Cracked: the sequel

I posted the results of some rice flour paste resist experiments the other day. After those I decided to try similar work using wheat flour for the resist. Working with the wheat flour was noticeably different from the rice flour. Wheat flour paste is harder to mix. The flour has a tendency for lumps, unlike the rice flour, but I managed to get the stuff pretty smooth and about the consistency of pancake batter. It was easier to smooth onto the fabric than the rice flour, which isn't as sticky as the wheat flour, so efforts to smooth the rice flour paste often result in simply picking up sections of the paste on the smoothing tool (I tried my squeegee, the back of a spoon and my finger—same problem with all of them) and leaving uncovered segments. This was not a problem with the wheat flour paste. I made two pieces, one with nothing added after smoothing the paste on so I could just see what kind of crackle I would get. The second had a pattern of stripes made using a bamboo skewer. Here is the first after drying, painting with acrylic paint and then removing the paste.

Similar but less "chunky" than the rice paste piece that was done the same way.

Here's the one I drew in with a skewer. I used red fabric for this one.

I really preferred the boldness of the rice paste pieces over these wheat paste pieces, though these are OK and quite usable. The worst thing about the wheat paste was removing it from the fabric. The stickiness of the wheat paste (would that be the gluten?) made it spread smoothly and stick nicely to the fabric, but also made it much more difficult to remove. The wheat paste dried very hard and was firmly stuck to the fabric which made it impossible to scrape the dry bits off the fabric. It had to be soaked in water, which made it gummy and slimy and not easily dissolved. Added to the gooey character of the wheat paste was the acrylic paint I had painted onto it, which combined with the wheat paste to make a really tenaciously gluey, sticky surface. I ended up laying the piece out, wet, on a flat surface and scraping, with a credit card, the gunky paste off as well as I could and then washing it with soap.

Today I went back to the rice paste to see how it would hold a line drawn into it with a skewer. Since the wet paste does not stick to the fabric, but instead just sits on top of it, I found that when I drew into it, it tended to pull up bits of the paste along the drawn line. Here is what the dry pasted fabric looked like. I used yellow fabric this time.

You can see that the drawn lines opened as it dried. Then I painted over it with multcolors of acrylic paint.

Those cracks and lines were so deep I really had to work the paint into them After it dried the paste was easy to remove. I figured out that most will come off while it is dry, then the residue is easily washed away. Here is how it looked after it dried and the paste was removed.

Eh. Not great. There are some nice areas, but overall I am disappointed.

In this detail you can see that there were areas where the pattern was completely lost. I think this was because in my efforts to get the paint to go down into the lines and cracks I thinned it with too much water and it simply wicked into the surrounding fabric instead of just defining the crackle and drawn pattern.

Each of the pastes has strengths and weaknesses. Now I think I want to try a mixture of rice and wheat flours to see if the problems are compounded or counteracted.

Frogs

I never intended to collect frogs. I don't even much like the idea of having "collections" of things cluttering up my house, but somehow I have accumulated a lot of frog things, some purchased, some received as gifts. Why frogs? Good question. I don't have an answer.

 

Silkscreen print by Earl Newman

Even out in the garden

Out there we have real frogs as well, often heard and seldom seen. The little guys show up among the hydrangeas occasionally.

Cracked!

Last week I proposed to the STASH group that when we go on our annual retreat next month that we do a surface design project. I suggested flour paste resist on fabrics, which we have discussed before as something we wanted to try. Our retreat will give us the time to work through the process with plenty of drying time between steps. I volunteered to coordinate the project so I have been doing some experimenting to narrow down our options.

Here is my first experiment:

I have done resist dyeing using wheat flour and wondered if rice flour might yield different and interesting results. I found several recipes online. The first one I tried involved cooking the rice flour with water until it boiled and thickened. I spread it on a couple of pieces of white fabric. The first, above, I did nothing to. The second, below, I used a bamboo skewer to draw in the wet paste. Then I let both pieces dry thoroughly.

When they were dry I scrunched each one up to crack the paste, then I painted a layer of acrylic paint over one side and let it dry. When the paint was dry I washed out the rice paste. The results were pretty disappointing. Neither developed an interesting crack pattern, though the one with the scratched away pattern did show the pattern. My assessment was that the cooked rice paste spread too thin and penetrated the fabric too much to allow for good cracks.

