CAMERON ANNE MASON

SDA Seattle is a group of members of the Surface Design Association who live in the Seattle area. We’ve been getting together monthly for about a year and a half. Overall there are probably 15 or so of us that come regularly and we discuss topics ranging from “what inspires you” to felting. This past month’s meeting was on Wearables. It was a lively meeting and we rediscovered what we need to make our meetings successful; we need to look and touch stuff! We’re all working with fiber and textiles and the sensuality of those media are what draws us. With that in mind, I think we’ll be focusing more on experiential meetings rather than “talky” meetings.

dyeing in a muted palette

For this next series, which for now I’m just calling “Boulders”, I’m working with a much more muted palette. The idea is to emphasize the form and stitching rather than the surface design.

Oooh, this is so hard for me! I love color and texture. It’s like a drug for me. I’m just so in love with it that I think stepping away from it for a little while is a good idea.

the "boulder" forms

I’ve worked with lighter colors all Fall but really, I’ve only gone as far as mid-tones. So I took another step away from value in this dye session and lightened up my colors even more. There are several challenges in working with really light tones. One is that you can end up with pastels that look a little too much like a trip to the candy store. The other is keeping visual interest while muting the color.

I’ve also been turning my process on its head a bit with this body of work. Usually I dye a whole lot of fabric and then play mix and match with the fabrics and the forms. This time I’ve designed the forms first and then picked out focus fabrics in midtones from the fabrics I dyed this Fall.  Then I used those focus fabrics as a starting point to dye light fabrics for the rest of the panels on the forms. I think it’s good. I think it’s going to work.

Once I ironed out these grays I was really surprised and happy at how much I like them. There are a few disappointments and a few gems, as usual in a batch, and at least one has a little more color than I planned, but there are definitely usable and I’m looking forward to working with them.

I feel like I’m finally getting somewhere with new work. I’ve been struggling away since the kids went back to school mostly because I’ve had too many ideas. But now I’ve got a deadline coming up at the end of October (I’m planning on entering Fiber Philadelphia 2012) and so it’s time to focus one idea and let the others percolate for now.

I spent a lot of time looking at my photos from our trip to the Southwest last Spring. While I was there I was drawn to images of cracks and splits in the Earth. I have many photos of these. Some are views of the sky from a slot canyon, some are fissures where boulders cracked and split, and some are of the trail curving away and disappearing around a bend. My favorite is a photo of a boulder split by a tree root. I imagine a small rootlet finding purchase in the stone and, over eons, growing until it splits the stone asunder.

So I’m working with the image of forms that are split. Whether they are boulders split by a root, a canyon, a shift in geography, or a path curving around the bend will be up to the viewer.

It took me a while to draw something that felt different, yet still related, to the work I’ve been doing with my recent series, the Seedpods, Blades and Cotyledons. My process is also a little different with this body of work. I spent more time sketching at a small size requiring much less time reworking at full size. The paper patterns have come together quickly because of this prep work.

I’m also starting with the patterns before I move to fabric. I have some new fabrics that I dyed (see the last few blog posts) but I’m going to try to keep the value light in these pieces. My plan is to emphasize the form and the stitching with these pieces and not get seduced by the color and texture of the cloth. Make a body of work where the pieces relate to each other but don’t compete. Simplify.

Yeah, we’ll see how that goes!

I overdyed 20 pieces of fabric the other day. In most cases I was just trying to knock back the white areas so there wasn’t too much contrast. In some cases I was toning back the color by adding a complement. It was a big dye day though and I was pretty happy with the overall results. Can you say earth tones?

I’m in that pondering place, what’s next? As I flail about trying to figure out that million dollar question, I’ve been dyeing some fabric. I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at my photos from my trip to the Southwest and trying to recreate the colors and textures I saw there. Below are some samples. Now, what do I do with them?

I finally tested five new dye colors I got from ProChem this Summer: Turkey Red, Barn Red, Pumpkin Spice, Butterscotch, and Sage. I dyed cotton, rayon, silk habotai and raw silk samples. Then I tested different discharge agents on each color sample. I used bleach in various formulas, thiourea dioxide, and Decolourant, a commercial discharge that comes as both a paste and a spray.

testing Decolourant spray and paste

I used bleach on the cotton and rayon as a diluted spray, in Soft Scrub cleanser, in Clorox Toilet Bowl Cleaner, and in Cascade dishwasher gel. I skipped all these on the silks because the chlorine in bleach is too strong for them and will break down the fibers.

Soft Scrub is a good dependable discharge agent. It bleaches really well and is already thickened so can be used for stamping, stenciling, silk screening, etc right out of the bottle. Don’t use it on any silk screens with photo emulsion, though, the bleach will eat away your designs.

testing househould cleaners as discharge agents

The dishwasher detergent didn’t work for me at all. It said on the package that it had bleach but I couldn’t see any results. My friend Deborah Gregory has used it and gotten good results in the past. We wondered if they had changed the formula since it’s been several years since she used it.

