Bush Walk

I hope that the Christmas break was just what you needed. I have spent time at the lake, just swimming and lazying about.

I want to try some “Sun Dye-ing. Dye the fabric, place object on the fabric, secure and leave in the sun. The dye wicks from under the objects so the dye appears around the objects.
Picked up lancewood leaves and leaf skeletons while walking up Mt Ngongotaha. Made up a green/blue textile ink solution and painted half the fabric. Then mixed in some more blue to make it darker green and a splash of red, which I didn’t fully mix, and I wanted to see “what would happen if”.

The leaves and skeletons were pinned in random manner to the painted fabric, and left it in the sun to dry. Amazing, the fine leaf skeletons work and look so delicate. The solid lancewood leaves had blurred edges, due to the wind, so need to pin more surely. Tried the technique on woven flax with ponga fern, but the ink absorbed straight into the flax – it didn’t work.
To add texture to the sun dyed fabric, I made a stencil with leaves with freezer paper, and rubbed gold, copper, silver and green paint sticks around the stencil, and brushed the paint inwards, to create a translucent effect.

I hand quilted leave shapes with gold metallic thread, and variegated green around the leaves.
Couched some “jazz” yarn in 3 meandering lines, creating a vertical composition.
I know you can buy some special Helio (sun dying) paints, but for my experiment the textile ink worked okay. Will consider using this technique again.

Frottage and ferns

Shiva Paint sticks have been sitting in my drawer, and I need to play with them to understand their qualities a bit more.
I wonder if they can create the sense of sunlight filtering though the forest.

I tried rubbing them over a woven flax mat, (frottage) but the design that came through to the green fabric wasn’t strong, just random blobs of colour. So…I masked off sections on another green fabric and frottage bronze, gold and green Shiva sticks using the mat as a background. This was a better effect than trying to frottage the whole mat.

Found some brown chenille yarn from Spotlight, and it reminds me of the furry part of the ponga fern, so I am going to create a frond in front of the frottage paint stiks.
Using wash away stabiliser and a long zigzag, I secured the yarn to the wash away in a coiled stem / frond.

After washing the stabiliser away, I hand sewed the “koru” to the green fabric. The spirals were difficult to sew, but at this stage, I cannot think of another way to attach them.
I machine quilted in one direction, only following the line of the making tape “blank spaces. To me the result was similar to the dappled sunlight filtering into the forest.

Some Jazz yarn framed the piece, but maybe it would have been better as a spiral, instead of a diagonal? What do you think?