Soft Form 3D Vessels

Soy Milk as a Mordant

I have learnt a lot about the use of soy milk as a fixative and as a mordant during my study of earth pigments. Primarily to use soy you must use fresh soy milk that has been made that day from beans soaked overnight and blended with water prior to use.

I had tried soy milk as a mordant in earlier eco dying attempts but never been very successful. That was because I tried to use off the shelf store bought soy milk. So i decided to give this ago.

The example above was made using scoured cotton and soaking the cotton in fresh soy milk for about 30 minutes before making a bundle and steaming it. I omitted to give this fabric a tannin bath before using it so the liquidamabar leaves have not printed well but the maple, cotinus and forest tulip leaves have all transferred successfully. The cotinus leaves were fresh but the others were taken out of my freezer and rehydrated before use. I think a tannin dip would have further enhanced all the prints.

A Little Bit of Collage

I am not really a paper worker but I recently watched some short videos on a Collage Summit that made me think it might be fun to try some of this layering. I started off to make some cards and then decided to continue to make a covered box to house them. On the top of the box I have laminated a small MDF covered piece from making artist trading Cards from a long ago exercise

I started off by laminating a layer of neutral torn papers. It looked pretty messy but when the glue had dried, I added some white and bronze paint by dabbing the paint on with some bubble wrap. You can see how this looked in the second image below. Then I cut up the cards into regular sizes.

To decorate the cards I traced some women’s heads onto tissue paper - the exercise had used Muses. I carefully tore around the images and laminated them on to the individual cards. The tissue paper disappeared with just the drawn image showing, image 3 above. So I began decorating the images with small torn pieces of paper and a little bit of paint. I will probably find some appropriate words to go on them before I am finished. The cards fit neatly into the decorated box

Earth Pigments on Textured Grounds

This is an interesting concept and something I would like to try more of. The texture above was made from some old concrete at the back of my house. My house was built on the foundations of an old butter factory so some of the concrete is old and stony.

I presized some scoured linen with fresh soy and lay this on the concrete. Then I painted it with a soy pig paint made from soy milk and yellow ochre earth pigment and left the cloth to dry in situ. The weather was quite damp so it took ages to dry but the lovely pattern on the cloth was worth the wait

I think I would make a stronger mix in the future to enhance the pattern. This could be achieved using wood or cobblestones on rough concrete to achieve a different texture.

A subtle print with Soypig

The interesting thing with this method of working is that the soy milk “size” impregnates the fabric and will fix the pigments in the cloth at the painting stage. It does require 4 weeks to cure so that the fixation is complete. The pigments in the soypig paint drops through the top surface of the fabric to be revealed on the underneath of the cloth so when the fabric is dry the reveal is often a surprise.

I am working on a heavy weight plastic sheet so I can move the painted fabric around while I wait for it to dry without disturbing the sinking pigments. This piece is on white linen that has been scoured by washing in the washing machine on a 60 ° wash with 2 tablespoons soda ash and a teaspoon of Fairy dishwash (neutral soap). Scouring removes any finishes or starch etc from the cloth that might interfere with the natural process.

Claire Benn calls the process of painting soy milk on the fabric “sizing with soy”. I worked on damp soy cloth and this has to be done the same day as the soy milk is made (see previous post). I kept the sized cloths in a zip lock bag in the fridge while waiting to use them Or the sized pieces can be dried and put aside for use at a later date. I haven’t had much joy with working on the dry cloths so I will spritz the fabrics with water to dampen them before I use them (paint them) in the future.

I mixed 1 teaspoon to 100ml of soy milk to make my soy paint. The soy milk is added gradually to the pigment so as to avoid lumps or clumping. This piece used the pigment sourced from the bottom of my garden. I placed some lengths of end thread from the linen under the fabric (on top of the plastic) - Claire calls these “thieves” and then using a cut back chip brush I painted the soy pig paint across the fabric.

As i am primarily a representational artist, this way of working forces me into abstraction and I was delighted with the result. I am calling this piece “Turbulence”. To fix the soy and pigment permanently on the cloth there is a four week “curing time”. And then stitch can be added to enhance the cloth. This is the stage I am at now with this piece.

