Creating spaces...

Quietly making progress on my new piece. Starting to create spaces and introduce some background colours.

First application...

... a wash of blue to further build on at a later date. Both photos taken at an angle.

And on another matter, every so often I get enthusiastic about sorting through 'stuff'. I do this for three reasons (a) things have gotten untidy, (b) I am bound to find something that I had forgotten I had and, (c) some stuff just needs to go....

In this current wave of enthusiasm I came across a diary, written in 1988 when I was attending Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deere Island, Maine, USA. This was a live-in, on site, three week experience. I took a workshop with Ana Lisa Hedstrom of Shibori fame. I have re-read this diary and thought I would share with you some of my comments written 22 years ago!

Ana Lisa Hedstrom's shibori garments are incredible, the weekend after attending Haystack I was in Chicago and met a woman who owned five of Lisa's garments! I was so impressed!

The Haystack kitchen was just about as famous as the learning environment. It introduced me to many new dishes that up until then I had not been familiar. I found the following comment in the diary would love a 'plain' cup of tea - there being available only herbal teas.

Photo from Haystack Mountain School of Craft's website.

Black Saturday for NZ...

It goes without too much saying that we are all reeling from the devastating earthquake which struck in the early hours of Saturday morning in the Canterbury region of New Zealand. And then later in the same day a plane crash which killed nine people. The earthquake was the same magnitude as that in Haiti. Fortunately, its timing, our building regulations and low density housing avoided such a tragedy, and no one has been killed. There will be tremendous on-going recovery for the months ahead. Fortunately my region did not suffer.

Along with listening and watching events unfold, I have quietly made a start on my latest piece. I decided to start with a stack of the house shapes. These were drawn to scale on some freezer paper taped together to get the size I wanted.

It took some effort to get everything drawn correctly, after which I quickly painted the shapes so that I could get an overall visual on whether they looked correct.

I cut out the lines and ironed the remainder on to the prepared fabric. Then painted the lines with a textile paint/pigment. This image is taken side on as it is flat on my printing table and I am not able to get a full angle front image (unless I suspend myself from the ceiling!).

After removing the freezer paper I decided that the colours I had mixed were too strong so....

... instead of ironing to set the paint, I gave the lines a scrub and a wash. This removed some of the intensity of the colour.