A Book of Marks: Dorothy Caldwell Class at QSDS in Columbus, Ohio

Last year I won second place in the QSDS Fabric Exhibition and the prize was a free two-day class of my choice this year. I had taken a class in kantha stitching from Dorothy in Kingston, Ontario five or six years ago and knew how inspiring she is an instructor, so I signed up for her five-day Book of Marks class. Of course it was a wonderful learning experience. Below is the display board Dorothy created with small bits and pieces of her cloth -- it served well to illustrate the language of marks and how rich and evocative they can look when collaged together. Since I am focusing on written language in my own work right now as gestural marks more than concrete symbols for words, the class was a perfect choice to fuel my own investigations.During the course of the workshop we made marks on paper and fabric using a variety of tools -- fat soft graphite sticks, India ink, tjantings and wax and bleach discharge, awls and hammers, felt-tip pens, embroidery thread and stitching. We attached brushes to dowels and created gestural lines using our dominant and non-dominant hands. Here's classmate Judy Rush working. On the wall behind her you can see one of the large line paintings a class member did with the brush tied to long dowel exercise. These pieces were truly expressive, unique and individual.

You can see more of the dowel stick and India ink paintings below, along with a seldom seen photo of Dorothy doing her impression of a runway diva. The 21 students in our class each embroidered expressive marks or words on a t-shirt for Dorothy to thank her on the last day of class. She put it right on and modeled it that last morning of class. Everyone crowded around to take photos and cheered her on to do runway poses for all the flashing cameras.

SDA Conference in Kansas City

After spending a lovely week in New Mexico with my family, I flew to Kansas City on May 24th for the Surface Design Association Conference, which was held at the Kansas City Art Institute. I arrived early to do some volunteer work. I was fortunate to be able to help Jan-Ru Wan, a wonderful artist from Raleigh, NC, hang part of her installation, "Potent Thread" one of the numerous exhibitions featured in Kansas City's gallery district in conjunction with the conference. (The Spring 2007 issue of Surface Design Journal has an excellent article about her work on page 24.) The piece shown here is called "Sacred Connections"; it's dyed and printed silk organza with found relic objects from Thailand, spoons and waxed string. Attached to the bowl of each spoon are small wax Buddha figures.

On Sunday I started a four-day class called "Visual Metaphor" with Jo Stealey, head of the fiber department at University of Missouri at Columbia. We worked with a huge variety of materials and processes to brainstorm and flesh out new ideas and imagery and created several 3-D interpretations of our subject matter. Jo is an excellent instructor, gives helpful feedback and crits and it was a pleasure to learn from her. Here, Linda and Wendy are working on a class exercise.

Jo's standing at the back on the left talking to Charlotte and Carol. Working hard at sketching are left to right, Wendy, Lyn and Sue.

After the class, the conference started. It was a whirlwind of demonstrations, lectures, slide presentations, social interactions, excellent vendors and gallery exhibitions. If you have not been to an SDA Conference and you love an environment where every imaginable type of fiber art happily mingles, this is a must attend. It's a volunteer run conference, not at all slick or perfect, but that adds to its charm.

One of my favorite exhibitions at the conference is the Member Exhibition. This is an unjuried exhibit open to all SDA members and the only restriction is that the pieces must be 18" x 52" and hang vertically. This year over 200 entries were received and exhibited in the H&R Block Gallery space. You will see amazing examples of just about every surface design technique imaginable in this display.

Of course I was happy to visit my own piece there. It's the third piece from the left below and it's called "This Indenture." I wanted to create a piece that captures the beauty of nature but also reminds us that we have a deed and obligation to protect this planet. My piece is one of 100 that have been chosen to be part of a traveling exhibition that will tour for two years. If you missed the conference, you can buy a marvelous CD with every piece in the exhibition on it and use its magnifying feature to view each piece so closely that you can see every detail. Check out the Surface Design Association website to order one -- it's only $20.

After the conference ended, I stayed on an extra day to take an optional tour bus to Columbia, MO and see more exhibits there. The first stop on our tour was Stephen's College, a private women's college that has an amazing costume collection. Although the entire collection had just been relocated and wasn't all on display, we did get to see some amazing samples. We donned white gloves and actually got to handle pieces from the late 1800's through the 1980's. Then the curator opened several boxes with several articles of French men's clothing from the 1720's. I was surprised at their small size and intricate embellishment.

This coat is velvet, hand constructed, with very detailed silk embroidery on it. It obviously had been worn a lot and parts of the garment are in poor condition.

But look at the amazing hand embroidery on it.

This was another coat in pale salmond silk that had a matching pair of pants, also embellished extensively with hand embroidery. It fascinated me that I was holding clothing and looking at stitchery from over 300 years ago.

After we left the college and costume display, we toured downtown Columbia, which is a lovely small university town with a real appreciation for art. There were multiple fiber art exhibits.

Jo had an exhibit at the Perlow Stevens Gallery. She worked with handmade paper and natural materials to create these wallhangings.


Jo does an extensive amount of hand stitching in her work. You can see the leaves below that have been arranged and pressed into the paper as well as some of the hand stitching on this piece.


The last stop on the tour was the University of Missouri George Caleb Gallery with Carol Le Baron's exhibition "Endangered Species." The exhibition included Carol's large resist hand-dyed felted pieces and her Jacquard weavings.

The work was amazing. Carol was in Jo's class with me before the conference, so it was especially meaningful to attend her opening and be able to fully appreciate the work that she does.

Back to the Studio

Six pieces went out via priority mail this morning for the Fabric Exhibit and sale during the QSDS conference in Columbus, Ohio. If you aren't familiar with QSDS, check out www.qsds.com for more information. Great classes there.

