Surface design workshop with Betty Busby

Last weekend was triple booked with all kinds of things (including a funeral), but the main thing was the opening of fiberworks (which I'll share pictures of next week) and a two-day workshop with Betty Busby.  Betty's absolutely fantastic-  I've known her for a long time and she's the one who organized the invitational show at the NM State Capitol last summer.  Her work is phenomenal, you can see some of it here.

She does several workshops, but this one was for surface design.  We did a bunch of silk painting using different approaches, did some sun printing using custom cut vinyl, and then spent a bunch of time doing what she calls post-processing.  This is surface embellishment with all kinds of things, colored pencils, inktense pencils, fabric markers, paint markers, shiva paintsticks, gel pens, and many more.  She had tons of tips and tricks to share, and huge bags of different things to try.  It was a lot of fun and I have lots of notes of things I want to incorporate going forward,  particularly with regards to her overall approach.

I did a lot of testing different fabrics during the class just to see how well her approaches would work on different things.  She uses a lot of silk, and I did a fair amount of that, but I also used a bunch of my shiny bridal-type polyester and some polyester velvet.  Usually I'm all about the candy colors- and Betty brought every color of paint you can imagine, but you can see from what I did that I was in a sort of muddy orange mood!


This is a piece I "sunprinted"  It's not traditional sun printing, but you wet paint the fabric and then put down the vinyl shape and as it dries a print is left behind.  The black star, white spiderweb, and black cambrian shell are all vinyl cutouts on the wet fabric.  This was shiny white polyester.

After they dry, and you peel back the vinyl, it's lighter underneath.  Here's the shell after I removed the vinyl and started coloring on it with paintsticks and markers.

Here's the lily pad after I started embellishing it and its background.  I used painsticks and markers and paint markers and colored pencils and gel pens.  Just to experiment!

This one was printed onto a chunk of an orange sari-  I liked the formal gold woven edge contrasting with the organic feeling of the prints.  No post-processing yet.  I might piece a halloween quilt with this and the one above

Here's another one I sunprinted-  this one is on silk, but no embellishment yet, this is just what it looked like after I peeled off the vinyl.

This was painted silk over rubber bands

And this one was silk painted over a place mat.

This started out as some sort of tablecloth-  it was beige, but it had flowers woven in it a sort of jacquard weave so it had a lot of texture.  I wasn't sure whether the printing would work but it did!  

And this one was polyester velvet, painted using a faux-shibori technique.  Came out with lots of great lines and organic stripes even in the velvet which doesn't pleat well.  The next picture shows what it looked like as I was painting it.

And of course the side of my hand was covered in paintstick, paint, and marker after coloring for a while!

The workshop was really great and I had a good time.  It was nice to just be creative without any particular project in mind.  Definitely take a workshop from Betty if you have the opportunity!

New Manuscript Quilt

You may recollect I've been working on a series of quilts depicting the pieces of the Episcopal liturgy, specifically the Holy Eucharist, Rite 2.  The next section I decided to work on is the Confession.  In thinking about this piece I decided I wanted to use my own handwriting rather than a more formal script as I've used in previous pieces.

I didn't want to digitally print it, so I started thinking about ways to get my handwriting onto fabric.  At first I thought I'd try bleach discharge using a bleach pen, but on my little samples, the bleach pen bled so much that it wasn't really legible.

Next I thought about using Esterita Austin's ink/paint transfer technique.  I'd previously used it on my seed packet quilt and thought it might work here.  Basically, you can paint or write on parchment paper, layer it with misty fuse and organza and the paint/ink is picked up by the organza/misty fuse when you iron.  Previously I'd done it with paint, which worked quite well, but for the handwriting I wanted to use marker as I'm not very graceful writing with a brush.  I did some sharpie writing on the parchment (top picture), and then did the mistyfuse transfer onto organza (middle picture).  It worked fine, but because the misty fuse has the texture of a fine webbing and the marker ink doesn't have any inherent structure to it (like a layer of paint), the ink only transfers exactly where the misty fuse fibers were.  This resulted in a sort of faint transfer which wasn't exactly what I was going for.  I tried it using wonder under instead of misty fuse since that's a little denser, but it really didn't work (bottom picture); I just got a big mess.

Next I decided to try sunprinting.  I purchased some Jacquard SolarFast, a sunprinting fluid that allows you to print in many different colors, not just the blue of traditional cyanotypes.  I got a bottle of purple and a bottle of orange.  You paint it on, then while wet, put on your items for resist, cover them with glass, and put them in the sun.  Many people print black and white photos on transparencies and place those under the glass for printing, so I figured I could write with a black marker and that would work.  I did two small test pieces on different background fabrics.  For one (Alleluia Alleluia below) I used a standard sharpie and wrote on the transparency.  For the other (Go in Peace below), I wrote with standard sharpie directly on my glass.  The two pictures are just different amounts of time in the sun so you can see the color develop.  Writing on the glass was easier since it meant only positioning one thing, but I was concerned that because the writing was on the top of the glass, the thickness of the glass might make the writing less crisp.

Indeed that's what happened.  Sorry for the terrible lighting below, I'm not sure why I had so much reflected light off these samples.  Anyway, you can see that the writing is definitely crisper and easier to read in the Alleluia sample than the Go in Peace sample.  In fact on the Go in Peace sample, you can hardly even see the words, especially on the purple.

I decided to use orange for the center of my print (where most of the writing would be) and purple for the outside ring since the writing was easier to see on the purple.  I did like the look of the purple and orange on the light yellow print background, so I grabbed another piece of light yellow tone-on-tone from my stash.  I also decided to go ahead and write on the transparency rather than the glass and use a thicker marker.  The final size of my print is about 30 x 30 so that meant a large piece of glass, transparency, and fabric to line up.  It was a bit tricky lining it all up in the dark, and then my giant sheet of glass broke in two leaving some very sharp edges, but in the end I got it all layered up and into the sun.  Here it is mid-print.  The thing that looks like a white string across the top is actually the place where the glass broke.  I had to hold it together with clear packing tape.  If you look closely you can see the transparencies underneath (where the writing is).  The little whitish squares are the scotch tape I used to hold the transparency sheets together.  Unfortunately you can't use the transparencies without the glass overlays because they blow away. 

 Here's how the final print turned out.  I like it- the text is subtle, but legible if you look very closely, which is fine with me.  I have great plans for how I want to turn this into a quilt, but sadly there are a few more high-priority things in the pipeline right now so it'll be the first of the year or later when I get back to this.

What kind of experiences have you had with these techniques?