News from Blue Ribbon Flies

About once a week I get an email from Craig Matthews and "The Gang at Blue Ribbon Flies" out in West Yellowstone, Montana.  It is a newsletter that I signed up to receive about a year ago. First off, before I go into any of my own horn-tooting, I need to say that this is one of the best written regulars I get to read -- that includes blogs, magazines, forums, etc.  The writers (John Juracek and Craig Matthews, plus some unnamed others, no doubt) do indeed know how to make sentences -- a true rarity these days.  And sentences that make sense, besides! You can get a sense of it from their blog.
The newsletter is more of a treat, if you ask me.  Not only will you be greatly entertained, but enlightened, engaged and, well, not insulted with bad grammar and syntax.  The photographs are always stunning, the news is newsy, the information is handy if not essential, and after a regular dose of this newsletter, you will begin to feel very much as though you are part of that wonderful West Montana scene all year round.  I would add some pictures here from the newsletter,  but I'm not sure if I can do that without permission and/or the right know-how technically.

Which brings me to the reason for writing this blog, my own moment to shamelessly self-promote.  On Friday I got an email from my midwest rep, Rich Stekete, who also gets the newsletter.  I hadn't had a chance to read it yet since I was preparing for an outdoor show, but Rich had to point out to me that The Painted Trout was again being mentioned in the newsletter.  He attached a document of the snippet featuring us, and I'm going to try to attach it to this blog.... Just click anywhere in the image to see a full-sized version.

Rich wrote "This major "ink" is outstanding!"  Thanks, Rich!

Commission Days 5,6,7 & 8

I've been so busy since working on this project that I haven't had time to write about the final and intense last week of work.  Here it is in pictures and I will post an update with text and more pictures. in a few days.

In the meantime, however, I got an email from the gentleman in New York who commissioned this piece.  Here's what he wrote:

Olive explores the Chaos

Hi Lauren,
The silk got here yesterday.  It's absolutely amazing, way way beyond my expectations.  The details in the leaves and birds is absolutely gorgeous.  Thanks so much for taking on this project.  I just dropped it off at the tailor and will keep you posted as to the progress & end result of the blazer.  Thanks again, it's wonderful!!

Filing system for silk screens

Organized by Species of Tree, Bird, Fish, etc.

Ready to print!

First stage: the main grouse motifs

My assistant hand-applies resist to the grouse images

Leaf motifs are added

There are a lot of wings to resist...

Painted grouse showing resist marks, painted leaf, and other elements. 

Screening the final "top" design element, a faint scrub grass allover pattern.

The full finished effect before steaming (setting the dye).

Close-up of grass over-print before steaming.

Close-up of grass over-print before steaming; resist lines in grouse tail in lower left.

Rolling the finished silk for steaming.

Lucky Pot and her Happy Food

One down, one to go: silk rolled in muslin, wrapped in kraft paper.

So many things can go wrong...

My trusty stove-top steamer with Lucky Pot on top.

One full length of steamed, rinsed and ironed silk.

Ready to send --  say goodbye!

Commission - Days 3 & 4

Day 3.

Early Friday, before going to set up the booth at Art in the Garden, I rinsed both pieces of "real" silk for this commission, in order to get the discharge paste off the fabric.  Then, of course, they each needed to be wrapped in towels and ironed, one at a time.  

That was really all I had time for.






Day 4 (Sunday)

Art in the Garden

After unloading the truck from all the stuff carted to the Art in the Garden show, I was able to get downstairs and mix up a fresh batch of print paste.

Print Paste

This is made from sodium alginate, a natural ingredient derived from seaweed (I'm told). It allows you to silkscreen colors by holding them in a paint-like consistency.
Like many "potions" and solutions in dyeing, it has a shelf-life; it can go bad, become soupy, or dry out, depending on atmospheric conditions and whether or not the Dye Gods are on your side that day.  

Then I stretched the test piece onto my print table and began printing the images that would need hand painting.  This was the part that I was really testing:  how this thicker silk would respond to my dye paste and my dye painting.  Would the paste penetrate the cloth fully?  Would the colors I painted in bleed out of their lines?  Would the silk itself take up the dye the way I expected?

 After waiting for all the images to dry, I painted in a leaf -- very very carefully.    Success.

