Month: January 2008

we are sick sick sick

January 21, 2008

I’m home sick. Not hideously, lie on the couch and moan sick, but stagger about slowly and sit down frequently sick. Which is quite bad enough.

In response to those who asked questions I have some of the following answers:

Transfer paints are simple to use. They work best on man made fabrics, specifically polyester. They also work on cotton and linen, but give much more muted colors. I have experimented with transferring onto polyester satin, crepe, chiffon, velvet and a cotton/poly broadcloth. All worked quite well, with deep color transfer. I tried transferring onto silk chiffon, and the color passed cleanly through and made a gorgeous image on my ironing board cover.

Mine came from Embroidery Adventures, which doesn’t exist any more. I found some available in Canada from the Opulence Textile Art Catalog and the G&S Dye catalog, and in England from Fibrecrafts.com and Berol , ThreadStudio in Australia also has them. I know they are available elsewhere. Workshop on the Web (WoW) advertisers frequently have them, and WoW also has published tutorials and articles about using them.

Use is very simple: paint onto plain paper, let dry, iron onto fabric. The mess is minimal, about the equivalent of poster paints. The color does not change the hand of the fabric at all that I can feel. The colors quite brilliant on polyester, and I’ve had some trouble getting more subdued or delicate colors. Getting full-on black or blue is pretty easy. The colors I have are the CMYK printing primaries (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) and if you have a printed color chart you can find the color you want and mix it using simple percentages. The color on the paper IS NOT what you will get on the fabric, and it takes some trial and error to figure out how to get exactly the color you might want. Unless you are happy with kismet in the color department. Which works too.

There are two books that address transfer paints explicitly. Beaney and Littlejohn wrote Transfer to Transform in 1999, republished in paperback in 2000. Linda Kemshalls also wrote a book called Color Moves, in 2001.

It sounds too simple to be true, as though I am leaving something out, but truly, that is all there is to it. Go get some, see what you can do.

details

January 19, 2008


Jan 18b
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I routinely get caught up in the details of things – I love a feather, the twist of a shell, the curve of a child’s cheek – I can have difficulty finding the big picture. So realizing that with transfer paints I can paint a feather, or a leaf, and get the most outrageous level of detail onto the fabric is intoxicating. I find that once I have transferred these things I just stare at them, because, well, they’re nearly perfect.

I mean, isn’t this feather enough to stop your breath for a moment? Or these?


Jan 18a
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Friday early morning it snowed, and then freezing rained on top. The back porch snow drooped off the railing like this:

Snow_droop

Some kind of heavy duty surface tension going on there – there really was not anything under the snow, it just formed a catenary curve all by itself. Of course, it didn’t last long. The sun came out and the back yard glittered like diamonds, coated in ice like this:

Ice_twist_2

And then it all melted in 40F degree weather.

marker, sort of

January 17, 2008


Jan 17a
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I sprung for a new transfer marker today – browsing Michaels craft catastrophe and the marker followed me home. So did a small packet of dried ferns (for transfers) and a new pad of list paper because I’ve lost the other two pads I had for shopping lists.

I mention this only because I am trying to Not Buy Anything because really I have enough stuff to make decades worth of postcards. Or what ever else I decide I am going to make this year. So – no more stuff. I’m shopping my stash, and it is pretty fun so far.

An entire day of running errands. Not peaceful, but nice to be done. And there is more light in the living room.

new hamster

January 16, 2008

I am beat from working outside in the outrageous windy cold, lifting water buckets (I still love electric water buckets) and spending hours on homey trivia. I realized I’d been in the car nearly two hours for a grand total of 20 miles, dropping off, stopping, picking up, etc.

We got a new hamster. Bringing the total in the house to two, and there it shall stay. The new one is piebald dark gray and white, and we are in the process of naming him. They can’t live together, so we have a second tank and water bottle and wheel. He is fairly calm, although he bit me in the store and Alice before bed. We’ll have him about as tame as Pumpkin eventually.

