Before the triple disasters hit Japan,  I pretty much had the next 3 1/2 weeks reserved for getting ready to travel there and two weeks there and a few days to get back in the swing here at home.

Yesterday, I was pretty much useless. I couldn’t get my mind around doing much and I was glued to the TV. I finally went to my studio late in the day and started putting away the fabrics I had used in the river piece. It was a big job because I had used lots and lots of fabrics. I finally finished that today.

Tonight, I made 4 fiber post cards to send to those who are buying books through my website. One is up at the beginning. Here are the others. I repurposed an older piece that was not working as a larger piece. They are all silk.

This morning, I went to Fabric Depot, the mega fabric store in Portland, to see a demonstration of the fairly new product deColourant. It is a product which discharges dye as it deposits a new color and it is relatively non-toxic. I had used the product and had some problems with the color washing out. The demonstrator was Nick Coman, a fiber artist from LA.

Here are some of the samples he brought with him. I was very impressed with the brightness of the colors in these pieces. He said they had all been washed.

This is a neat t-shirt.

This was a batik rayon scarf. The ginkgo leaves were added with de Colourant.

Here is Nick at work. The t-shirt he is wearing was done with de Colourant and had survived many washings.

OK, here is the secret. See that heat gun? It is very important to get the de Colourant very dry and then heat set at a high temperature. The heat gun does that very quickly for small areas. We watched that green de Colourant become brighter and more vibrant as he hit it with the heat gun.

And so, I had a pretty good and creative day. We had buckets of rain and thunderstorms and a brief tornado warning. I had to go out to pick up my organic veggies and I got soaked.

I want to do something for earthquake relief. I am planning on putting some work on Ebay. You can designate that some or all of the proceeds go to the Japan Earthquake Relief. I will let you know when I do that.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 15th, 2011 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Discharging fabric, Japan, Postcards, This and that. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.