Sailing North

My husband, Ron and I went sailing again this summer. For 2 weeks we headed north ending up in the Broughtons. It was wet.

Most days it was wet. 

But is was to be expected because we were in rain forest country

There were enough breaks in the heavy rain for us to go ashore to walk through wet undergrowth.

Current Threads 11 Opening

The Vancouver Island Surface Design Association had the opening of their Current Threads 11 exhibition at the Ladysmith Waterfront Gallery on Saturday August 6th.

New this year was a collection of small works called 'Under Currents' at a set price of $195.

Artists: Elserine Sprenger, Linda Wallace, Barbara McCaffrey, in front of Barbara's work

Artist: Dale MacEwan, in front of her work

Artist: Susan Purney Mark, in front of her work

Artist: Susan Duffield, in front of her work

Artist: Susan Jones, in front of her work

There was a great crowd throughout the opening

MISSA Day 5

After completing a screen printing of a wallpaper over the whole cloth, I put on a wash of light blue paint beside the yellow. I put it out in the sun and manipulated it to get the right flow of soft lines.

I added leaves and flowers as resists - the same plants/shapes as the screen printed motifs

Linda working on placement of motifs on her compositional cloth

Judy cutting a stamp to make a motif on her cloth.

We ended this wonderful workshop with our instructor, Eleanor Hannan giving us a critique of each of our cloths as they hung in the stage area of the smaller theater on campus.
In the week everyone had completed their cloth to a stage where they could now add the final layers, whatever they needed to be. I'll keep you posted on how my cloth develops.
I will be returning to MISSA next year and I look forward to another class with Eleanor because among other joyous things, she gave us all permission to just play for a whole week - something I need more of in my life.

MISSA Day 4

Another layer was added to our cloths by freely brushing on the back with paint

I added some dry brush strokes with a tree stump under the cloth

While drying in the sun my cloth attracts some comments

MISSA Day 3

The 3rd day was spent mostly on silk screening on our 4 meters of cloth.

I wanted a wall paper effect so combined an alternating band made with a stamp and my silk screen pattern rotated 180 degrees each time. 

I didn't quite get the motifs in the right place to make the pattern interlocking but it worked well enough.

At this stage the 3 layers were looking a bit jumbled up in parts.
But there was lots more work to be done to pull it all together.

MISSA Day 2

We began day 2 by making different stamps and playing around with them.

The next step with our cloth was to establish territories on it. 

I used my stamps to define the different areas of an abstracted face. 

In the afternoon i sun-printed with ferns down the side.

At the end of the day i hung the cloth from a balcony so i could see all of it when i returned to the classroom the next morning.

MISSA

I attended the 1st week of this years Metchosin Summer School of the Arts out at the beautiful Lester Pearson College campus in Eleanor Hannan's "Compositional Cloth: The Face" workshop.

She showed us a number of ways to make stamps and patterns after a few warm up exercises to get us thinking about the face.

Eleanor showed us how to make a silk screen.

And how to make all the right sounds when using screen and paint.

The first marks we made on our 3 to 5 metres of cloth where to be bold and free.
I was not impressed when, with my first stroke, the too runny paint fell out of the brush to make a red puddle, a heavy-handed start  for my cloth. 

Disperse Dyes at SDA

The 1st exercise with the disperse dyes Marie-Therese had us do was a sample of the different dyes. 

This proved to be a most useful reference through out the week.

I have ordered a set of dyes from ProChem and will repeat this exercise with them.

Dyeing with a resist

An exercise to see how many prints one could make from one piece of painted paper.

I made 16 and could have made more.

It is a most economical technique.

An exercise using cheap copy paper to make a stencil.
Marie-Therese showed us there are so many possibilities with disperse dyes

Marie-Therese Wisniowski

The 2nd week, after the SDA conference, I attended a 5-day workshop run by Marie-Therese Wisniowski, from Australia.

Marie-Therese is an excellent teacher. She opened up the whole world of diverse dyes and transfer for her students.

I had worked through the Double Trouble book 'Transfer to Transform' but wasn't able to take the technique into more developed work. 

Marie-Therese explained the chemistry of the process then took us through a series of carefully planned exercises that allowed us to build on our knowledge as the course progressed.

The poor images are of Marie-Therese's signature work. She has also curated textile exhibitions. This Artcloth one featured a number of the instructors and speakers at the SDA conference. Check out her blog to see more of what she gets up to www.artquill.blogspot.com