I made nothing today. I’ll do it tomorrow.

canonical windows

January 15, 2008


Jan 15a
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I have been experimenting with layers of transfers, stacked up. Windows seemed particularly alluring because of the different skies that I see out of mine. I like how the clouds came out best. I used cotton batting as a resist. The snow needs to be flakier, and in layers against a numinous gray sky. The night isn’t bad – but I need a better way of incorporating stars.

There are other windows, with curtains, and sunsets, on Flickr. Two days worth, in fact. After posting about how to waste time, I wasted a lot, but I still got my art in last night.

snow day, how to waste time

January 14, 2008

Snow day for the kids, which means not having to get them up and make breakfast and lunch all at once and get them out the door in a timely fashion. That is a relief. We get to have a slow breakfast, random lunch and probably Al underfoot as well, until the snow stops and we dig out.

Snow_day

OK Abby – this post’s for you. Some of us have January term and copious amounts of free time. For the rest of us, I advise poking this post over the course of weeks if not months.

I present some of the things on the internets that have been sucking my time and brain power. The last time I fell into something like this, two whole days vanished into Questionable Content and the kids had to make their own suppers and I forgot to take Aerin to flute group. I haven’t fallen quite so hard lately, but I have found A Girl and her Fed  which has much less back story  but makes up for it with political intrigue. I have always read Pibgorn, and 9 Chickweed Lane both by the same author. Pib has gone to a Mon/Wed/Fri schedule  and is hard to get into without backstory, but  Chickweed is easy to pick up and filled with people I wish I could talk to. 

Shaenon Garrity deserves her own paragraph because she is incredibly prolific and almost every strip makes me laugh. She has clearly been doing this for a long time. I found Smithson first, but it is laughably short and I wanted more in less than an afternoon. So, cleverly following links, I discovered Narbonic which made me snort so loud Aerin wanted to get involved. Within the first  week, Shaenon managed to introduce Mel, Helen B. and Dave, and incorporate "evil coffee" along with a doomsday machine and giant mutant gerbils. Aerin and I roared through the whole thing, and she’s been infecting friends with it, which is gratifying. After finishing that, we started L’il Mel,  one character’s growing pains.  Now Shaenon’s started Skin Horse, which I have to wait for like everyone else. Totally worth the wait, but agonizing nonetheless.

But then, just when I had a grip on my time in front of the computer, Elizabeth Bear and three (deranged, but in a very good way) writing friends (including Emma Bull and Will Shetterly) have come up with an ongoing fiction over the internet, complete with story, backstory, character dossiers, and even (my mind boggles) some characters’ blogs. They have Livejournal blogs, which they (the [fictional] characters) post to with some regularity. And a bulletin board for the onlookers to keep up, and attempt to keep it all straight. Fans of paranormal conspiracy theories should be particularly pleased. My advice is to click everything, and check to see if there are hidden links on every page. 

Someone posted to the bulletin board ecstatic that they had gotten a reply to a comment from a completely fictional character. On their blog.

I completely understood the joy. After all, I’m the one that dragged my family to picnic on a completely fictional island, in the rain.

OKay. My work here is done. Go waste your time.

week 2 leaves tucked in

January 13, 2008


week 2 leaves tucked in
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I have  a lot of fabrics that have TIF Challenge colors all over them trying to get the colors etter, or seeing how hard and long to press, or just to see what the next one looks like. So I used some of these to make this weeks object. I realized I like it better in this orientation – I made it horizontally. I was thinking about this postcard from last year:


May 26
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Alice finished a hat for a doll.


dolly hat

I made the doll before she was born, but couldn’t find hair I liked. Alice carried her around a lot when she was one and two years old, and has revisited her since. She persuaded me to put some tibetan lamb on her head for hair, and captured her back to her room. Later that week, Alice insisted on learning to sew doll clothes, so I set her up with some stretchy stuff and she made leggings/pants and shirts, stole some socks from another doll, and started on this hat last week.