It was amazing to return to my studio after coming home from teaching at Pro Chem. One of the best things about teaching is how much it inspires me in my own work. I had entries due for the QSDS Fabric Exhibition and I wanted to explore some new ideas with discharges and resists. I took this photograph of the aging walls at Pro Chem; they just begged to be interpreted on cloth.

I wanted to try and translate the stone shapes and patterns around the building. So over the course of this past week, I experimented with a dye and discharge process that I'm planning to use in a new class called Ancient Cloth, techniques for creating aged looking cloth. It is supposed to premiere at Penland School of Craft in 2008; more on that later once it's definite.

I dyed this two yard piece of silk habotai a medium-dark golden brown. Then I covered the surface with Kraft paper that had stone shapes carved out of it, silkscreened on resist and let it dry. Then I took the paper off and silkscreened on more resist. When that dried, I discharged the whole piece, washed and dried it. Finally, I added more contrast by creating those discharge lines around each stone shape. Great fun.

This piece used much the same process as the previous one, although the cloth was longer and dyed in a gradation of light gold to dark brown. I used the same paper resist as the previous piece, but then I took the cutouts from the paper resist and pinned them on top of the remaining fabric. That preserved more of the dark brown from the original cloth while I discharged the area around it.

I dyed this piece a light golden brown and then monoprinted the entire surface with discharge paste. I was tempted to do more but decided I love its simplicity.

This piece, dyed the darkest of all the fabrics, got coated with potato dextrin resist and then I applied the discharge to the dark brown fabric once it dried and crackled.

Here's a detail so you can appreciate the beauty of the patterning the dextrin creates.

There is a raw, rustic quality to these pieces that is really exciting me. These are just a few from the pile I've collected with various surface design processes and patterning on them. They range from golden to dark brown. I have ideas about how I want to combine them with stitching to create interesting textural works, but I'm heading out on Thursday for an 18 day trip, first to New Mexico for a week and then the Surface Design Association Conference in Kansas City. These ideas will get put on hold for a bit while the travel and conference class and sessions will stimulate and add new ideas. I'll be posting some of my experiences at the SDA conference in a few weeks.

Glorious Textures Pro Chem Class

I taught a five-day class called Glorious Textures on Painted Fabrics at Pro Chemical & Dye Corporation in Fall River, Massachusetts April 25-29th. Seven strong, accomplished, talented women attended my first class there; and in a small class you have the advantage of getting to know each other very well. That's a big plus.
Pro Chem's offices and warehouse are located in an old, converted textile mill. Since I am drawn to aging, time worn structures, the exterior was a treasure trove for me. Look at this wonderful, sculptural piece.












The class dove into experimenting and by the end of the week had painted lots of materials and started layering and hand stitching some great samples. Betsy dove into the experimentation -- she was bold about experimenting and loves texture so she didn't hold back! She also started exploring different combinations of stitching -- combining different stitches adds even more interest to a surface.Those long straight stitches on the green shapes work especially well, don't you think?















Val arrived with a definite focus-- she has learned numerous surface design techniques and she wanted to carry her work to the next step and work on how to combine and use those techniques in compositions. Her thoughtfulness about her work and love of surface design is evident. Her eyes glow with delight as she works. She accomplished a lot as she explored a variety of compositional and layering ideas. Val is starting the master surface design course with Jane Dunnewold --talk about being in good hands -- and brought in some exceptional surface designed cloth she had made in a previous course with Jane.



Karen Q. (way more attractive than this photo, sorry, Karen!) doing some stitching on one piece and another several other incredibly lovely pieces she painted and layered for stitching. I couldn't take my eyes off them on the wall and wanted to start stitching them myself. Karen gave me the push I needed to start blogging, so thank you Karen!

This piece is very Gustav Klimt like, can't wait to see what she does with the stitching. Lots of possibilities.



Cheryl has a strong art background and has returned to textiles after many years working and selling her work as a painter. She has a great love of line and creates wonderful calligraphic lines in many of her paintings.
She's putting us all on her mailing list so we will get updates on where she's showing and selling her work and how she transitions from painting on paper to painting on textiles.




Janet is beginning her artistic explorations. She has great passion and spirit and spent a wonderful week painting components to create a small, very meaningful piece for her personally. Her sharing and wisdom touched and inspired the whole group. She did a small, very powerful piece based on an emotion -- unfortunately my image of it didn't turn out. She is truly a Butterfly Woman, emerging from her chrysalis in beautiful colors.







Karen R came with some ideas and imagery that really resonated with me from photographing Buddhist temples. She keeps excellent sketchbooks and spent the week working through -- and abandoning -- some of the ideas she first thought would best express the temple imagery. By the end of the week she had worked through a number of ideas and samples and hopefully will keep working with this theme. This is a piece in progress where she is exploring adding the temple elements with stitching. Check out the wall behind her picture -- she produced a LOT.


Pam, as this sample illustrates so well, loves color and loves to hand stitch. Since she is also a fabric designer, author and quilting teacher, I took several deep breaths when I found out she was coming to my first class at Pro Chem. She was great -- no surprise, she's a fellow Libra and loves playing with color and textures in the same improvisational way that I do. Look for her new quilting fabric designs for RJR Fabrics this fall!


Finally, here's Vicki Jensen, Pro Chem's amazing technical consultant and workshop director, who joined us for a few demos during the week, showed us some wonderful techniques with wax and then settled in to stitch with us on the weekend. Here she is working on layering and stitching gorgeous felted pieces she made in Chad Hagen's class (and Chad will be teaching at Pro Chem in August, check out http://www.prochemical.com/ for more information).

My experience at Pro Chem was wonderful in every way -- the lunches were EXCELLENT -- and I can wholeheartedly recommend taking classes at their facility. I'll look forward to returning there again to teach in 2008.