Next up was the question of how the silk would take up my resist material -- this is often called "gutta" or what some people think of as "batik," although it is neither.  It does operate the same way, however, which is by resisting the dye painted along side or over it.  In this case, we needed to increase the detail and interest of each grouse by allowing some of the bird to NOT receive color.  The white barring on the feathers, for instance.   The material is applied with a small squeeze bottle, and I'm not very good at this because years ago I ruined my right hand grading papers at the University of Michigan.  70 hours a week writing on freshman comp papers did it in, and now I have to be careful how much I use or over-use the hand...Nevertheless, I managed to resist a few birds and let it dry for the rest of the day.  I needed a break; though I love working in the studio on a Sunday because I get to listen to great jazz on WEMU,  I needed to give myself some time off.  More tomorrow!

Big Commission Day Two

Day Two.
Rise and shine early, Miss Girl, 'cause you've got a lot to do and it's all gotta be timed just right.

First thing:  rinse (again, and again, and then yet again), the silk yardage that had spent the night in the dyepot.  

Then blot each one dry with towels, one at a time, and iron each one, one at a time.  This had to be done in one, shall we say, sweep.  As mentioned in Day One, you have to iron silk while it's still damp for best results.

At 9am, Marietta Van Buhler, a photographer and one of our participating artists at Art on the Farm,  came over to help me with some Facebook chores that I couldn't get my brain around.  Wow, was she helpful! So not only a very gifted artist, she's kind of a techie, too.  Now you can see postings from The Painted Trout FB page on our website, and also postings from Art on the Farm's FB page on THAT website.   Immediately following that I had an appointment in Ann Arbor with a dear friend who was visiting.  She is owner of Chocolate in Chelsea, the best chocolate on the planet, no kidding.  We talked business like a couple of rabid animals, it's been so long since we had good chin wag.  Lots of ideas shooting around.  The other people at the table didn't stand a chance!

Then back to the house where I jumped into my "studio clothes" which really comprise the bulk of my wardrobe anyway.  They were still a little wet from the morning's rinsing and ironing. I tend to wipe my hands on my butt, since it's always the nearest thing at hand. 

The "real" pieces of silk were indeed lighter than the test piece, which by the way didn't end up being too dark after all.  Nevertheless, I am very happy with the hue of the real silk.  Here they are:

Real silk, test scarf, test piece and scarf above.

The colors don't really translate very well on my monitor, but you get the idea.  The "real" silk is the piece on the lower left, a test scarf is in the middle and the test silk is on the right.

Next up was the discharge print layer.  If you look closely at the grouse scarf above and also by mousing over the image on our website, you'll see under the darker print, there are pale yellow leaves.  That's achieved by taking away some of the dye with a silkscreen print using discharge paste.  It's a major step, but it's always worth it since it yields a much more interesting and complex pattern on the cloth. 

To achieve this, first I have to mix up a batch of the stuff, which requires a certain amount of print paste (which I had made up ahead of time), and two chemicals that when combined make the "go juice" of the operation.  They have a life, however, and it's short. Unless you use it in 3 days, it loses its "go" and you are not going to get the results you want; in other words, little if any dye will be lifted from the cloth.

I estimated the amount I would need for the test piece as well as the real pieces, and mixed it all up.  It's never a bad idea to let such things sit for a little while so that all the ingredients fully dissolve, so while that was happening, I taped the test piece to my printing table.  It's not too different than stretching a canvas in that you want it taut and without any big moving areas of cloth. You want to be able to print and not have the silk lift up when you lift the silkscreen off the fabric, but you also don't want to use up stupid amounts of tape for what is, after all, just test piece.  Plus, this is my nice new table cover and I don't want a whole lot of tape residue to have to contend with. 

I had prepared the silkscreen the day before and in short order I was at work printing the pattern across the fabric, closely imitating the rhythm of the prints on the underlying layer of the original grouse scarf.  As soon as the print was semi-dry, I removed the tape.

Because the basement is, well, the basement, it's cool and semi-humid.  I do use a dehumidifier but turn it off when I am working so I can hear Diane Rehm and other NPR stuff.  The print was not drying fast enough for my impatient little soul, so I brought it upstairs to my office which, as mentioned in Day One, is not unlike a sauna, but a dry one.

