Long ago transitions

I seem to be looking backward a lot these days when it comes to my art. I pulled this piece out of storage tonight and pressed it and rephotographed it.  It is hard to believe that I was in the midst of panic over my thesis work this time a decade ago.  This piece was not part of my thesis show but done prior to my first experiment with composting.  It was however one of the key transitions from printing to fibers using imagery I'd been developing.

 

Town and Country c2001  

Hand dyed and printed/painted silk, vintage silk, viscose rayon, silk organza

The design was repeated in etchings as well as collages (scroll down this page to see some examples) and comes from my fascination with township maps and plats.  I have long been attracted to square things.  This piece is also one of my first attempts at layering fabrics.  This one is pretty complex in that regard and includes some vintage silk that had been in my mom's stash (the orange) but everything else was hand dyed or printed (fiber reactive dyes of course).  But some of the fabric (solid color squares and the multi color rectangle lower down) was dyed back in summer 1976 in that very first fibers workshop I took with Judy Millis at SIUE.  I was just talking about that red fabric in this post.

Where my mom acquired the orange silk I have no idea.  I left the fabric exactly as I found it.  It is only 20" wide with selvedge edges.  In the lower right corner is a written mark as well as a tied resist and there is an open weave structure across the bottom.  A layer behind the orange is purple, visible here from the side with a layer of organza over the top.

Details

A few days ago I wrapped this 60" long scarf on one of my rust rods.  (BTW, this is a scanned detail.)  I rolled one direction then overlapped the next layer going the other direction and still had scarf left for a partial third layer.  The rust does a remarkable job of penetrating the layers, In this case--with pleating, there were 12, but the timing and the 3rd layer resulted in a much lighter toned design in parts of the whole length of silk.

The soft grays come from used tea bag dust, which reminds me I have hundreds of tea bags in a sack that need to be emptied.  I have not yet washed this scarf and I suspect I'll see some color shift when I do.  I'll post the washed pressed scarf for comparison later.

Stripes were created by an auger.  This is a 72" scarf so a portion on either end had to be folded over before being wrapped on the 4' long iron piece which resulted in the chevron pattern.