The Quilt Artist

The Fantasy


The morning sun streams through the east facing windows of the Artist's palatial bedroom.  As the sun strikes her smooth brow she awakens and stretches her well-toned body under her pristine 10,000 thread count, hand-made sheets.  


Her lover has left a beautiful tray of assorted pastries and Blue Mountain coffee on the hand carved side table.  The table, made from reclaimed wood gathered from a centuries old farm house in France, sits in the sunlight shaded by lace curtains woven from recycled silk by cloistered nuns in Rome.


All is right with the world as the Artist sits to break her fast and glances at the dozen art magazines from all over the world that makes up her morning reading.


Suddenly she tenses as she reads about Cloth, Paper, Scissors magazine's latest challenge.  The challenge is to take a half yard of fabric, transform it by your preferred method and send eight nine inch squares of it to the magazine Arts for a fabric swap/exchange.


"Yes" she declares aloud, startling her pack of rescued, pure bred, dogs and cats from their  postprandial slumber, "This is just the thing for me."


She dresses in a white smock, made from an Irish Linen table cloth that her great-great-great grandmother hemstitched, and rushes to her secluded studio back in the woods of her mountainside retreat.


Using her portfolio of Japanese wood block prints as inspiration, she selects a piece of fabric sent to her by the Sultan last year and, as her assistant prepares it for dying, the Artist gathers her dyes from Bali, silk screens from Tibet, inks from Ireland and brushes from her badger farm in Montana.


She is now ready to create her masterpiece.


Skipping the next seven days of creative chaos, including three crying jags, 75 yards of fabric sent to the recyclers and the demise of one great dying table from the weight of her frustration, the Artist produces this:

  
The Reality


The Artist awakes to the yapping of three small dogs wanting to get outside to chase the squirrels.  While eating her Cherrios over the kitchen sink, she sees that Cloth, Paper, Scissors Arts has another challenge.


"Yes" she declares aloud, startling her pack of snarling mutts competing for her leftover milk, "This is just the thing for me." 


Using her 1949 tourist guide to Japanese wood block prints as inspiration, she gathers her materials consisting of fabric from the sale table at WalMart, leftover dyes from a friend's class three years ago, silk screens from a door prize package and inks from a calligraphy class when she was in high school.


After eight hours of washing, drying, ironing, wetting, dying, ironing, stenciling, ironing and ruining the top of the plastic table she uses for dying outdoors, she produces this:

  I would love to resemble the fantasy but, alas, my life is the reality.


Have a good week!  

EZ Screen Print

I read about the EZ Screen Print system in the Amy Karol book Bend the Rules with Fabric. I have always enjoyed using purchased silk screens but I never semed to be able to find the ones I wanted when I needed them. I bought the book back in August and have been mulling over purchasing the system since them.

A couple of weeks ago I took the plunge and, until a couple of days ago, it sat on the kitchen counter waiting for me to try it out.

Sweet Sadie's has run out of staff T-shirts so I took that as a sign to make some for them.

I started with some stained while t-shirts I have lying around here and, after runing one screen, got this result:

Imagine how it would look on an unstained T-shirt!

I then tried out my silk sreen on a black T-shirt..

Not as good a result because I didn't have the right ink but in a pinch it would work.

The way this system works is that it uses the sun, or another UV light source, to harden the emulsion on the screen where you don't want the ink to penetrate. Where you do want your image, you mask it from the sun (like the Sweet Sadie's which was printed in black on a transparency sheet) and the emulsion stays soft. Scrub off the soft emulsion, dry and put the screen out in the sun for a final hardening and your screen is ready to use.

I now have three different sizes of Sweet Sadie's silk screen bits, from one big screen, to try on other T-shirts to see what works best.

I hope Paul likes them.

Now to what I really want on a silk screen.... some smallish leaves to cover up stains on other T-shirts. Just need to find the right images.

If you would like try your hand at making silk screens, try this system. It's relatively inexpensive to begin, then if you like it, you can then invest in more screens.

I think 2010 will the year of the silk screens.

Could be worse!