Note the band of purling as decoration, the pointy top, the i-cord finish and tassel. oop – I have to take another picture to properly show off all the details.

experiment that did work

January 12, 2008


Jan 11b
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Turns out you can use tissue paper for transfer paints. I wasn’t sure, in part because I wasn’t sure which side of the paper the paint had dried on. The tissue paper is so light that when I was trying to rest things on the radiator to dry the tissue paper was floating right up the wall. I got some nice texture from the tissue paper being slightly scrunched  as well. I think that is an artifact of the satin I was transferring to, rather than a constant function of the tissue paper.

I also experimented with transferring onto other textures of fabric. I have a startling amount of white felt, so I tried several layers on that, with interesting, if fuzzy, results. It takes a lot of color to get down into the structure of the felt, so it can carry a lot of layers of color, so long as they are all light.


Jan 11a
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I also worked for a while on the TIF Challenge. I am having detailed thoughts about other topics, but this is what I worked on making. Today felt like process rather than planning, so I just ploughed ahead with cutting and stitching, to see where it would take me.

The thought was alternating rectangles of felt, with leaves on them. I like the stand up seams. I adore the leaves. I have more leaves on sheer fabric to go over the more solid blocks. There is another picture of the larger object on Flickr.


TIF 2
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

As for the lack of posting yesterday. Well. I am thinking I might get take Fridays off. I read. I knitted. I had a nice lunch with Al.

ideas that didn’t work

January 10, 2008

So today I tried a bunch of things that didn’t quite work.

I found a handful of pine cones and tips of branches in the parking lot at the Y this morning, an after effect of the wind yesterday, and thought I’d see if paint on them would transfer with the fabric laid over the top and pressed. I’ll tell you right now, it doesn’t. I got some lumpy places on the fabric with no color for most of the pine cones, for the wet pine cone I got a brown sausage shaped transfer. For the needles I got some faint images, and a very nice scent, but mostly nothing really useful.

I tried transferring onto sheer silk. The color went right through and set quite nicely on the ironing board cover. The silk remains pristine.

I did make up some parts for the TIF Challenge, but I’m not sure how I’m going to use them. Working with these nearly perfect leaf images on shiny shiny fabric is unexpectedly inhibiting at the moment. I love the leaves and want to showcase them but then I can’t think what to do to, or around them to finish the piece. I need some doodling time.

transfer test, vocabulary words

January 9, 2008


Jan 9
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

The day started out this morning all misty and mysterious, raining a little, and very foggy.

Img_3192_2Img_3193_2

About noon a front cracked through like a whip, and blew the fog and clouds away, leaving a sharp, bright sparkling afternoon. Gusty wind has been whisking around the house all afternoon.

I was thinking about transfer paints and iron on things today cleaning stalls, and came up with a couple questions. The first was whether I could mix the transfer paints to make the palette for the TIF Challenge. The paints on the paper look different from the transfered colors, so there is a certain uncertainty involved. Then I wondered if t-shirt transfers worked the same way, sublimating ink onto the fabric, or if they used a different mechanism. And then I remembered two pages of transfers I’d made in a class years ago using a color copier. How did they work?

So I started with the TIF palette. I mixed up what I thought should be the colors I wanted and tried them out. I think I got pretty close, so I will be able to use the transfer paints and keep the TIF challenge in line with the media of the moment. The t-shirt transfers do not use the same mechanism to get the image onto the cloth. Transfer paints have to dry on the paper, and heat makes them sublimate (go directly from solid to gas) and the color-carrying gas is absorbed into the fabric.

The t-shirt prints are a thin layer of plastic that peels off backing paper when ironed onto the fabric – the color is carried on a separate layer and can be peeled off with a fingernail. Which could be an interesting exploration at some point – distressing the iron-ons – but isn’t what I’m after. The transfers from the color copier work the same way as the t-shirt transfers, but the layer of plastic is thinner and the heat required to set it is higher.

Now I wonder if I had access to a dye-sublimation printer, if it would work directly on polyester fabric, or if images from it would iron onto the fabric better.

I wonder if you can paint transfer paint directly onto polyester and iron it in, so to speak.