Next I mixed the rice flour with water to form a paste and did not cook it. The paste went on thicker and began to crack as it dried. Here's a closeup of one little section of the fabric with the dried rice paste.

Once it was really dry I painted this piece with acrylic paint and let it dry.

When the paint was very dry I washed the rice paste out of the fabric. The paint that was sitting on top of the rice paste also washed away. The paint that seeped into the cracks left a wonderful pattern on the fabric.

This is what I was hoping for! Love those crackles.

Closeup view.

"Oh, what a beautiful daaaaaay"

Busy Saturday started with a meeting of the planning committee for the Washington County Open Studios tour at my house this morning. It was a great meeting, but that meant we all left with stuff to do. I am handling the registrations. Ray went off with his guy friends on another mission of the Burger Project. They call it "the quest for the perfect Burger," but it is really just an excuse for five old guys to get together and eat unhealthy food. They seem to have fun. Once we got all that out of the way we headed south toward Aurora, Oregon for a garden show and sale out in the farmland. They called it "Gardenpalooza."

Great day for a drive in the country. The farms and fields south of Portland are amazingly beautiful all times of year, but springtime is the best. We parked out in a field and headed for the tents and big glass house. Lots of beautiful plants and flowers and garden art.

What the heck is this thing? Amazing looking. I have a feeling it is not native to Oregon.

Such great color.

We bought a tiny Japanese maple that may someday be as big as this beauty.

Tulip magnolia. The smell was divine.

The only crabby person I encountered was the purveyor of these cast concrete leaves. She came lunging at me snarling, "no photos, NO PHOTOS!" just as I snapped this photo. I guess she believes this has never been done and someone might steal her idea. Umm. OK.

The guy selling these pieces just smiled when I took the photo.

We took the back roads home, through farm country and several small, quaint towns, with a stop in Aurora which has an interesting history, having been founded as a utopian religious commune in the mid 1800s. It is now filled with old, restored buildings and houses and antique stores.

As we headed homeward, we turned on the car radio and Garrison Keiller and friends were closing the Prairie Home Companion show with a rendition of "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning." Indeed.

STASH Yesterday

Was a beautiful, sunny day here. The STASH group met at my house and we met up in the loft of the studio. It was comfortable and nice. It was an extra small group with Gerrie and Beth missing. We are not feeling sorry for them. They are both traveling in warm, sunny places. I have been pushing the group to do more at our meetings than drink coffee and catch up on our lives—not that those two things are not important! But I always like a little challenge or activity of some kind that adds something to our artistic purpose.

My friend Deborah Boschert posted a little video tutorial on her blog several weeks ago that I enjoyed. Deborah uses bits of fabric in her work that has her handwriting on it. I have always liked that, so I emailed the group and told them to watch Deborah's video and bring a permanent fabric marking pen with them. I prepared the fabric and we took about 10 minutes to write on our fabric. It got very quiet! I started writing a sort of stream of consciousness narrative about the beautiful day and summer coming. Reva wrote remembered poetry, Gale wrote about birds. Mine started too neatly and legible, I soon decided, so it got more exaggerated and stylized as I went along. All four were so unique and very personal. Suzy, who loves all things red, wrote in bright red ink in a very small script. It looked so wonderful! Had I remembered to take my camera to the studio I would have photos of all of them, but you will have to make do with mine.

I challenged everyone to now make something using their fabric.

Since my birthday was just a week ago (and I like to celebrate for as long as possible) we went out to lunch after our meeting. Gale brought me a gift of a handmade, felted pincushion. Isn't it great?

Have I told you how much I love this group of women? Oh yeah, about a hundred times, I suppose. But I can't say it enough. They are lights in my life.

I may have found it

I did a little more research on drawing apps for my Kindle Fire and found Sketchbook Pro. It seems to be the drawing app iPad users prefer and is available for the Kindle. It wasn't free. It cost all of $2.99 and seems to be much friendlier than those other apps I reported on yesterday. I will need to take some time to delve into all the features and, of course, try out everything and practice them all a bit before I feel competent with it. But here are a couple of very quick tryouts.

Nice painterly effects and a simple, straightforward way to do some blended shading.

I can work with this.

