quilting | Tien Chiu's Blog

March 18, 2012 by Tien Chiu

More quilt blocks

I took a few hours this afternoon to catch up on my quilt class “homework”. You may recognize this fabric:

It’s made with teeny-tiny scraps, not even big enough for a sample exchange. (That fabric was so hard-won I hate to throw away even the tiniest pieces!) I flipped one piece upside down to get a little more value contrast. I like the effect, but I should have done several pieces; with just the one piece, it looks accidental.

And here are two others:

I’ve also caught up on administrative stuff: fifty samples of Autumn Splendor fabric are winging their way to the Fine Threads and Beyond Plain Weave Garment Study Group Complex Weavers sample exchanges. This sounds relatively simple, but between doing the write-up and assembling photos, samples, and thread samples, it’s taken me nearly eight hours to do all fifty samples! (I actually did two separate write-ups – the Fine Threads and Garment study groups have different focuses, so I tried to keep the write-ups tailored to the audience.)

And I’ve cleaned the studio, paid the bills, and cut out touch swatches for Kodachrome and Autumn Splendor’s entries to CNCH, the Conference of Northern California Handweavers. (Entry deadline is end of March.) I haven’t yet finished the edges of the swatches, but have pity on a girl! There’s only so much admin stuff I can take in one day. I’ll do that part tomorrow, or next weekend. There’s no hurry.

I had originally intended to do dyeing/screen printing work today, but it rained all week and today is cold and blustery – not the best weather for working outdoors! So I’ll probably spend it reading, or chewing through John Marshall’s PDFs/videos on carving stencils. (I picked up a copy of the DVD at the quilt show.) And doing some analysis. I have lots of ideas for Phoenix Rising buzzing through my head, and it’s time to write them all down, then sort them out. I have visions of echo weave, collapse weave, devore, and woven shibori dancing in my head…not to mention dozens of dye techniques…time to figure out what combinations/samples I want to weave!

March 16, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Quilting and katazome

Despite more busy-ness, I did carve out some time for fiber stuff today. So here is a new quilt square from my foundation piecing quilt class:

It’s not technically perfect, nor is it very exciting, design-wise, but it’s pleasant enough, and I got to practice foundation piecing and a little bit of design, so I’m declaring it a success. The next on the agenda are string blocks and crazy quilt blocks – which should go quickly – followed by freezer-paper template hexagonal blocks, which promise to be painfully slow. And that’s just to catch up with last Friday’s lesson! The new lesson opens tonight, so I am dreadfully behind. (But it’s OK – it’s not being graded, and the class stays open for a good month after the last lesson.)

Yesterday’s Black Sheep Handweavers Guild meeting brought a marvelous temptation: katazome! The wonderfully talented Karen Miller was our speaker, and talked about katazome, the art of Japanese stenciled resist dyeing. Her work is exquisitely detailed. You should visit her website, Nautilus Fiberarts.

Anyway, looking at her work made me think of all the wonderful ways that katazome could be combined with handweaving. Or just used as itself, for surface design! I had been thinking of playing with katazome anyway, and this has made me determined to learn more. I do have a rather extensive book on katazome that my friend Julie gave to me (thanks Julie!), so I’m going to do some research. But my real dream is to take John Marshall’s week-long katazome class. John is, as far as I know, the katazome expert in the U.S., and his work is amazing. I can’t take it this year (too many expensive conferences and too little vacation), but hopefully next year.

It so happens that both John and Karen will be at the East Bay Heritage Quilters Voices in Cloth 2012 show this weekend, and since I have to be up in the East Bay for my aquaponics workshop tomorrow, I think I’m going to go to the show. Since I’m doing a little bit of quilting, I’m curious to see what else is being done in quilting, and I would love to see John and Karen’s work, closer up.

