Wednesday, June 3, 2009

June's Jumping!

The next few days will be spent working at the Genesee Valley Quilt Club's quilt show which is the biggest ever this year with over 700 quilts and 40 vendors. It will be held at the Rochester Institute of Technology and will be air conditioned. We have lectures and classes as well as quilts from some of the best in the country (several of our quilters have been well represented at Paducah and Houston). I have entered seven including three full sized quilts and four art quilts. So if you have nothing to do on Friday night, all day Saturday or Sunday, head on down to Rochester for this magnificent show. RIT is very close to the NY Thruway exit in Henrietta.

In them meantime, my marbling bath has been calling again! This time I had a pile of real dye dogs -- these were horrible pieces that I had tried to fix, made worse, discharged and then dyed again in some cases. Also included were pieces using cruddy Joann's stuff from my early days of dyeing when I was trying to dye purples. These are all stuffed in a Rubbermaid tote in my basement, never to see the light of day. I decided to see what alum-ing and marbling would do for them as I had nothing to lose at this point.

This was an overmarble on an old piece of fuchsia/purple/blue fabric from Joanns. It obviously had weaving flaws but the marbling covers all that up as it is more forgiving than the dyeing!







This is another of about the same color as above. I used lots of blues in the marbling bath and only a little of the original purples shows through.





This is the marbled side of a dog dye from awhile ago. It looks better in person for some reason.






This is the reverse of the above piece so you can see what it originally looked like -- this is the before picture basically.







Another of the purples overmarbled.

Just switching gears to move toward purples and reds. This was done on white fabric.



See, I switched!


An interesting one, I thought.

Just playing here as the "flowered" ones I did before worked so well on my jacket.
This is a technique called ebru which is most widely practiced in Turkey. My background is a little more colorful than theirs as theirs tend to be monochromatic and as always, I put lots of color on.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Beth How do you make those flowers on the ebru Turkish piece.
I love looking at your work.
Are you going to tell us where we can see more of the art pieces in the show. on the web I mean. Will any of them be posted.
Ricky in Winnipeg

Beth Brandkamp said...

I didn't take many pictures of the art quilts in the show as I have had them many times on my blog and wanted to put new stuff there. If you go to the posting about the show, there is a slide show of all the quilts. There are a few art quilts in there for sure but not as many as there were. Beth