Joanne said I should have gotten the iPad. Well, maybe in a perfect world, where it doesn't cost 3 times what the Kindle Fire cost. It's main advantages would have been the slightly bigger screen and the 3G or 4G connectivity. The Kindle requires Wi-Fi. It is the small price to pay for saving $400. It's a toy. I don't fool myself about that. So is an iPad—albeit a slightly fancier toy. For really precise drawing, I have Illustrator and Photoshop on my computer. What I was looking on for in the Kindle was an app that would allow me to make quick, simple sketches on the fly. Maybe it won't turn out to be anything I will really use, but I rather like the idea of fooling around with quilt ideas or just entertaining myself with it. And, really, if you haven't, you should look at a Kindle Fire. It is very cool. I can read my email and blogs and Facebook with the greatest of ease and the screen shows photos on web sites and blogs beautifully. Most of the apps out there are available for both iPad and Kindle and other tablet devices, so those are the same and work the same on either device. Angry birds and Words with Friends are super on it. I do wish they would get the Kindle version of Draw Something  out there, though!

On a very, very low tech drawing note, I just had to show you this Easter egg, decorated by nature.

I dyed a dozen eggs in solid colors. On Easter morning my son hid them out in the yard for my grandchildren to find. This egg was solid red and placed outside in a bed of damp sedum, branches of which imprinted themselves onto the egg, along with fine speckles I suppose from the dew. It couldn't have been better designed if it had been done on purpose!

Digital Drawing

I have been playing the greatest game on my phone. You may have heard of it, or discovered it yourself. It is called "Draw Something." It is played between two people. I may begin by drawing one of three possible words that the game presents. There is an easy, medium and difficult option. I try to draw the difficult one when possible. Sometimes it is a pop culture person or reference that I don't even understand, but there is always something in the three that is doable. Here I have just drawn "diaper" which I will send to Brenda in Australia.

It will show up on her phone (or iPad) and show the image as it is being drawn. She will have an assortment of letters to choose from to guess the word and fill it into the blanks that are given. Then she will choose a word to draw and send it back to me. When it is my turn I first see her guessing as my image is being drawn. She guessed diaper before I had even drawn the diaper on the baby! Then I see her drawing begin to draw on my screen. This was how it looked at first.

I can see that the word has four letters and they will be four of the ones below. Can you guess it?

Now that the drawing has progressed, I'll bet you can.

It was "halo." Some are harder than this one.

The game is fun and the drawing tools are pretty simple, yet effective. You can draw with your finger. On my tiny iPhone screen it was tricky. I got a stylus to use and that makes it a bit easier. I can see that using an iPad would be a great advantage. I think all of us playing have learned some tricks. At first I was trying to draw outlines then fill them in with color. That is difficult because it is so easy to obliterate the outline if the fill-in color accidentally goes over it. Much easier to block in the colors, then draw the outlines on top.

One of my birthday presents last week was a Kindle Fire pad. It is not quite as big as an iPad, but considerably bigger than a phone screen. I have been quite covetous of an iPad, but honestly just too thrifty to spend that much money on one. The Kindle Fire is a good compromise. I was, however, disappointed that the Draw Something app is not yet available for it, but the game has made me interested in digital drawing apps and I have been trying out a few for the Kindle. Some are free, some cost a small amount. The most I have paid is $1.99.

The first one is called Sketch n Draw. It is quite fun to play with because it has a variety of different brush types.  The one called "shaded" creates a variable line with feathery crosshatching that magically appears as you draw. You can't control the added "shading" so it pops up sometimes unexpectedly, like the little pyramid on the top of his head. I really like the variable character of the line, though. But is is random as well.

Other brushes are interesting, but not terribly practical. The one below might be useful for drawing earthworms.

You can add color, but it is really cumbersome. Here I started with a spattery paint brush for the color, then switched back to the shaded brush for the outlines.

Switching back and forth between colors was hugely awkward and time-consuming. Rather nice effects, but for me too cumbersome. Also hard to control. None of the brushes are really straightforward draw/paint tools.

Next I tried an app called "Drawing Pad." Hated it. There is an assortment of brushes and pencils and markers, but the sizes are limited and the colors limited as well. It does not seem possible to simply draw a thin, clean line with any of the tools.

