My dyeing/print making class with Pat Pauly was amazing. She’s SO comfortable with thickened dyes and what she can do with them that it was almost hard to keep up.
This was the first demo, about using stencils. She doesn’t use them with a screen, but just hangs on to a corner and scrapes dye through. It’s fast!
Next, she scrapes on background color. (See the berry and yellow streaks above.) Adding the background color does alter the previously stenciled areas some, but she’s not worried about it.
Pat picks up the perfect amount of dye for the perfect spread/scrape. I haven’t mastered that yet and it does make a difference. For instance, if it’s too wet and gloppy everything smears when you do the next thing.
Judy (I think) had good luck with stencils. Don’t you love the colors?
I like these “open” stencils, like those used above. They allow lots of color to print, leaving a more delicate background peaking through.
Next, we learned about putting textured items below our fabric and lightly rolling on dye. Check out Jim’s piece: those large circles are toilet flanges! (Several people headed to the hardware store after learning this.)
Pat also talked to us about having contrast within each piece of fabric: light/dark, large/small, busy/quiet. But, she said not to aim for a whole cloth quilt fabric. I think Jim hit all the marks.
We learned monoprinting next. It was very fun to do – almost like finger painting. But, I didn’t like my results. This was a very ugly bright green monoprint. I tried to resurrect it by painting over the majority of it with a dark blue (still wet here.) Better, for sure. I made the screen with soy wax, which was rather challenging with such a detailed design.
On day 2 we washed the day 1 fabrics and at the end of the day we had SUCH fun pulling that stuff out of the dryer! As you can see, Pat was pretty happy with them, too.
I don’t have many photos of my own fabrics. This is my favorite one, in-progress.
Here’s some more work from around the room. This large piece was created by Sandy, who is an experienced dyer. It shows! She worked a lot with newspaper stencils. That’s how she made the large circles.
This one, by Melinda, featured rolling over textures, stenciling and scraping color on. That scraping is really fun!
I can’t wait till I have more time to finish up my class fabrics (~8 yards,) and then to USE these puppies!
Ellen Lindner
