Stage 2: Auditioning Fabrics

Yesterday I showed you the sketch I started with for this piece. Now it's time to pull out some fabrics. First, I have to go back a little. For the orange pieces in the picture below, I used the glue resist method on some of my dyed fabric to write words. After it was dry, I painted over it. I didn't necessarily want the words to be readable but create texture.

After that was finished, I already had some ideas for colors for the rest of the piece. I got out my scrap box of greens and blues and started pulling out pieces. I also had to pull some bigger pieces off the shelf. In this piece, I'm using mostly hand dyed fabrics. This is when the studio gets messy, as I pull out and then just leave the discarded fabrics in a pile.

I lay the fabrics next to each other in the general way that they will be put together to make sure everything is working together.

A side note: Some people think I have a lot of fabric (which I do). Part of the reason is that the fabric is my palette of colors. With paint, you can mix any color you want. With fabric, you have to use what is already there. With more fabric, come more choices (and even then you sometimes don't have just the right color). More and more I am preferring my own hand dyed fabric because I am setting the palette that way.

The picture above is not very good but I was mostly using it to record the order of the striped section because I was going to start piecing them together. The camera is good for recording the arrangement you have so you can always go back to it to make sure you have it in the order you want.