watercolors

Many moons ago, when I was just a young buck in grad school, I discovered the joys of watercolor. Having devoted the majority of my young adulthood to studying oil painting (I mean, is there any other medium if you're going to be a serious painter? Wink...) it felt somewhat naughty and subversive to put down the turpentine and fill a jar with water, pin some paper to the wall and set to work, letting the colors bleeeed. I didn't do anything super cool or smart with those watercolors - I just painted still lives - huge still lives - of all the dirt and crap that was sitting around my studio (I kept a very untidy studio.)

little details of those watercolors...

I don't know that I've ever really given the full story on this blog of how I made the switch from painting to sewing, but that's because there really isn't much to tell. I think like a lot of people that pursue a passion extremely hard, I just experienced burnout and needed a break. I also never stopped working with art and artists on a daily basis, albeit in a much different capacity, and so it has never been far from my mind. But the long and short of it is: Shortly after moving to Houston with Nick, I stopped painting. Around this same time I received a sewing machine for my birthday (for lack of any other birthday ideas, Nick suggested I ask my parents for a sewing machine - that man is clairvoyant sometimes, I swear...) and left it sitting in a box for a number of months. Finally my fingers started to itch for a creative outlet and I buckled down and learned how to thread my machine and sew my first few tentative stitches...

One of my earliest frustrations with sewing was with my fabric choices. Perhaps I'm exceptionally picky, but I was never happy with the prints readily available to me at the local fabric stores. I find it exceptionally frustrating when you have a mental image of your dream garment only to find that the fabric in your minds eye simply does not exist!! You guys have seen enough of my makes to know that I tend to favor loose, abstract prints with a hand drawn/painted quality. Prints that looks like I might have made them...

So from the very beginning I've had "learning to hand dye fabric" on my sewing bucket list. This summer I got really excited to see that The Art of Cloth Dyeing was being offered as a class on Craftsy.   I enrolled and began leisurely working my way through the classes, not really taking notes or doing any of the techniques shown, but just trying to get more information on how dyes work, what you need, steps, etc. My husband, Nick, kept raising his eyebrows at me because much of the samples shown in the class are what I might call "fancy tie-dye." While I think some of these immersion dyeing methods can yield really beautiful and unusual results - and I plan to try them out in the future - I was really watching this class with my own agenda in mind.

What I really wanted to do was direct application dyeing. So after waiting patiently for a few months until I had enough money to gather supplies, I finally put in an order with Dharma Trading Company (anyone watch Lost...?) for some bulk fabric, chemicals and a small selection of procion dyes.

This past weekend I hand painted my first length of fabric - three yards of some diaphanous silk habotai (habutai?) I had to work very quickly (thats the reason why all these pictures show me with my dust mask and gloves on) just barely touching my brush to the fabric and letting it bleed outward. The more layers I put on the looser my "hand" became and I began to have fun letting the colors mix and travel directly on the fabric. It reminded me very much of how much joy I used to find in those grad school watercolors, touching my brush to a surface...

xx