That afghan I'm crocheting is getting bigger as we speak! It's close to 16 square feet now, nearly 4 feet x 4 feet, on its way to becoming, maybe, 6 feet square.
That cellulose fiber I dyed last week with acid dyes -- the Abalone tencel and bamboo -- got spun up and washed, and alas! most of the color washed out in the end. Oh well, can't blame a guy for trying. What I'll do with the yarn sometime in the near future will be to overdye it with natural dyes, after mordanting it for cellulose fibers. The experiment was worth doing, nonetheless, but I won't be doing it again! Can't say I wasn't warned that it might not turn out as I'd intended. If you try it at home and it works for you, please let me know!
I'm finishing up my third woven shibori on the loom, and hope to dye them next week. I have a few exhibitions I plan to enter as well as a Trunk Show at Art of Wine in Eureka on May 17. I'm using that date as a deadline, of sorts, to get several more pieces completed.
I just took this photo of yarns and wovens dyed with acid dyes, that I'll be sending out to local media along with a press release for the Colors to Dye For class I'm teaching on May 10 & 11.
It seems like there are a lot of things happening at once, now, or maybe there's just lots to do, as always. I've been wanting to attend the monthly meeting of our Altered Book & Collage group, which is today, because I'm so interested in the projects the group does each month -- making books, embellishing journals and papers, polymer clay, paper beads, something different and exciting each month -- but I keep bringing my focus back to my fiber work and weaving textiles. Even though part of me wants to do the other stuff, just because it's so much fun and inspiring, I know enough about myself to realize that I don't really have the time to get distracted by other projects, despite how much fun they might be. I'm trying to build a body of work with my textiles, and try new things in this genre.
On the other hand, I often see works of art in other media -- like glass, primarily -- where I'll be really attracted to some design on the surface of the piece, or some textural quality, and it gets me thinking about how I might go about creating something in textiles that utilizes those elements, or how I can represent what it is I like about that piece, in my medium.
It's looking now like next week I'll have a lot of time to devote to my art -- lots of studio time, which I'm up for.
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