This final image shows the side I painted with the soy pig. You can see the shape of the thieves vaguely on this tip side but it is quite darker and different to the underside where the soy pig paint has dropped down through the fabric.

Earth Pigments

It seems articles about earth pigments and creating your own art materials are everywhere - or is that just because I have become aware of them. I do note I have in my library a couple of books like “Organic Artist (Nick Neddo) and “The Organic Painter (Carne Griffith) so it has obviously been at the back of my radar for a while.

So when Fibre Art Take 2 offered a course with Claire Benn (UK) called out of this earth and focused on the concepts of soy milk and earth pigments (either hand made or sourced from eco suppliers) I was ready for the challenge. And what a challenge it has become. Claire is well known for her surface design work with fibre reactive dyes but over the past few years she has worked almost exclusively with soy milk and pigments in abstracted compositions. She is a great teacher with so much encouragement to just try things and anyone wanting to learn more about this process - rather than just my achievements through the next few blogs - would be rewarded with enrolling for the next intake with Fibre Arts Take Two.

It has been an interesting journey for me as I am primarily a representational artist and struggle with Creating abstract work that I am happy with. The unknown “reveals” in the soy pig process have helped me to look differently at my work

The earth pigments are locked in place with the protein within the soy milk. It is essential that fresh whole soy beans be soaked and then ground each day as the soy sours quickly without all the additives found in store bought soy milk. That was my first hurdle - finding whole soy beans (not split) to work with as the biosecurity standards make whole soy bean access a little difficult.

Back to my earth pigments. In the photo above I have taken some earth from down by the spring - this is the same earth I used for the dabu dying. I dried the soil and then ground it with a mortar and pestle. It was then sieved through a standard kitchen sieve. A second finer sieve was then used to reduce how fine the particles were. It should then have been mullered but mullers are quite expensive so I tried to grind my fine particles on a sheet of glass with a flat bottomed candlestick.

My final product was lighter than I anticipated but I was not disappointed with my result

Earth pigments are available in a whole range of colours from art supply stores but the prices vary quite a lot. I purchased a yellow ochre, a green and a black powdered pigment along with a sample set which enabled me to try pigment colours that I might want to use more of in the future.

Fnally I was ready to make my soy paint using one teaspoon of my pigment to 100ml of freshly prepared soy milk

Knitting with Convolvulus

For some time now i have been playing around with weavable vegetation form my garden. Convolvulus (Bind weed) is a perennial weed that causes me quite a bit of grief trying to stay on top of its rampant nature. Earlier I posted a small bowl that I had made from it. Now, after reading about Alice Fox’s investigations with the vine, I decided to try knitting with it and making a textured wall hanging.

Here is the result. The convolvulus vine was cut, leaves stripped and the vine coiled and dried before rewetting for pliability and knitting on No 8 needles. I started each new piece at the beginning of a row, weaving in any ends at the side. The darker area is a part of the root vine whereas the greener parts are those that travel up to the light.

The finished piece was stitched onto a linen mix substrate and that was stretched onto a piece of thin MDF and mounted in a box frame without glass. I prefer the texture to be readily visible rather than confined behine

Dabu Dying with Thermofax Screens

I had some mud mix left over so decided to see if this would work as a resist through a thermofax screen and then dyed with Indigo. Of course I could play around with this sort of process indefinitely and I already had some scoured cotton sheets ready to go so I was off running. I have been sourcing flat 100% cotton bed sheets from thrift shops as they make great substrates to work on at a really affordable price and give me scope to experiment and play with

My eldest daughter is a mad chicken lady - she has around 400 chickens. She breeds pullets to sell for those wanting to have their own “egg Factory” and also sells fertilised eggs after candling them to insure they are fertile. It has been a god send to her since her husband passed away with cancer 2 1/2 years ago. She only has Barred Rocks and black Orpingtons so this screen, which was a commercially prepared one seemed a good one to start with.

The first image above is one of my own thermofax prepared screens. The Second is one of Jane Dunnewold’s screens which I have used extensively in my work before getting my own thermofax generator. The third print is a very delicate print of tui from one of my thermosfax screens. Perhaps too detailed a line drawing for this type of resist but could be used to stitch into. The bolder prints seem to work best with the dabu dying resist method

So That is How Caterpillar Books are Supposed to Work

I have made caterpillar books/snake books before but I was never quite sure how they were supposed to work. Mainly because the last very important step had been missed from the instructions and that is gluing the internal pages together so the book stands as a book and no longer wants to unfold in a complicated manner.

