I spent the day up at the Oregon College of Arts and Crafts taking the workshop, Working with Liquid Resists and Thickened Dyes. Most of the morning was spent going over the usual safety guidelines, recipes for all the stuff we will be mixing up and samples of finished work. Then we selected 4 pieces of fabric to soak in soda ash solution and we each got some time to mix up containers of potato dextrin and corn dextrin.

Here is a photo of the classroom. I love the high padded tables that we have for our work space.

Reva is taking the class, too. We arrived a little late and so I ended up at the back of the room. I am one of those first children that likes to sit near the teacher and be the teacher’s pet. Instead, I am in the back of the room with the bad girls. I am kinda enjoying  it.

Here is my goopy work for the day. This is some blue hand-dyed fabric, before and after stamping with corn dextrin. I used two sized of bubble wrap and a round sponge.

This fabric is covered with potato dextrin. I ran a toothed plastic wedge through it on one side. The other side has plain dextrin with thin and thick layers. As it dries, the thin layers will get small cracks and the thicker areas will get bigger cracks.

This piece has masking tape with potato dextrin over it and then it was combed.

And this yellow fabric was stamped with corn dextrose.

These will dry over night and tomorrow, we will paint them with thickened dyes, which will then have to batch in plastic for a couple of days.

Here are some of our tools for making marks.

Reva irresistable today!

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I want to thank all of you who responded to my Tasteful Art post. I really appreciate all of your comments. I wanted to hear what others thought about this. Collectively, the comments were very constructive. I was interested in how many of you mentioned the addition of another color to push the design. That was actually a comment from my critique group. One idea was to have different reds in the silk squares, or perhaps a lime green. I may try something like that. I will share my attempts to make it less tasteful!

I love my crit group. I have learned so much from them since we have been meeting together. Sometimes, I get so in my own head that I can’t see the forest for the trees. I couldn’t wrap my mind around this comment, and you all helped me work through it.