The dinosaur in the studio
My 12 year old laptop in the studio is so slow that I can just about do email. Amazing that I am blogging at this moment - but it's a struggle to upload photos or do anything interesting. So...bear with me.
I have 14 rolling bins of fabric in my studio, plus innumerable plastic boxes both under my tables and in the closet. ARGH. They put people like me on the Hoarder show!
Two of these bins have been sitting for a year and a half and I finally decided to deal with them. I shipped them from my NJ studio and they are filled to the brims with fabrics I printed for more than a decade.
At the moment I am sorting all this binned fabric into piles and plan to see how I can use it in a modern context. I need a new challenge! I had forgotten how good some of them are (and how awful others are).
A little history: In the early part of this century(!) I used my own fabrics in my work almost exclusively.
By 2008 I had so much printed fabric that I stopped printing and pretty much stopped using it -- although I continued to teach surface design now and then. But it became too much work to ship all the paints/dyes/auxiliaries/screens and equipment across the country. UPS damaged my shipments and the airlines gave me grief - so that was that.
Lately I have gotten more requests again and as a special favor to the guild in Grand Junction, CO (who have had me there three times to teach printing) I gave a three day class. Some of the results are on an earlier post and they are wonderful. But I am done traveling with dyes, paints, and STUFF.
Instead, I am contemplating giving small group surface design classes in my West Palm Beach studio, starting sometime in 2020. Small groups - maybe 4 people.
Some classes would be Deconstructed Screen Printing with thickened dyes; others would be Improv Screen Printing with Paper, Tape, and Glue using textile paints. I'd have to think about soy wax batik, depending on whether my fuses would hold up, LOL.
The Palm Beach Airport is 15 minutes away and there is a LaQuinta Inn 2 minutes away and a lovely Hampton Inn about 10 min away. And everywhere, all that lovely weather in winter!
Leave a comment to let me know if you'd be interested in treating yourself to a few days of fun, improv, no-stress surface design and if there is enough interest I will get serious.
P.S. All but two of the wonderful UFO block challenge pieces are in, so tomorrow I'll post what I have. You can't believe how fabulous and imaginative the results are.
xoxo