In Debbie Lyton’s Sensing Place course (Fibre Arts Take 2) we were encouraged to take a walk and create small sketches of a considered moment on that walk. I think we were supposed to sit and do this but I decided to incorporate the exercise with a walk to the Three Sisters Rocks at Tonagaporutu. I had long wanted to do tis walk but they are only accessible when the tide is out (half way or more) and my husband isn’t up to walking that distance since his lung cancer operation.

I was to collect some delicate ceramics from a home based potter in new Plymouth and I planned my return trip so that I would catch the tide just right. For any artist the trip is a delight of huge monolithic structures, textures, caves and the ever present sea

You can join me on my walk on the slide show below.

We were encouraged to use descriptive text to insert into our caterpillar book.

Here is my text:
The sun is warm on my face
The half tide sea, cool on my feet
Tide patterns forming against the strata rockface
I hear the drips of water cascading
The quilted rocks rise up above me
Sea worn caves of dark secrets
Tunnelling through to peep hole visions
Water flowing, tide ebbing
Glimpses of coastline through the openings
The Tasman sea forever lurking
Sentinels standing - Three Sisters

I chose turquoise burnt umber and black to paint two A3 pieces of paper using various mark making methods. Once the paint was dry, I folded the paper in half long wise and pressed with a bone folder. Then I folded each subsequent side into this middle fold and pressed with a bone folder.

I folded the short (portrait) sides of the paper in the same way. The result is 8 segments. Decide on whether your book is to be a portrait or landscape book (mine is landscape) carefully cut up the two outer folded lines through 2 segments. On the middle fold cut down in the opposite direction two folds.

The sections can now be folded up and down to create a pile of the folds. This is the part I had always missed. The blank top and bottom sections will be glued onto the covers. Open out and mark the rest of the blank sections 1 and 2 so you can identify which ones need to be glued together. Glue those blank sections (a 1 to a 2) down so the book now only opens as a traditional book.

Measure and cut two pieces of cardboard slightly larger than the book for the covers. Cut two pieces of paper 1.5 cm wider all round than the cardboard. Glue the cardboard and place in the centre of the papers. Press well with a bone folder. Trim off the edges at 45° close to but not right up to the corners of the card. Fold down and glue opposites ends of the covers. Pinch in at the corners to create tidy corners that do not have dog’s ears. Glue the inside of the cardboard to the blank front and back of the caterpillar book. Press under a weight over night.

These are delightful little journals that can be used for any number of recording ideas. In this case I have recorded my walk to the Three Sisters, but I am very tempted to make one for sitting in my garden, listening to the cicadas at this time of year

Back to Dabu Dying

Dabu Success!!!!

After i returned from India last March I was really keen to have a go at Dabu dying. This is an indigo based dying process that uses black mud as a resist. I had told the proprietor of the dabu factory we visited that I was from a lime rich area and he kindly shared the proportions of Lime, Arabic gum and mud, telling me I must practise when I got home as it was an art form that was in danger of dying out.

I tried but I did not have an indigo vat at the time and tried with tumeric. The pattern was there very lightly but not enough to be easily discerned. I decided to wait till Summer and set up an indigo vat for the purpose.

Well time has moved on and Summer is almost over - in fact we are in the first few days of Autumn if you go by the traditional calendar. So I decided to set up a new trial making sure everything was as close as possible to what I experienced India.

