Stamped fabric

I made a few more foam stamps using the Magic Stamp blocks pressed onto some natural plant material that I found.   The top one is made of dried up Echinacea flowers and the one below it is made of a pine branch.   I used opaque textile paint on navy blue fabric.  These stamps are a lot of fun to make because they are your own unique design and the great thing is you can use them whenever you want on whatever surface you want.  I sometimes stamp on recycled tea bags to make greeting cards!

Piece for Stittsville Library show

For the last few years in November Out-of-the-Box has had a show at the Stittsville Library.  This year the show theme is "A Way with Words".  I made a piece using the word " Bird".  I sewed together hand painted fabric scraps and printed the white fabrics with my hand carved stamps.  The show will be hanging at the library until the end of November.  At the bottom you can see my new Cardinal stamp which I just carved.  I used a photo and carved it using Speedycarve rubber.   My piece measures 16 X 20 inches and is mounted on a painted canvas.

Here's a closer photo of my machine stitching.

New stamps

I made a few new stamps the last few months.  These are both made using the Magic Stamp foam blocks and pressing them onto a surface while the blocks are heated up. Natural shapes make wonderful stamps.  For the background fabric I often use fabric that I've coloured before using leftover textile paint.  The first stamp is made from a pattern on some packaging material.  The circles are about three inches in diameter. The second stamp is made from the brown fiddleheads left in the fall after a fern has grown in the summer. My collection of stamps is growing...

Eco printing in August

I hadn't done any eco printing since the workshop in June so when we had a cool spell earlier in August, I did quite a bit of eco printing on watercolour paper.  I bought a roast pan at Canadian Tire and got to work.  I collected some plants in the woods nearby and at a friend's place outside Ottawa.   I printed them on 90 lb and 140 lb watercolour paper.   Here are some photos of the results.

 This one is a Purple Aster plant.  Colours came out well.

This one is Wild Raspberry leaves.

 This is Wild Grape leaves on a branch.

more in August

Next I took a zen doodle and transferred it to fabric with a Sharpy marker.  I plan to add pink borders and continue the piece into the borders.  It took a lot of time to fill in all the details but it has potential I think.  It measures 18 X 24 inches so far.

August art

On the August long weekend I starting working on a few things.  First of all I took out my Rayna Gillman book called Create Your Own Free-Form Quilts.  In it she teaches how to cut up fabrics and sew them together into strips and then sew the units together into beautiful quilts.  There's something so freeing about just sewing together strips and seeing where it takes you.   I have a lot of my own hand painted fabrics so I cut up some of them and made a small quilt top.  Here is the result of that.  It measures 19 X 20 inches right now.

Eco printing

It was a busy week!  On June 11 and 12th we had an eco printing class at Wabi Sabi with Wendy Feldberg.  We learned the wonderful process of preparing papers and protein (silk and wool) and cellulose (cotton and linen) fabrics for printing with plant materials and rust and then doing the printing.  Wendy is a wonderful teacher.  We learned a huge amount in the two days.  Here are some photos of my eco printed fabrics.

This one is of a silk scarf I cold printed before the class.  It was done on silk with red onion skins.  I left the bundle rolled up in a jar for a month.  I actually didn't do any preparing of the fabric besides washing in Synthropol.

This is a print on 90 pound watercolour paper.  You can see the rose leaf which I made more distinct by putting iron water on it.

Here are another couple of prints on watercolour paper.  You can see the red hibiscus.

Here is a piece of rusting done by putting rusty bits on the paper, sprinkling on some black tea and vinegar.  Afterwards I brushed some prereduced indigo on it.

This is an eco print on Japanese shoji paper bought at East Wind in Ottawa.  This paper is fine yet tough.  Some of the class members got silk-like prints on it.

This is an eco print and rusting on linen fabric.  You can see how the iron rebar made very dark marks.  There is a faded red flower print in the middle.

This is also on repurposed linen with mostly yellow onion skin and some rusting.

This is a silk crepe scarf eco printed with lots of red cabbage and coreopsis and other plants.  The crepe silk worked quite well.

Another silk crepe scarf eco printed with rusting and plant materials.  Looks even better in person!

Postcard playdate June 8th

On June 8th a group of us had a playdate with Juanita Sauve at Kitchissippi United Church.  She taught us how to make her beautiful landscape postcards.  I really enjoyed the process and Juanita  did a great job teaching it to us!   Here are two postcards I made at the playdate.  I want to perfect my choice of fabrics and the stitching afterwards.  I might try it with some of my naturally dyed silks.  Out-of-the-box is making postcards which will be shown at FibreFest in Almonte this September as a fundraiser for the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum.

new stamp

In May I made a new foam stamp using a Magic Foam block.   I pressed it onto some star anise and got a neat flower like design.  Here's a stamped piece with my new block around the outside.  In the middle I had stamped one of the corners in the wrong direction but I stamped over it in opaque pink paint and when it was dry restamped it.  It's a slightly different colour but it still works.

my video

We had a successful show!  Lots of visitors and lots of sales.  Liana Voia came to videotape all of the OOTB artists who were present.  I sold about half of the sales items I had brought to sell.  Here's a video of me talking about the pieces I had hanging at the show:

Fibre Fling 4

On April 10-11 I will be showing my artwork at Fibre Fling 4 which is held every spring at Kitchissippi United Church. 

Here is a piece that I will have there in the colour challenge section.  It's for the green challenge and I've named it Hello Spring.  The background is a collage of green fabrics.  Then I machine quilted it over a piece of sheer material and put a silhouette of a blackbird made of black leather on top.  I machine embroidered the details on it.

more photos of Stamping playdate

Here's a photo of some stamps made of Magic stamps.  The foam is heated and pressed into the object you want to use.  You can see I made one out of rice, a pine branch, a necklace and a dried flower.

A student busy at work using her stamps.

I preserved the leaves we used in November using a glycerin and water mixture and freezing them.

Stamping playdate

On January 26th I taught a class to a group of  ladies from Out-of-the-Box on how to make their own stamps at the Kitchissippi United Church.  I showed them how to make stamps with leaves, food, found objects, styrofoam, fun foam, Magic stamps and carving rubber stamps.  It was a lot of fun showing them how to make the stamps and then print with textile paint on fabric and paper.  Here's a photo of me teaching.