March 7, 2012 by Tien Chiu

A more serious study of surface design

Fifteen yards of cotton fabric arrived yesterday, along with some opaque textile paints and a few more T-shirts. I’ve been meditating on what to do next. Now that the practical considerations (new clothes + quilting fabric) are taken care of, I think I’m going to do a more serious study of surface design techniques and composition. Jane Dunnewold’s Art Cloth is going to be my guide during this study – the (excellent, excellent!) book has instructions for most surface design techniques AND some guides to composition!

So the question becomes, how do I break things down? I can focus on a single technique, delving into the depths of discharge printing or dyeing – which is good for studying technique, not so good for composition – or I can work on a single piece from start to finish, using multiple techniques. Better for composition, not so good for technique. Also involves more mixing-up, since many of the materials don’t keep well.

I suspect I may take a combined approach – do one technique at a time, but use them in a variety of compositional approaches – subdued vs. bold, “busy” vs. “quiet”, small designs vs. large, etc. to see what effects I get with each. I will probably put together a matrix of things to try, not as a hard and fast rule but as a general guide. I’m sure I will stray considerably from it, but I’m more comfortable having a plan.

I’m still deciding what size pieces to work on. I think I will either work in fat quarters (22.5″ x 18″) or fat halves (22.5″ x 36″), mainly because my dye/printing table is only two feet across! This will let me keep the fabric flat without resorting to more complicated measures.

The four design materials I will be studying are: dyeing, discharge, paints, and foil. The six application methods will be:

bound-resist (tie-dye, shibori),
chemical resist (wax resists, paste, etc.),
stamping
stenciling
screen printing
painting.

That is a lengthy list and most of these items are worth a lifetime of study just by themselves! But I am not after a deep understanding, just a general idea of how and when to use them. That is somewhat less daunting.

Anyway, dyeing is the first step in surface design, so that’s what I’ll do this weekend. I need to read up on different dye techniques this week, so I can experiment as broadly as possible. Fifteen yards of fabric sounded like a lot until I started thinking of all the things you can do with it! Now I can already see that I’ll need more. (But not for a few weekends, perhaps?)

Meanwhile, since every blog post should have a pretty picture, here is my latest quilt square:

It works reasonably well from a technical standpoint, but compositionally it doesn’t work at all. The pale pink is too pale – it stands out like a sore thumb and doesn’t look related to the darker magenta elements at all. So it stops the eye and the block degenerates into visual chaos. If I do it again, I will do it in single colors.

Next up is Dutchman’s Puzzle, which I am hoping to complete today.

March 6, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Quilt square

I finished my first foundation-pieced quilt square yesterday:

I like it! It came out pretty well, with nice sharp points. Compositionally, I think it’s sound – I’m on the fence about the first fuchsia log, which stands out pretty sharply – but it also adds drama, which I think is important for this block. Aside from the fuchsia it’s all closely related, medium to light value colors, which isn’t as exciting as I would like.

Today I’m going to work on another quilt square, though that will probably have to wait until Mike gets up, as my sewing machine is fairly noisy. I think this one will be “Snail’s Trail”, but I might do “Dutchman’s Puzzle” instead.

March 5, 2012 by Tien Chiu

New wardrobe

I screen printed eight T-shirts yesterday, of which this is my favorite (click in for a closeup!):

my favorite: red dragon on a flame-colored T-shirt! — red dragon on a flame-colored T-shirt!

Here is my next favorite:

bordered tiger print on rust-colored fabric

And here are two others I liked:

This one did not come out quite as brightly as I had hoped, probably because my screen printing inks are semi-transparent – meaning the background is apt to show through.

The same thing happened here, but I love it anyway:

And these four are still in progress:

With this one, I intend to discharge the tiger using thickened bleach (more accurately, Cascade dishwashing gel with bleach – more controllable and less likely to bleed), then paint it with thickened dyes to give an orange tiger against a khaki-and-olive shirt. I think that should be really neat!

These two are white and need to be overpainted with thickened dyes to make them more interesting:

Cat perching on a stone ledge. This one's for Sweetheart, who loved to sit on top of things. — Cat perching on a stone ledge. This one's for Sweetheart (who died last year) - she loved to sit on top of things.

