Photos from my daily walks behind my house.
Wildflower Inspiration
Category Archives: fibers
Goodies and Sketchbook Designs
I recently posted about Karen Straight from Big Sky Fiber Arts over on the Felting and Fiber Studio site. We do “Meet the Supplier” posts as we find suppliers that have great stuff for fiber artists and felt makers. Karen just happens to live in the same area as I do and she brought me a lovely surprise.
And I was surprised. I had not expected any kind of gift at all. So it was great fun to open it up and see what goodies Karen had given me.
Thank you so much Karen – I can’t wait to try out the wool and ramie. Now to just find a little bit of time to play.
I have been doing a little bit of work in my sketchbook. These are black and white designs based on sketches or photos.
It is fun to crop an image in different ways – you see different ideas for design this way. What have you been working on?
Woolly Goodness
I showed a few of these over on the Felting and Fiber Studio recently but each evening I have made a few more batts. Thought you’d like to see all the woolly goodness!
Christmas on Halloween?
I made a couple of stencils today based on poinsettias. I made two different sizes of the same design.
This is the larger size and you can see I still have the cut out pieces too. If you’re careful, you can use these for a negative/positive image. With this type of plastic though it is hard to hold them in place. Perhaps I’ll try a bit of spray adhesive but I don’t really like that stuff because it gets all over the place.
Here’s the small design before I cut it out.
And the smaller one cut out. I put a bit of duct tape on the edges because there wasn’t a big enough border and I didn’t want to get paint over the edge.
I used one of my silk screened pages and stenciled a few poinsettias on the page. I used a portion of the stencil with green to make the leaves. I think this will make a nice Christmas card. I can scan it in, add some text and I’ll have a nice digital card.
Here’s a closer view of the bigger flower.
And I added a little yellow ink to this screen printed page. It looks a little more gruesome and fitting for Halloween perhaps than the poinsettias. Happy Halloween!
Screen Printed Fabric
Here are a few of the fabric pieces that got screen printed at our Screen Printing Party last week. Most of them are mine but one is Sally’s as she left it at my house accidentally.
This piece is Sally’s – it looks kind of blurry – I hope if you click on it to enlarge it looks better. It’s a piece of linen fabric that was previously dyed green. A deconstructed screen print was screened over the top.
Here’s a closer view. I think this would make a nice background.
This piece was previously printed with the green leaves. I screen printed the blue on top of that.
This piece has been printed twice with a blue school glue screen. The bottom layer is the red layer and then I screened green dye on top of that with a different blue glue screen.
This gets the ugliest fabric award. It was originally printed on a “gelli” plate, that’s the red/purple layer. Then I used the green dye and the blue glue screen. I was hoping to improve it a bit but not sure it’s any better. I think I need to over dye the entire thing to tone it down a bit.
Here’s the back of the one above. It is definitely better from the back.
These are my favorites. These four pieces of fabric were screened over torn paper. I just sprinkled some paper scraps from the shredder on top of the fabric and then screened various colors of dye in several layers over the top. The paper forms a resist as you print.
Here’s a little closer view. I’m not sure what I’ll do with these fabric pieces yet but I think this last set would make great notebook covers.
Ruth Lane Art 