The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I promised pictures of what I've accomplished in the last week  One piece was finished and I was taking a photo, when, viewing it through the camera, I realized that it was off square.  A quick look told me that it was beyond fixing.  I showed DH, who took a look and said--" I guess you want me to pull that apart and save the beads for you"  Yup!  That was the only thing to do with it. Here is "the Bad".

The Good, is a second piece that I finished and framed.  It started with a clean-up rag ( Always save your clean-up rags.  They can turn out to be the best pieces you did that day!)  White cotton with paint wipes all over it--some with fabric paint and some with acrylic.  I FMQ'd the white areas with Cobblestones pattern and the coloured areas with a grid, using a grey/white Sulky Blenadable.  Then I covered three FlexiFirm triangles with white Duipionni silk and added novelty beads.  I had been prepared to use a lot more beads, but by the time I got these larger ones on, it appeared to be just right.  I laced it onto foamcore and framed it.  I am quite pleased.

White Wedding--full view





White Wedding-close-up



The Ugly are some of the prints I did yesterday during the dyeing/painting day with my Ravenesque group.  Now, I refuse to take full responsibility for some of my disasters.  We were working in a parking lot, in high winds.  I didn't realize that the table was at an angle until I poured paint on the sheet of glass I wanted to use for pulling prints,  the paint ran right off and onto the ground.  I was using Seta-Color, diluted 50/50, as I usually do, but it was just too runny. The result is four prints of black and fuschia blobs.  Ugly! However, I didn't heat set them and ran them through the washing machine today.  The result is grey and pink blobs, but light enough that I can add more layers and, hopefully, save the pieces.  I'm starting to think that my best bet may be to cut the four of them in pieces and sew sew them back together in different places to make one large 24" by 24" piece.

 I then tried the paint full strength and used a breyer to spread it around.  This gave a better result, but was drying too fast.  I would spread my paint and embed leaves in it, and then pull a print.  Then I would take the leaves, and use the paint-y veined side to make a print on a piece of dry cloth.  This dry cloth had been low water immersion dyed, using light pink and blue  dye, then clamped between two round drink coasters, and dyed a dark navy.  The result was almost like a series of pale "moons" in a dark sky.  I did the leaf prints of some of the "moons" but not all.  I really, really like this piece, and very much want to refine the technique and try it again.