I used an Indian wood block in the shape of a scallop shell and an offset printing in rows. My mix was a little bit runny and I dropped a couple of blobs from the block onto the cloth. You can see in the second photo where I have attempted to sponge these away. My fabric was a 100% cotton sheet that I had sourced from a thrift shop and scoured with soda ash and alkaline neutral soap at 60 ° in the washing machine

I created the Indigo vat by using a kitset that supplied 100gm soda ash, 50 gm sodium hydrosulphite and 20 gm of pre reduced indigo. I mixed it in a bucket with a lid that I have used for indigo dying previously and after 15 minutes or so a nice “flower” was beginning to form on the top of the vat. To test if the vat was ready I placed a small strip of cotton tied in knots into the vat, waited a little bit then carefully lifted it out. Care must be taken not to introduce oxygen into the vat or it will expire. It came out green as in the photo below of the strip on the yellow bucket lid. The magic of indigo started to happen almost at once. In went the Dabu prepared piece. Left it for a little and then took it out carefully. By the time I got to the clothes line it was already turning blue. Where the fabric had been folded was still green as it had not oxidised but a few minutes on the line and the blue was pretty uniform - even where I had to sponge off the blobs.

I wondered if the soda ash in the mix would offset the process of scouring. Would the soda ash in the mix mean you could place a pre printed white on white piece of commercial dyed fabric in the vat and would the print act as a resist. I have had some rather lovely results with preprinted commercial fabrics but I have always scoured them first. I trotted off and found a fat quarter. Into the vat it went and the results looked promising. We will see when it is washed how well that process worked. That is the last photo in the gallery below.

Now I have an indigo vat and will have to work at creating some interesting results this next week.

Experimenting with Mediums

Like many people, the use of various art mediums has been a bit of a mystery to me and I have concentrated on using just a few that I am familiar with. Recently I participated in a Fibre Arts Take 2 on line course with Wen Redmond. Wen is a master of mediums using digital ground to create effect from photographs that she then transfers to a range of substrates.

The most common digital grounds for this process is Inkaid and it is not available in New Zealand. The Australian supplier was out of stock so I was left a bit high and dry for a lot of the course. So I decided to go to the nearest art store (an hour away from my home) and investigate possible alternatives. Well i had a ball.

Being able to use (and alter on photoshop) my images taken of grunge and natural landscape was just a bonus. Mokau, the closest beach to us, is on the west coast of the North Island and is pounded by huge seas at certain times of the year. It is prone to coastal erosion and the local council has tried various methods to try and halt the land sliding into the sea. The ragged “fabric and huge boulders are part of tis attempt. The old log is the seas deposit on top. Often when I walk along this part of the coast I take photographs and I have used similar photos in several artworks previously.

Using a foil butter paper as a substrate I have coated the surface with Golden Paper paste medium. It gives a rough texture, not unlike handmade paper. using a carrier a sheet, I then printed the image with my Epson inkjet printer. This is the result.

When the inkaid arrived I tried the clean up, shadow deli paper from a mono print exercise and coated that with Inkaid. Once it had dried I printed that, again on a carrier sheet so that it did not scrunch up in the printer. Here is the result

This is the same photo but the effect is quite different. you can see a piece of the deli paper that was not printed on the right. The subtle colours from the deli paper make this image much “warmer “looking

Creating a Holograph

Things have been very busy in the garden so while I have managed to get a bit of time in the studio I have been a bit lax at writing up the blog. My apologies.

I just finished Wen Redmonds’’ signature course with Fibre Art Take 2 and what an adventure that was. I decide to try this holograph on a magnolia leaf that I have crotched round and cut out the centre. The course centres on the use of various digital grounds that allow printing on all sorts of substrates. In this case I printed the image of a lock on an old door with peeling paint using silk organza as my first substrate.

The exact image is then printed onto interfacing and aligned with the first print but with a packer between them. It is a bit difficult to see in the photo but as you look from right to left the holographic image appears on the underside so that it almost seems 3 D. I have some other ideas using some photos I have taken of coastal caves with various exposures that I am keen to continue this experiment with.

I decide to use the leaf as the base just for something a bit different. I have crocheted and stitched on leaves previously and this is just and extension of that techniique

Exciting Image Transfer Option

I am getting ready to start work on a series of Faces Of India from my trip to India last year. I have been working on Wen Redmond’s course using different media and from that learned about a free ap called imagy.ap that allows you to split an image into parts - each of which can be then be printed. In he example above I printed four images (you can see where the joins are) first onto HP overhead transparency. I use an inkjet and you must use OHP for inkjets as the standard laser ones will not adhere the ink. Or if you have inkaid you could create a useable transparency by putting a layer of inkaid (maybe even Golden’s ground would work but I haven’t tried that yet). Let the ink dry on the transparency.