My new favorite is the toilet bowl cleaner. It isn’t thick enough to hold an edge for stamping, etc but it gives a really interesting halo around the discharged area. It seems that the edges of the liquid discharge faster than the wetter center area. You have to wash it out before the full bleach process has occurred or you lose the effect. So keep an eye on it and a bucket of soapy water close by stop the reaction when you’re ready.

you can see the haloing around the discharged area

The thiox and Decolourant products had very similar effects as far as color. Interestingly the Decolourant discharged the most color on the rayon.

So what do I do with all these samples? I paste them into my dye book. It’s my studio bible, where I go to figure out what colors I want to work with and how they will react to discharge. It’s an invaluable and evolving resource. I’ve begun the slow process of reorganizing it and am hoping to have an intern this Fall to get it further into shape. Not glamorous work, but important.

samples ready to be pasted into my book

Reentering my studio practice post-Summer fun required some tidying up and putting away. Today I finally put away the puppets and lanterns from Country Fair that had been waiting since July to be stashed away in the back corners of my storage. I also finished ironing and rolling the long piece of silk that I brought to Burning Man.

I washed the silk before putting it away since it was exposed to the alkaline dust of the playa and also smoke from the fire. I figure the ironing took between 6 and 8 hours to iron all 150 feet of it! Quite the meditation. I split it up, doing a little bit each time I was in the studio. Today I was ready for it to be done so that I could open up the space and move forward into new work.

But because I haven’t been in a big hurry to get it done I’ve been able to appreciate the fabric as I went along. I often feel when I work with my fabrics that I’m reading them like maps. Because this piece of fabric is so long and because I did the ironing over days, it felt more like reading a novel. The colors were the characters and the marks were plot developments. Like many a novel, it had parts that were better than others and it did sort of bog down in the middle. But overall, although it’s not for everyone, I can recommend it.

the plot thickens . . .

a happy ending

It feels strange to be spending so much time on a project that isn’t in line with my “work”. I feel like I keep having to defend it to myself, and I’m a little embarrassed to share it. But really, I’m having a great time doing it. And you never know where things will lead.

I was telling Anna and Paul McKee, my studio-mates, that it’s like being at Summer Camp in my studio these days. Only instead of making a basket, I’m making a giant bird that I’m going to set on fire. Kind of freeing, really.

The bird shape is complete for now. I still need to able to remove the wings for travel so am not adding any additional structure around the shoulder girdle. I’m still adding detail on the wings and may add some around the neck. My daughter Vida was at the studio today helping me tie raffia around all the joins. Still plenty of work to be done and I haven’t started on the nest yet.

the work table

now that it's got eyes it needs a name.

wing detail

Yesterday, having gotten both wings pretty much together, I had to decide whether to keep adding details to them or to go on to figuring out the body. I knew that going on to the overall structure was the right next step but I just didn’t feel like it. I went ahead and started on it by making shapes for the body and the head but got frustrated. It was hard. And it was a beautiful day outside. And I didn’t want to be inside. And I was cranky.

So I gave myself permission to take a day off. I spent a lovely afternoon in my garden reading and smelling the heliotrope. Aaah, just what Dr. Cameron ordered.

This morning I was able to come back and start over with a fresh mind and new perspective. And instead of being frustrating it was a fun and challenging puzzle to figure out.

I started with the basic shapes I had made the day before and joined them together to make the head, neck and body. It took some time because it was all about getting the proportions right. I didn’t want to make a mistake at this point and have to spend a lot of time later going back and fixing it.

Once I got those shapes together I made the base. I made a tripod out of bamboo poles and fixed them into a heavy, round, wooden platter I found at Value Village (along with some fabulous red platform boots!). I drilled out divots for the poles to sit in and tacked them with hot glue. So far, so good. The time spent doing the drawings and the macquette really paid off. It all went together pretty much the way I had planned and the proportions are all working.

At this point I realized I needed to reorganize the space in my studio–this thing was getting big! My big table space is made up of two tables side by side and covered with laminate. So I moved everything to the side and now have a big(ish) space in the middle of the room.

The biggest challenge continues to be making it in a way that it can be taken apart for transport and reassembled once I get to Burning Man. After today, I think the body with tail won’t be fixed onto the base until we get there. Otherwise it will be too hard to get the wings attached. Any way I do it it’s going to be a little tricky but should be much easier with a second (or third) set of hands than it was bracing and tieing it myself today.

I got as far as framing out the legs and adding some form on the legs, chest and bill. Next is working on the tail. It’s looking a little lopsided at the moment. But basically I’m really happy with the way it’s turning out.

Yesterday, after drawing and reading about bird wings and feathers and tails, I decided it was finally time to stop preparing and just start on this Fire Bird project. There’s only so much planning you can do before it becomes a way to avoid getting started. Not to say that research isn’t valuable, but after a point it can become procrastination. The questions I still had needed to be answered with my hands on the materials.

framework over full size drawing

So I started.

It was a little rough figuring out working with the reed but I feel like I’m getting the hang of it. I started with the wings because they are basically two dimensional. Once I finish them I should know the material well enough to move into the three dimensional body. One of the trickier issues is that I want to make it in parts and do the final assembly once I arrive to make it easier to transport.

But that’s in the future. For now, I’m happy with the way the wings are coming along.

two days work, two wings