Don has been creating garden beds in our backyard and topping them with pecan mulch …
When he put the leftovers in one of the front beds, we discovered the neighborhood cats no longer liked “using” it as a litter box …
Unfortunately, it rained while some of the mulch was still in the bed of the little black truck, which then leaked out and stained the driveway …
The good news is, that gave me an idea. I asked Don for a shovel-full of mulch to which I added a couple of gallons of water. After letting it sit in the sun for a couple of weeks, I strained it out and dunked some cloth in the liquid gold that resulted …
with rather good results, I dare say …
N.B. The cloth on the right was first written about here.
With all the back and forth between the old blog and the new blog, I neglected to properly credit Tansy Hargan’s Finding Your Color Voice online class for inspiring my recent experimentation. I thoroughly enjoyed her presentation style and, more to the point, learned an awful lot!
Because I wanted to preserve what I’ve been learning, this project was more about creating a tool than anything else; a book of swatches detailing the color combinations possible with the Derwent Inktense set of 24 dye blocks …
Each color swatch was a combination of one ink block color with each of the other 23 colors. Here are two of the blue swatches, with the key colors outlined in black for future reference …
I used Jude Hill’s paperless piecing technique to size each patch, with two pieces of cover stock as ironing guides …
Then used another Jude Hill technique to glue stitch the edges of the resulting patches, here shown back and front …
Next I ladder stitched the pair of swatches with a piece of watercolor paper in between to give the resulting “page” some body …
Then stitched the page to previous pages with DMC threads chosen to match the key colors …
with the result that the foreedge of each page is a key to the adjacent pages …
The remaining “raw” edges along the top and bottom were whip stitched with one strand each of black and white DMC …
Finally, the handstitched cover was given a light coat of Golden Fabric Painting Medium to protect the colors from any further rubbing (a problem that should be less of an issue when I move on to shibori) …
One last note: the “24 x 22” refers to the fact that I decided not to create swatches for two of the three black dyes as the results were too similar to be worth including.
I’ve sampled all but two of the 24 Inktense color blocks (choosing to forego two of the three black blocks for now). Each sample swatch has one color combined with the remaining 23 colors. The first swatch in the upper left corner is white combined with every other color. By comparison, the last swatch in the lower right corner is every color by itself …
Note: the painted area of each swatch is 3” x 2”
The swatches above have not yet been rinsed and ironed. Instead, I decided to test out hand-rinsing the Inktense on scraps that were painted with the leftovers from the sampling process. Here’s what they looked like after rinsing and ironing …
The old pillowcase that I put on the ironing board tells the tale: the dyes ran, but not as badly as I feared. And no great surprise, the darks, reds, and yellows were the worst offenders …
Here’s a closer look, arranged by the “What if I wet the cloth and let the Inktense bleed?” trials …
Close up outlined with a Pitt pen
The “What if I paint blocks of color with leftover dye?” trials …
And the “What if I try to freehand stripes?” trials …
I'm Going to Texas (version 2.0) 