I joined the four sections of my transparency with clear packing tape so that I could see the whole image and audition fabric for the background. I had read about using citrasolv as a image transfer agent but this product is not available in new Zealand. So I had a play with some general citrus clearner from the supermarket.

I sprayed the area of the fabric where I wanted the image to transfer to with the citrus cleaner then carefully placed the joined transparencies onto that are. Spray the fabric NOT the transparency or the ink will blob on the transparency film. Then I rubbed the image. I used a barren but anything that gives some pressure will work. I carefully lifted the edges of the transparency and sprayed a bit more cleaner onto the areas where the transfer didn’t seem to be working quite as well.

The output photo above is the result. I am delighted. This image has been transferred onto some cotton eco dyed fabric that was a bit wet in process so the images were blurry but it suits this application well. I intend to stitch over the photo so I was not too concerned about the “join” lines in the image. I do think the fabric needs to be scoured to remove any finish if using a commercial fabric as the next piece I did was not as clear a transfer and I think that was to do with the commercial finish on the fabric.

The inkjet OHP’s that work best are the ones that have the rough side for the ink to adhere. This “roughness will transfer with the image and the OHP will be pretty clear after use. Trying to recycle as much as possible, I painted the cleared OHP with Inkaid and found that I could reuse that transparency. Below is the printout on the transparency from that trial. In this example you can see a little of the man’s blue shirt at the top of the transparency. This area could be cut off before applying the citrus cleaner transfer. As this was just an experiment to see if i could reuse the OHP I didn’t bother to clean up the transparency first. You could use citrus cleaner and a baby wipe or similar to clean the residue off the OHP before treating with inkaid.

I really like the ability to use the transparency to audition fabrics and choose the placement of the transferred image

The image below is on unscoured commercial fabric and the image did not transfer as cleanly as the one above. It could be that the lighter skin tones played a part. for my purposes it won’t matter too much as I intend to thread paint over the image but it is something to consider if using an image that is to stand alone

Remaking the Lid to the Pine Needle Workbox

I made this little pine needle workbox a couple of years back and somewhere along the way the lid disappeared. My husband reckoned it had been taken by a rat for its lair but it seemed strange that only the lid disappeared although the box itself has a large cachelon in the base that might of made it too heavy to card away. Anyway for the last several months it has sat without a lid and every time I look at it I feel annoyed. So one day over the Christmas break I decided to remake a top. It took me most of the day and because I was at the beach I used a shell bauble on the top - the original had a bead. It is a bit higher than I would have liked but I am pleased to have it complete once more. Bit like mending really and a change from working on the project which is pretty much finished now.

It is high Summer here in New Zealand and the garden has been calling. It is far too hot to be out there working in the middle of the day but we have managed to cut back the camelias and trim the fig vine on the bottom part of the house and cut back the Albertine rose which had taken over an area. The clean up was as much work as the cut back!!!!!

Working on the Druid/Tohunga/ Shapeshifter Panel

Selecting icons to express my ideas is always a quandary. I really wanted to include a reference to the Maori three baskets of knowledge and after much research in relation to Celtic and Druid traditions I came across information related to the Druids and tree of life and Shape Shifter. That seemed to fit the parallel so then how to make something that expressed the image I was wanting. We have something similar to this in the shop but they are quite expensive and suddenly the idea sprang to my mind to use copper wire and a a steel ring I had previously used to mount work in and create my own bejewelled tree of life

I have to admit it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be and this still needs a bit of refinement but I am well on the way.

Most of the rest of the week has been used in tidying up and binding the panels for mounting with the piano hinge mechanism so necessary but pretty mundane work. maybe next week I can show you some of the finished panels.

Back to Working on the Project - the Maori Calender

I am continuing in a woven theme using foraged botanicals for my work. The project is to parallel Celtic and Maori cultures and one of the pairs of panels focuses on parts of the year that have importance - like the winter solstice (Matariki/Yule. I have already partially completed the Celtic calendar wheel and after I started this weaving I thought it might be a bit different to utilise this for the Maori on.

At the moment it looks a bit like and American Indian emblem but by the time I get it partitioned in to the parts of the year with a Maori symbol in the centre and documentation around the outside I am sure it will come together. I will use pseudo leather to section the parts of the year and am still contemplating on the emblem for the centre.

