Perfect Weather For Sunprints!!

Crisp and sunny fall days are perfect for sunprints and Saturday was THE day. I was up and out gathering my weeds , seed pods and ferns quite early. I carefully laid them in a pile in the shade of a tree, near the sunny portion of the yard.

The boys were up and out early as well' as they wanted to get the lawn done quickly. A warning was given about my pile of gatherings and the mowers started to rumble. I came out with my fabric to find the pile mulched and the warnings forgotten- at least the lawn got mowed!!! SIGH!!!

So I gathered again!! As the most successful foliage to use is either in my garden or growing by the roadside, I had no trouble finding more supplies!!!!

Here is the linen( pieces of a large rustic tablecloth- a yard sale find) laid out in the sun with the dye and the foliage bits, drying.

On the cobalt blue piece I used everything from weeds to Hosta Seed Pods to ferns to dill seed heads!


For this oragne piece I used Creeping jenny Groundcover and tiny maple seedling leaves. With such low humidity, everything was dry in about an hour!!
Here are the results!!

Here you can see the hosta seed pod stalk and an umbrell seed head from my Dill Seed crop (near the top). I love the airy versus crisp outlines of the various folliage elements. Or as Ariel Freeman, my watercolor instuctor would say, "All of the wonderful mix of hard and soft edges!"

Here are the sunprints paired with some of the same pieces of table cloth that were dyed in my recent dying workshop at Artistic Artifacts. The blue sunprint will become the back of a shirt, with the orange as a sleeve, and the other colors will be used to fill in the remaining components to create a very colorful linen shirt!!! Can't wait to get started!!! Must be sure to heat set the sunprints before I do anything else!!!!!!

Have a wonderful day!!!

Playing with Color!

We are having an extremely dry Fall here in VA. Our second round of water restrictions goes into effect this Monday, that means no more outside watering.It has also been very hot- we are all ready for some real Fall weather!

That said , the weather has been perfect for some fabric dyeing and sun prints. One must take advantage of weather conditions since we really never know when things will change!

These two pieces were done using a vintage linen napkin. I used ferns, Creeping Jenny and grasses to mask the dyed fabric. These pieces will be used in upcoming Journal Quilt projects for my Surface Design Group.

These pieces were done using regular muslin. The lacey effect is from a paper doiley and the flower prints are from Zinnia blossoms.

With the last bits of dye left in the pots, i dyed some laces and rims that I will use in various projects. I love having bits and pieces of dyed lace on hand as I never know when I will need it!

Most of these bits were purchased as odd pieces at antique stores and flea markets.

I finished off another Round Robin project today. I have been fretting about this piece for a long time. This Round Robin really sucked the artist right out of me- so many dropped out and several books were lost- it was very disheartening and very depressing. The gal whose book I was working in was very willing to wait for me to get motivated and to find my RR Muse again, so that was cool. I finally got inspired.

The book is large and has heavy black pages. the black pages were a bit dawnting. First I collaged some text pages and airline baggage tags on parts of each page. Then I did some paint scraping. this is what things looked like at that point.

So far , so good. At this point i decided that I was ready for some stretching- it was the perfect situation. If I really screwed up, I could just rip out the pages as there were many pages and I was the last artist to work in this book. I decided to play with some gesso with the thought that I would stamp over the gessoed parts. I did add the gesso but then I picked up a Sharpie Marker and didn't look back. Up till now I have felt so unsure about doing this sort of thing, but now the gate has been opened and the perverbial horse has left the barn!!!! I had so much fun with this piece and it is sooo different from things that I have produced before.

I will be doing many more projects like this one! I just hope that the gal who owns this book will like it as much!!!!