why artist drink....

After months of boiling wet wool, research, planning, many careful (repeated) experiments, and lots of sewing, I really thought I had this one.

I sewed on the paper resists, and sewed black lines around the resists, and added 2 woolen wheel shapes. I was ready to boil it with a darker wool.

I agonized over color choices. The operators will be red (leached from a beautiful piece of wool I found in a thrift shop years ago), with legs that drip down to the bottom of the piece. I finally decided the background will be #1 on this test patch - not too dark, with a great mottled appearance.

OK! lots of basting stitches holding the light and dark together...

Wrapped it around the tube, pulled straps to tightly hold it. Boiled for an hour, Checked. Boiled for another hour. You can see the colors have soaked through to the back.

Checked again. Not enough contrast. OK,  I take all 3 sections, cut off the dark wool layers, sew NEW dark wool layers onto the sopping wet light wool layers, re-wrap it around the tube, pull on straps, boil for another hour.

Unwrap and start cutting off the resists and extra wool colors - great color saturation, crisp lines...

.....but we'll put my observational failure down to fatigue. By the time I was cutting off the resists, it was after 4pm and I had been working on this all day. If only I had just shown the tiniest bit of restraint, if I had just let the damn things DRY before I cut off the resists, I might have noticed...

...that the background color has a horrible, truly UGLY purplish cast to it. If I had let it dry, and noticed the color, I could have just used the same resists, already right on there, and just boiled it a third time, with another piece of dark wool.  Now, it means that once again I have to print out the resist patterns, cut them, sew them on, and wrap/re-boil it all.

>sigh<

a few days later.....

OK, if taking out the stitches is just another part of the creative process, then so is re-resisting/wrapping/boiling, right? So....get this ugly thing off the work wall. Print up new resists, cut them out, iron them on, while making allowances for the shrinkage of the wool while boiling.

I taped up one section on my front door - when it's open like this, I get enough light to take a decent photo (having a blog means I'm getting better at recording all my steps - and if I'm writing out the explanations for you, I really have to understand exactly what I'm doing). Anyhow....the color is awful, but the mottled, geologic aspect is just what I want. This photo shows the newly printed resist ironed on. Then wrap with another dark wool, soak, wrap and into the oven.

Later: My husband took a photo of me unwrapping the wool, just out of the oven ( the tube fits diagonally). After I open the foil, I unwrapped the straps that tightly hold the wool layers close to each other.

YES! a very nice brown...

All three sections, laid out on towels on the kitchen floor. They REALLY look good, but this time, I SWEAR, I will restrain myself. I will let them dry, and look at them tomorrow and proceed from there (I remember a small child, years ago, who had been told to NOT peel the paper wrappers off the crayons. She was hiding behind a chair, peeling off the paper, mumbling "no...no..no"). No, no, no, Diane.

They are hanging on the clothesline in my studio, with the paper resists still attached.

the next day.....

Well...I got rid of the ugly purple. The brown color is good. It's now all the way up to mediocre. I can't think of any way to improve it. If I was the kind of person who drank, this would be the time. But I'm not, so I'm going to drown my sorrows in chocolate. This piece will go sit in a dark corner until it's ready to behave.

Any comments or questions? Contact me at dianesavona@aol.com