The weaving has been done with a mixture of raffia, convolvulus roots and convolvulus stalks and white cotton. The feathers I have added around the outside are the same feathers I have used to make th emini korowai for the weaving panel.

I continue to be immersed in the process of replicating what it must have been like for foregoing artists/weavers, experimenting and learning to utilise the materials at hand to create mainly utilitarian pieces where I have the luxury of taking these more into the artistic realm.

Submission for Online Exhibition

This week I have been busy trying to work out how to best display my work for the online exhibition. I think I am fairly happy with this display

The back left piece is made from pine needles, the back right from rushes and the one in the from from convolvulus stems. They are all quite different to work work but it has been such and interesting and exhilarating experience creating with these simple botanical materials. I feel a certain connection both to the natural world and to the women artists who came before creating utility items and learning about the materials they had to hand and then progressing from simple shapes to works of art.

For some time now I have been wanting to move into three dimensional work so this has been a good taste of that. Fibre Arts Take Two programme with Harriet Goodall was the basis for creating these vessels. I have really enjoyed the challenge of the course and the aha moment that simple materials can be utilised in the creation of these woven specimens.

Exciting Use of Garden Materials

Still a couple of ends to darn in here but would you believe this little bowl is made from convolvulus using the thicker roots to create the base fibre and the stem parts as the weaver to catch them via a buttonhole stitch to the row below.. Aren’t the subtle differences in the greens just lovely. Unfortunately i suspect these will bleach to a more straw colour over time.

Rattan (natural cane) is quite hard to source in New Zealand because of the biosecurity requirements and the danger of importing unwanted pests with the rattan. so finding other materials from the garden that provide weaving resources is exciting. Especially when the material is an unwanted weed like convolvulus or ivy or honey suckle that grows wild on the side of the road.

The materials have to be prepared before use. The leaves cleared off and the stems/roots dried for at least two weeks to get rid of the sap. Failure to do this step may make the finished item warp as it dries out. Before weaving the material must be dunked in water to gain back flexibility and prevent breakage of the length of twine.

My interest in eco processes in my art work is indulged when I find new and interesting ways of using materials from the garden or waste areas to create beautiful natural products

Learning Freeform Weaving

I am not a weaver but I am enjoying this free form activity using vines and roots from my garden. I have finally found a use for the ivy that tries to grow up my trees and he convolvulus (bindweed roots that infest the garden, especially where I have mulched.

It does take some time to forage, strip and dry the plant material before I can use it but it must be dried so it doesn’t shrink and distort the finished product. I feel very connected to both nature and the artisans who came before and practices a similar craft for practical reasons whereas mine is purely artistic in nature. I can understand that as they wove they began to think about adding pattern or other materials to the work to produce something that was unique to them. It is a fascinating journey and as I am very motivated in using botanicals in my art work it fits in just fine. I want to try weaving some straight convolvulus roots also - just to see how it comes together.

Creating a Blizzard Book

My art work often leads me to the creation of little journals or concertina books to present a process or idea. The Blizzard book is a more complex example of these. The first one I saw had me enthralled as to how you got those folds in place and could insert little tags in the folds. i was not to be beaten. It was very challenging working from written instructions but I finally got there. And now I am keen to do some more so next Saturday I am going to my art group who are having a day on making these. It should be fun.

I began by making a simpler concertina with the Blizzard folds just at the front and back. That wasn’t too hard but then came the challenge of folding every page in so that it created the folded “pockets. The size of the finished book is quite small in comparison to the paper size I started with.

Above you can see the simpler bottom pocket with a vertical fold to hold the tags. I thought it needed to be more integrated so I added a screen of leaves across the bottom. I cut out some little tags and stamped and coloured them with water colour pencils.

Practicing, I had just used white paper, so the next phase was to multiple layer print some paper for the full Blizzard. As a long piece the paper doesn’t look so appealing but I was counting on the folding mixing up the patterns and was pleased with the outcome. You can see a close up of the Blizzard book completed. And then I distressed some little tags with distress ink, stamped some images on them and coloured them with water colour pencils. The final image shows the tags inserted into the pocket folds