Cat with birds. Sweetheart loved chasing birds, too. I hope somewhere she is still chasing them.

The cat with birds is probably the least successful print: the border is a bit blurry on the left side and the cat really doesn’t make sense – compositionally the copper color doesn’t work and who ever heard of a metallic copper cat? I am tempted to toss this one and remake it, this time with a black or dark brown kitty.

The cat-with-birds was a lot of fun to make, though – it involved six Thermofax screens: five small ones for the birds and cat, plus a larger one for the border. And I like the composition, so I will likely redo it.

And here is the last one, which also needs rework:

The least successful print: red dragon on black

Here the semi-transparent inks are super obvious: the red dragon is barely visible as a dark maroon. However, this is probably salvageable. I’m going to discharge the shirt using either thiourea dioxide or bleach, then re-dye with a friendlier color. Maybe a flame-colored halo around the dragon? That would be really neat!

And, finally, I printed a pair of sweatpants – this was my first attempt at Thermofax printing and I just LOVE it, though technically it’s a disaster:

Here is a closeup of one motif (which looks a bit blurry; maybe I should have photographed a better one):

Thermofax printing, by the way, is TREMENDOUS fun, especially when compared to much more laborious silkscreening. Instead of having to laboriously apply emulsion to a screen, wait 24 hours for a screen to dry, then exposing and washing out the screen, you just take your design, sandwich it against the sheet of Thermofax screen, and run it through the Thermofax. Presto, you have a screen! It’s just a minute or two to mount the screen in the frame (which is far thinner and less clunky than a silkscreen frame), and then you can print right away. It is such a joy to use! I haven’t felt this empowered by a tool since I changed from a heavy hybrid bike to a lighter, more agile road bike.

(The only downside to a Thermofax machine is its high cost – “going rate” is about $1000 for a used one and $1500 for a new one – but after much searching, I found one on Craigslist dirt cheap. Woo hoo!)

And, as if that weren’t enough, on the quilting front I dyed 14 more fat quarters – shades of rust and orange as well as relatively solid blue, purple colors. The complete set of fat quarters looks like this:

They were tremendous fun to dye and I definitely plan on doing more, if only for the fun of it! I’m going to order at least 10 yards from Dharma this week with the intent of doing more “art cloth” next weekend.

And, finally, I got started on my foundation-pieced quilt block:

It looks rather garish right now but I think will settle down some once I introduce the blues and blue-purples. The construction looks OK, at least to me.

Karen asked about discharge. There are basically two ways of discharging fabric, cold and hot. Bleach can be used cold, but only works on cellulose fibers (it will destroy protein fibers). Thiourea dioxide (and I think one or two other chemicals) works on either, but requires heat and moisture to activate. Both require a respirator with acid gas cartridges, for safety. (Some people do work outdoors with a fan, but not me.) Bleach needs to be rinsed out and then dunked in a bleach-stopping chemical (the chemical name escapes me at the moment, but Dharma Trading Co sells it as Bleach-Stop) to prevent the bleach from eating the fabric; just rinsing it out isn’t enough. Thiourea dioxide either needs to be used in a pot on the stove (though I do this outdoors with an electric roaster/frying pan/camp stove, see previous notes about fumes) or applied as a paste and then ironed. Not all colors of dye will discharge and some colors shift when discharged, which is why I selected colors of MX fiber-reactive dye that will discharge gracefully.

I’ll write more about discharge when I actually do it, probably next weekend.

What’s next? Well, first I need more materials to work on. I plan to order another ten yards of fabric from Dharma this week, which should give me enough to experiment with next weekend. Second, I have homework from my quilting class, so I’ll spend at least a couple days this week practicing foundation piecing. Third, if I have time, I’ll practice draping muslins. Fourth is the book, which I plan to work on in the early mornings.

I haven’t yet figured out what to do with all this fabric I’m making, since I am not a quilter. I suspect I may make some quilter friend very happy, by donating to their stash!