Other Work

Here's a little quilt I made late last week.  I'm calling it Target of My Affection.  It's 15x9 inches and features one of my favorite deconstructed screen printed fabrics.

The circle was handpainted on heavy cotton/rayon.  It was an experiment...there were several circles...I didn't like the finished piece...I kept tearing it up into smaller bits...

About a year ago several blog pals were fooling around with Citra Solv Concentrate and National Geographic magazines.  Well, it only took me a year to try it -- I did so last week.  The bottom photo shows several magazine pages that were transformed.

Citra Solv is a household cleanser made with citrus.  If you're going to try this, you MUST use Citra Solv brand and it MUST be the concentrate.  No other citrus cleaner will work!

You just grab a National Geographic and drizzle Citra Solv between pages with images.  Get the pages rather wet.  Let the mess sit for 15-20 minutes.  Then tear the pages out and lay individually on newspaper to dry.  What happens is that the Citra Solv dissolves the ink and all by itself it will shmush the colors to create really unusual patterns and textures.

Here are some tips that I used to make the whole thing easier ~

• I worked outside and I would recommend doing this if you can.  The smell, although not bad, is pretty strong.
• Instead of using an entire magazine, which can be really difficult to get apart without the pages tearing out unevenly, I tore out imaged pages first, in pairs, and I faced the images together.  I had a stack of pages and drizzled Citra Solve on each pair of pages and layered the whole thing together to marinate for 20 minutes.
• Decant the Citra Solv into a plastic bottle with a small hole that you can drizzle from, instead of pouring on your pages out of the larger container.
• Putting a small rock on each page to hold it down while it dried did not affect the new image...but did keep the page from blowing away.

I also tried this method with photos from other magazines, and it didn't work!  There's something about the ink and the printing process that National Geographic uses that makes this work.  Apparently you can also use the New York Times Magazine and get good results.

Have a look at Citra Solv's artist page for additional information and inspiration.

Among other reasons for my not trying this technique last year is that I wasn't sure what to do with the transformed magazine pages.  Now that I'm doing different things with collage, these papers will find their way into my work.