Mouse Factory Designs: Hot work and the wind blows

Sunday, June 14, 2020

Hot work and the wind blows

Yesterday was spent in the yard, battling both a hot sun that dried paint so fast I had trouble using it, and a vicious wind that blew so strongly that I had trouble spreading both fabric and the newspaper I used to protect the table. First I tried making a sun print that I hope to use as the focal point of a new piece. Secondly, I tried making some leaf prints, that I had hoped to use as focal points in some new work. "Hoped" is really the right word, as the main leaf print piece I had wanted, just didn't turn out, and I'm going to have to re-think that whole project. But a second piece has possibilities. I also got a couple of good negative prints that may have possibilities.

This is the main sun print. I used ferns from the neighbour's yard. We tried all week to catch him in the yard, but weren't successful. So I assumed that the invitation he gave me last year was still good.

Here is a close up of the ferns. I left them as they came, as I wasn't able to pin them down because the table hadn't been padded enough. The paint is mainly grey but with a bit of purple, blue and green as well.

Having used several colours I had to give some thought to how I was going to put the piece together. I want the ferns to be the focal point, but I also want to try to make the rest of the piece somewhat interesting. So I made small pieces of each of the colours used, and plan to try a bit of low level piecing. I certainly did't want other piecing to take away from the ferns, so greyed each colour down. I was also a bit concerned about the lack of value, so created a second pure grey piece, but much lighter. As I said, the actual design hasn't been planned beyond this point. We'll just have to see where it goes.

Then came the leaf prints.
Here is the second piece of hand dyed fabric to which I added leaf prints. Again value plagued me, so I decided to aim at having the finished piece being long and narrow. The objective is to free motion quilt the leaf print and background and then add beads--lots of beads. Here is a leaf print on the lower right.

And a close up of the two prints that were added. They are leaves from the small Maple bush in my front yard.

The next venture was negative prints. With the very first leaf print, I got a wonderful negative on the first try, but it was on a paper towel, As soon as I realized what I had, I started using fabric for the negative part of leaf printing. The second one below isn't very good and may be just added to the "orphan block" pile. At the same time, the best use for the other two has yet to be determined.

But, I also did some leaf printing in my sketch books and the results there were wonderful. I can only show you two of them, as the other two were done with white paint on the white page. Now that they have dried, I'll be putting a water colour wash over them and they should emerge. I tried this with some stamping I was doing and I'm thrilled at the lacy border that emerged on one of the pages.