So far the most fluid I have found is an app called "Picasso." You can switch up the brush size, colors and opacity fairly easily and it has a little tryout so you can see how it will look before you add it to your drawing.

 This may be the best I will find, but I keep hoping there is something more natural and intuitive. Have you found a great drawing app?

Rabbits and Eggs

Here are the dozen eggs I dyed this afternoon. I think they are pretty! Tomorrow morning Uncle Andy will hide them in the yard for Sofia and Marco to find. After they find them, I think Sofia will decorate them further with stickers and such. The family is coming over for brunch tomorrow morning. It will be our Easter celebration, but also our family celebration for my birthday, which was Thursday.

I got out a few Easter decorations for the table.

 Somewhat pitiful and really, is that rabbit a little creepy, or is it just me?

Odd that our American celebration of Easter is so much about eggs and rabbits. Have you thought about this?

The first time we went to Ecuador to visit Emily in 1999 we were going to be there just before Easter. I knew we would be visiting families and friends of Emily's and I wanted to take some small gifts. At a shop here I found some beautiful egg-shaped candles that were decorated to look like Easter eggs. I bought a whole lot of them and wrapped each in colored tissue to take as little gifts. The first two I presented were to Emily's host mother and her daughter. They opened them and looked at them quizzically and then politely thanked me for the pretty candles that looked like eggs. "Easter eggs" I explained. Emily translated. The mother frowned a little and looked confused. "The Easter Rabbit brings them," I continued. Emily translated. The mother and daughter looked at each other. Their eyes said, " what on earth is this woman talking about??" Emily did her best to explain, but we could tell it sounded ludicrous to these people. Seems the Easter Bunny is unknown in South America, and eggs are not decorated or connected to Easter in any way.

In Catholic South America Easter is much more about Holy Week, or Semana Santa, which follows Christ's last days, including the last supper, his carrying the cross through the city, the crucifixion and at midnight on Saturday night mass is celebrated with great joy for his resurrection. It is a somber week of mourning and ritual and commemoration, with a joyful ending. Sunday morning is business as usual. No bunny. No eggs.

While I felt somewhat mortified by my choice of gifts, I continued to present them to people we met. We just started out by explaining this crazy American custom we observe at Easter time, even telling them the rabbit part, which we chuckled at ourselves once we saw the humor in the whole deal. And in return we learned that the most famous Ecuadorean custom that happens during Holy Week in Ecuador is the eating of Fanesca, a special soup served only during Holy week. Bean and salt cod soup may not sound too festive, but people who let rabbits hide eggs in their yards do not judge. (We ate it. It was, um, interesting.)

Have a lovely day, whether you are celebrating Easter, Passover, somebody's birthday or just the beauty of the season.

:: :: :: :: ::

P.S. If you have the time and want to read an entertaining article, Calvin Trillin wrote, in the New Yorker, about traveling to Cuenca, Ecuador (the very city where we were visiting Emily) during Holy Week specifically to eat as much fanesca as he could find. The article is archived online here.

Fire

Finished the campfire piece today. Actually, I thought I had it finished yesterday. It looked like this:

I don't know if you can see what I changed. The bottom foreground wasn't quite working for me. Those rocks around the fire looked too tight and somehow unnatural. And the ground itself wasn't "grounding." I added a couple more rocks and some deep shadow, which seem like an improvement to me. And then I added more sparks. Seemed like it needed those.

This piece will be submitted for our next High Fiber Diet show, "The Elements." If I can get them done in time, I hope to complete all four elements to submit. I started with "fire" because it seemed the most challenging, but now I am having a hard time coming up with any ideas for earth, air and water!

The size of this is 15" x 35". I kind of wish I had made it larger.

What I saw today

Gauguin at the Seattle Art Museum. It was a long day, but oh, so worth the drive.

Old Friends

Four years ago today I stopped by my friend Paula's house to drop off a birthday present for her. It was a planter planted with spring flowers and I knew she would be at work so I planned to leave it on her front porch with a card. I rang the bell on the off chance someone was home and she answered, looking pale and shaky. "Don't come in—I have the flu." I left the flowers and wished her a speedy recovery and left. She has no memory of the flowers or the day or our short conversation. By the next day she was in ICU fighting for her life against a virus that was attacking her brain. This was followed by a near fatal drug reaction and weeks and months of recovery.  She recovered and today is celebrating another birthday. Happy Birthday, Paula!

