Day with Jodi

Yesterday was tons of fun. Once I got down to Jodi's (3 1/2 hour drive - eep! I guess that's why we don't do this more often!) we got going on playing!

As it turns out, I brought WAY more fabric than I needed for what we were doing. I brought 5 M of black and 6(!) of bleached white muslin! We started things off with a little sunprinting (the weather and time of day were great for it) using Setacolour dyes. I hadn't used these before, and Jodi had a nice selection. I was pretty pleased with how this came out ...pleased enough that I'll probably put some of my own out here at home a little later if the wind doesn't pick up.

Most of the day was spent playing with Shiva Paintsticks. These super little numbers were really easy to get started with! My first piece used their Ginkgo rubbing plate. I enjoyed how we could layer the colours without waiting for the previous colour to dry.

We played for a while with the plates that are designed for the paintsticks, but after a while started branching out to other surfaces for rubbing. Jodi has an amazing collection of hand carved stamps from when she used to teach floorcloth painting classes - we found that they worked really, really well. They were tremendously versatile, too. She had some plastic doilies that got recruited as rubbing surfaces, as well.

I had a little stencil that I'd bought that morning (on my way there. Who from a town the size of mine can resist the WalMart craft section?!?!?) which I absolutely love. No suprise there, I seem to be partial to images of birds these days.

By far my favorite pieces were those done on the already hand-dyed fabric (thanks Jodi, for the apricot fabric) or on the black. Well, and the bird.
The ones on white background are calling out to me that they need more...so once the paintsticks are totally dry and heat set (Wednesday) I might try immersion dying them to see what happens. I have a hunch that because the paintstick dye is an oil based surface paint, it may act as a mask. I'm hoping that an 'overdye' will appear to be more of an 'underdye' - does that make sense?

Anyhoo...

Now I have more ideas than I could possibly do in a single life time. Once I finish the quilt that's on the machine I'll get crackin'.
I want to make some custom rubbing plates using dimensional fabric paint on cardboard (the ones I tried using white glue just don't have enough, well, dimension to be effective). Those will take at least 24 hours to dry. I better get the sunprinting stuff outside, oh, and possibly send off an order to Dharma Trading Co. or Maiwa Handprints for more dye....

I knew a great day with a good friend would ultimately get me in trouble.

Thanks for all the fun, Jodi.

Lisa