While that was drying, I cleaned off the print table (a must between EVERY use of the table, otherwise disaster will surely befall the project), then hand-dried the table with a towel, and just to be safe, gave it a blast with a hair dryer.  Then I got to work taping down the first piece of real silk.    For this cloth, I elected to use a sister print to the one used in the test piece and the grouse scarf. Same type of leaf, but the print itself is slightly larger and more interesting, with more directionality and variety in the shapes and sizes of the leaves.  The work went quickly.

 

By now the text piece had dried sufficiently and that meant I needed to fire up the iron again, as the only thing that activates the "go" is heat and steam.  One has to be careful not to scorch the fabric while at the same time allowing the steam to do its thing.  Interestingly, the color turned to a pale mauve, which I hadn't expected, but since I did switch reds when I dyed the real silk, I knew the results would be different. 

Then I rinsed (and rinsed and rinsed) this test piece to get the paste out of the cloth, which would also yield a little brighter underlying color.  This part is tricky, too, since you have to keep the fabric moving at all times and increase the water temperature in steps in order to prevent ghost printing of the discharge paste. Then roll in a towel again and iron dry.

By now the first real piece of silk was dry enough to take off the print table, which I did, followed by another scrubbing down of the table surface (also to prevent ghost printing and other terrible outcomes).    Then I taped the second piece down, printed it, and went up the stairs to fire up the iron to discharge the first piece.  I was happy to find that the color under the activated paste was a creamy pale yellow.  

Well, that was it for the day.  I had to pack the truck for a show I would be setting up for the next day and this was a good place to stop anyway.  I would do the rinsing of the two pieces (and ironing, of course) tomorrow. 

I realize some of this may be confusing when not boring, so if anyone has any questions, please feel free to send me an email at lauren@paintedtrout.com or post below this blog entry. 

Commission Day One

Day One.  (It's a long one, so bear with me).
I've spent most of the day in the basement dyeing silk for a long-anticipated commission work featuring over 2 yards of hand-dyed hand-painted silk for a certain gentleman in New York who somehow found me on the internet and wanted me to copy one of my scarves but in a sizable quantity so he can have it sewn into the lining of a jacket he is having made for him.  Yes, a long sentence, that.  Here is a picture of the scarf he found online (it is also posted on my website paintedtrout.com), where you can mouse over the image for close-up viewing of all the wonderful details.

The first thing I did before starting out was check my supplier to see if they had our particular silk in stock -- that would be in case I screwed up this first part of the project and might have to reorder and start again.


We needed 15mm silk because 10mm was probably not strong enough to endure the rigors of life as a jacket lining.  Not sure what kind of jacket, of course (I suppose I can ask him, the gentleman from New York), but I reckon he will be wanting to wear the garment and that means a robust life of putting on and taking off (and showing off, one hopes), and one wants one's garments to not rip unduly because of flimsy fabric.

The next thing I did was tear the 4 meter long 54" wide fabric into the two pieces I would be dyeing and printing, with a third smaller piece that I would be using as a test piece for not only color but printing and hand-dyeing.    That part (the ripping) was easy, though I do tend to fret over my estimates of shrinkage. 

The Dye Rack

Not sure how much technical stuff to put in here, so I'll just say quickly that since we wanted to approximate the colors on the grouse scarf,  I knew to use the same kind of dye.  It is a type of dye with superior washfastness and lightfastness, and I made up a fresh batch of each color I would need to get this odd peachy gold.  I knew I wouldn't be able to match it exactly, but at least I had a basis for getting near.  This is one of the downers of doing commission work:  you can never exactly replicate what someone has seen in your non-commission work.  Or at least I can't.  There are some artists, and many fiber artists at that, who write down everything they do, including formulas for every project and effect.  I can do that, but why?  Or to be more honest, I used to be able to know how to do that, but now can't bother.  

The Farm-auction $4 sink

Soaking the silk

Scale for weighing dye n' stuff

First up was dyeing the "test piece," but not before washing all the silk in a process known as "scouring," which basically means soaking in specific type of soap and washing soda in a super-hot bath for at least 30 minutes.
Yeah, but that would mean I'd have to clean out the sink to make way for the soaking bins.  I got the sink at a farm auction for $4.00 and it's been a faithful friend ever since.  But I digress.