This is me (left) and Paula (right) as we appeared in our High School yearbook, senior year. By then we thought we had been friends forever—8 years! We met in fourth grade when we were vying for the same boyfriend. We were in different classes, but managed to make each other quite miserable competing for this cute boy and ended up in a conflict that our teachers finally had to resolve. I still remember Paula's teacher saying, "You are both nice girls who should be friends and should not be so angry toward one another." The teachers determined that we should be made to eat lunch together for a week and get to know one another. At the end of the week we were buddies. Neither of us knows what happened to the boy we both adored. We have been friends since—through college, marriage, children and grandchildren. We started together in Pocatello, Idaho, then after college we each moved away, but always stayed in touch. In 1993 I moved to Portland where Paula lived. Today we live about 3 miles apart and see each other weekly. We have been friends for 56 years. I love her dearly and am so grateful that she is here.

The older I get the more I realize what great fortune I have in my friends.

Today I learned that another old friend, from college, died yesterday. I have not seen, nor been in touch with him for many years, but the news brought back a flood of memories of a talented, creative soul and sweet and generous friend and I am sad to know that he is gone.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, 

they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.  

—Marcel Proust

My two cents worth on the subject.

Pinterest. That's the subject.

Have you discovered the wildly popular online pin board service yet? When I first heard about it some months back it seemed like such a great idea—a place to "pin" all those wonderful, interesting, inspiring things that one runs across while surfing the net. Stuff you want to keep track of—somehow. I used the "bookmark" feature on my browser, of course, but a long, unsorted list of urls is pretty unwieldy. Then I just started creating folders that had photos I wanted to keep for reference, and urls of ideas and tutorials I might someday want to look at again. Then along came Pinterest and made it all so easy and organized and with a visual interface that showed you exactly what you had saved. Perfect. So, I saw it as helping us all do what we were already doing, but in a really well designed way. And—since it was all stored online, instead of on one's own hard drive, you can share it.

But it is blowing up, maybe. There is a lot of talk and opinion about what the copyright ramifications are. Some see it as clear copyright infringement. Some people are now saying that even though they have posted their photos online, for anyone to see, they do not want them pinned onto a Pinterest account. In case you're not familiar with Pinterest, this is what a Pinterest page looks like. This is mine.

Each of those squares is a category "board" and you can see one large and several small thumbnails of photos "pinned" on the board. I don't pin a lot of things. You can see that three of my boards have nothing on them. If you want to see it closer up, I think you can look just by clicking this link .

It may, indeed, be a copyright infringement to re-post other people's photos. I guess that remains to be seen. For me, it seems that re-posting on Pinterest is harmless. The photo is already on the internet. By pinning, you are posting it on the internet. Same/same? Seems like it to me, but not to everyone. People are starting to put notices on their blogs saying they do not wish their photos to be pinned. And I will certainly respect that. For the record you may not re-post my photos and say that they are yours. You may not take my photos and print them on T-shirts (or coffee mugs, or, or, or...) and sell them without my permission. You may not make a quilt identical to one of mine and enter it into a show or sell it and say it was your original design. (If you want to copy for your own enjoyment, knock yourself out...) But, if you want to pin it to your Pinterest board, that's fine with me. I do hope you'll give me credit and link it back to my blog.

Interestingly, it is possible to search and see who has pinned my photos. Fascinating. It is informative to see just what seems to grab people. Here is one screen of images pinned from my blog onto other people's Pinterest boards.

This tells me that my recent quilt with the hearts resonated with several people. Also my "Deep in the Forest" tree and my other tree, the "Sheltering Tree" piece. Just in the past week two people have pinned the beginnings of my campfire quilt. I wanted to leave a message and say, "not yet! It isn't finished!"

Scrolling back a bit I see  the deep forest tree was still popular and several people picked up on my little folded gift box tutorial and were interested in the finger lights I bought in Houston.

This is great information! It is also gratifying and flattering.

Maybe I am missing the big threat. Maybe I am just too trusting of people's motives, but until someone explains it to me in terms that make sense, or someone rips me off in some unexpected way by means of Pinterest, I remain a fan. I hope Pinterest can survive the critics and the legal questions. I think it is a brilliant idea.