Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Blue and Gold

In the bright sunlight and hot weather on Labor Day, I exposed a maple leaf from the yard to blueprint fabric. Today I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to rust dye veins on to it.
Two things I was totally unprepared for happened.
First, some organic matter fell out of the tree overhead, a seed pod of some sort, which caused a stain on the fabric. Keep your eye on the circled area to see how that developed over time.
Second, the salt traveled to the edges of the fabric and started forming into crystals!!! Remember how we use to grow crystals by mixing bluing, and some other household chemicals together and putting it on coal?
(Oh, dear, did I just give away how very old I am?)
Anyway...this picture shows how the piece looked after I removed the wire. I wanted a record of it in case all that nice blue color washed out.
But it didn't!!!
I found I can combine rust dyeing and the wonderful colors of cyanotype.
The thin wires didn't rust at all. That wire must have had some kind of coating on it. Don't worry I can add them with free motion quilting or "thread painting" as it is being called now.
I like the glow the salt and/or iron oxide made as it discharged the blueprinting chemical. Click here to link to directions for growing crystals with bluing

7 comments:

Sue Krekorian said...

Wow! Wonderful alchemy.

kathyinozarks said...

Very cool! I love your art-Kathy

Kristin said...

That's super cool!!! Maybe I'll see you on Thursday at the expo? I'm volunteering as a stage assistant from 11-3.30.

Lois Jarvis said...

I won't have a booth at Quilt Expo this year. However I will be presenting a 1 hour lecture for Quilt Expo on Thursday at 2:30 called, "Capturing Memories on Cloth". It is how I took paintsticks with
me on vacation to capture names of cities and textures of various cultures on rust dyed silk scarf so I came home with a finished product, not another UFO. You can register for this lecture at:

http://www.wiquiltexpoorders.com/Details.cfm?ProdID=90&category=5

jackie said...

Lovely combination of colours.

Anonymous said...

Lois......tell me more about the Paint sticks???
Are there special ones for use on fabric??? Loved the scarf!

Carol Sloan said...

I have been slack reading my blogs...so I just saw this today (10-27-08) and it is Awesome! I love the crystals! I'll have to do some of those! Check out my blog for a cool rust strip background I made.