dyes.  The left is nickel, the middle charcoal and the outer is stormy grey.  Quite a different look to each although the photo makes the two lighter ones almost the same the stormy one is definitely lighter.  The wind is blowing so hard today it was hard to take a good picture!

 These are both rust dyed - and it's interesting to see how different the two sides are.  For rust dyeing we used a half and half vinegar and water combination and left the fabric with the rusty bits overnight to set. The lighter piece was also soaked in tea and it has made the background slightly pink and has made the rust a darker brown as opposed to the reddish hue that is seen in the green.


These are the two ends of a silk/cotton blend that was going to be a scarf.  And may be cut up for fabric.  

Interesting to see the different effects created with the different types of rusty objects.  My green piece was scrunched onto a very rusty old cookie sheet, and the other had old horseshoes.  The scarf was dyed with washers.  Hopefully the rest of the group will publish a few of their pieces on the 12bythedozen blog.