While the silk sat in the scouring water, I made up the the dye bath, which meant I had to measure the chemicals into the water according to the (dry) weight of the fabric, and measure in the dyestock solution that I had just made up.  Only problem is, I forgot to weigh the fabric before soaking it.  Ah, but being a person who uses a scale quite often (for postage,  as well as chemicals and dye), I had a good idea what the pieces weighed, so I went ahead with little concern, knowing that there were greater things to fear.

Checking the pH

Here is where I can fast-forward to the result.  After many hours of dyeing the test piece (it takes easily 3 hours to fully dye the size I was working with) as well as two other silk scarves, using variations in the color formula (combinations of violet, two yellows, a certain type of red),  I had dyed the silk too dark.  Midway through the process I realized that the result would be almost brown, not warm gold, as I had planned.  I had overestimated the weight of the fabric and underestimated the strike rate of certain colors in my formula. Complicated, I know.  Never mind.  It was a good lesson, for while I was making my mistakes, I was learning from them.  I knew now I could "build" color on the silk even in the pot as it was dyeing, and that I could correct the color as long as I could control pH and temperature.  I came away from that part of the day confident about color.

BUT I also knew I would be in new terrain when it came time to dye the "real" pieces.  Not only were they each considerably larger than my test piece, there were two of them.  This meant that I needed my hugest pot, an old canning basin that I was not at all confident would accommodate the yardage. You can't crowd silk and expect to get an even color -- one more thing I hadn't thought about when I agreed to the job.  Yikes!  What else was in store?

The old table

A new cover

Staple guns young and old.

Once the fabric has been "cooked" (meaning held at a certain high temperature for an hour), you need to let it cool down, not just in order to handle it but to allow the final bits of dye to set.  So while that was happening, I got to work re-covering my print table.  Nothing elaborate, just the need to clean off the table to begin with, then carry down the new roll of covering and find the staple guns.  The cover has been great for the past 6 years or so, but I'm not going to embark on such a project and leave anything to chance, like stray deposits of tape adhesive, weird stubborn paint stains that mysteriously decide to come lose after years of being indelible, or forgotten irregularities in the surface texture.  

The other thing I did while waiting for fabric to cool was get the first silk screen ready. No picture for that, but I did take a break to go cuddle the cat.

 

  Okay, now back to dyeing.  At around 2 pm, I lower the "real" silk into the pot, piece by piece...
It isn't until 8 pm that the dyebath reaches the goal temperature of 185 degrees F.  Along the way I am adjusting and adjusting the color, monitoring the temperature, tracking and compensating the pH, and most of all, stirring and moving and repositioning the huge swaths of steaming dripping silk.  Good thing the basement is about 20 degrees cooler than my office.  It's one of those awful sweltering summer days and every time I come up from the basement I am about ready to pass out from the heat.

In between tending the dyebath, I make my move to rinse out the "test" pieces and iron them while they are still damp.  The best way to manage silk, as long as we're on the subject, is to wash in cool water with a mild soap – a few swishes with an Ivory soap bar is just the thing – rinse well, then roll in a towel.  Unroll and iron immediately on a hot setting such as cotton or linen. Do this while it's still damp, or your creases and wrinkles will set permanently  Do not fear silk!  It's an incredibly strong material and can withstand high heat from an iron.

Only me withstanding the heat from the iron is another matter.

My ironing board (the good one, mind you; there are several throughout the house), is at the top of the basement in what I call my "old office."  Not air conditioned, is what I'm saying.  It took a while to iron out these pieces (the main test piece plus the smaller silks I had added for color testing), mainly because the weight of the silk was so heavy.  The test piece took about 15 minutes to iron dry, though the other pieces went quickly.  It was interesting to compare colors among the various silks as compared to the original grouse scarf...

Scarf, test silk, and Grouse scarf...

By 9:30-10:00 the dyeing was complete.   I had been working for 14 1/2 hours, not counting cuddling the cat, and while I didn't like the idea of leaving the silk in the dye pot after it had adequately cooled, there was nothing I could do.  I mean nothing.  It was only with great coaxing that I got my bones up the stairs and into bed.