On the wall

March 30, 2016

Studio work has seemed very stop-start recently. I’m finding it difficult to settle down to work consistently. When I am working I seem to jump from one activity to another and keep thinking of other things I need to do. It’s making me feel restless and a little dissatisfied.

However … I am fairly happy with the results of my latest round of dyeing. I pinned everything up to have a good look. Lots of small scraps because I don’t like to waste offcuts of antique linen. I over dyed some rejected screen prints too.

Technically, all shades of brown. But one of the browns had quite a strong green tone and there was blue and black dye on some of the offcuts. As I pinned things up I enjoyed playing with some of the colour and texture combinations. I particularly like some of the pales ... though they are tough to photograph.

Then I added some scraps from a different dye session - shades of dark blue. By now it was getting harder to find space to pin anything new, but the blues combine well with the browns and creams.

I’m leaving everything up for a while so that I can keep looking and consider the possibilities.

Ambiguous edges

October 25, 2015

I had spent ages mixing a palette of dye colours only to feel that the results were not what I wanted. I seriously considered discarding them and starting again. Fortunately I couldn't bring myself to throw away all that work - or waste the dye. So, I spent another couple of hours painting the dyes onto cloth. In an "I don't really care what happens here" frame of mind. Then leaving the dyed cloth to cure overnight. And finally several more hours of rinsing out and processing. All with fairly modest expectations of what I might get ... although increasingly more encouraged. Then I laid out the results on my studio table.

A dance-around-the-studio moment.

The photos could be sharper and the colours are not quite accurate (the camera struggled with these colours under artificial light), but never mind. It's the edges I am most pleased about. Looking at the photographs, I particularly like the way you can't readily distinguish the real edges of the cloth from the painted ones. I spent some time, moving pieces around, overlapping them in different ways, considering the possibilities.

Colour study: neutrals

October 12, 2014

The last colour study gave me an idea. But before I can try it, I need a selection of browns and greys I can use. Because previous studies have focused on over-dyeing, I needed to do some colour mixing.

I looked at previous studies, both those done with thickened dye and in the bucket, and selected nine different ratios of red : yellow : blue that showed the potential to result in a neutral. I knew that different combinations of primaries would give different kinds of neutrals. I also knew that some ratios would be more likely to result in a neutral than others.

Once I started, I also became fascinated by the effect of changing the relative strength of the dye concentrates themselves. This is something I've experimented with before but this was an opportunity to explore it more thoroughly. Sometimes this could make the difference in whether I achieved any neutrals at all.

Above is an example of what I mean. These three sets all used the same primaries (scarlet, golden yellow, royal blue in this case). In the one on the left the relative strength of the dyes was 1:2:3 (weak red, strong blue); the middle set is 2:2:3 (strong blue); and on the right, 2:3:2 (strong yellow). Not in this picture, I also did a set of 1:1:1 (equal strength) for each set of primaries. The same dyes, the same mixing ratio in each row, different relative dye strengths. Once I'd finished, I found that the ratio of dye strength most likely to give neutrals, for any combination of primaries, was either 1:1:1 or 2:3:2.

In the picture above, each row represents a different mixing ratio of red : yellow : blue. In this case, the primaries were scarlet, lemon yellow and royal blue. I started with nine different ratios but gradually eliminated those that rarely resulted in a good neutral so that by the end I was using just six. In the best cases, any of these six could give a neutral. But across all the combinations of primaries I tried (six in all), the most reliable mixing ratios proved to be 3:2:1, 2:3:1 or 3:3:2 - i.e. the third, fifth and seventh rows in the picture above.

And the best combination of primaries? Scarlet / Golden Yellow / Royal Blue produced warm neutrals and has a bias towards green. Or Scarlet / Lemon Yellow / Royal Blue, which gives much cooler neutrals and has a bias towards blue. Magenta or Scarlet / Golden Yellow / Turquoise were also good, but only if you strengthened the yellow so that it could stand up to the turquoise.

Unsurprisingly, the worst combination from this point of view was Magenta / Lemon Yellow and either Turquoise or Royal Blue - which both yielded a lovely range of violet (above). So the next time someone tells you that mixing all three primaries together will result in "mud", challenge them to try it with those three. And if they challenge you, strengthen the yellow and mix in a ratio of either 2:3:1 or 3:3:2 and it's possible to get a grey - a blue-grey but still grey.

Colour study phase two: colour families

August 31, 2014

After my last post, of course I got back to work. I still feel I'm avoiding something - dyeing is very much in my comfort zone - but work is work.

The main activity has been dyeing colour families based on the complementary pairs I developed in June's colour study. There are different systems for doing this - the one I use is based on Leslie Morgan's - we share a fascination with this kind of study. The basic principle is that you dye three (or more) strengths of one colour and then over-dye the results with three (or more) strengths of a second, distributing the different values from the first round between the vats for the second. The outcome is twelve different values and hues out of three dye vats. This is the system I use for shibori-dyeing. It means I get a palette of shibori-dyed cloth in different colours that are all related to each other.

My colour studies are not usually about producing exact recipes for individual colours. They are more about finding sets of colour relationships. Because that is how I think about colour - no colour occurs in isolation, it has a "family" of related colours and it will look different depending on the colours you see it with. Often when I see a colour I like, it is as much about the context - the background or associated colours that set it off.

If I use a photograph or an image as a design source for a colour scheme, I don't necessarily try to match the individual colours in it. I will do some colour mixing and compare the colours in the image to the swatches in my dye book but what I'm looking for is the family (or families) of colours that will create a similar effect. There was a period when most of my work was based on the colours of a favourite painting by John Piper and for several months I worked predominantly with the family of colours I could generate from just two - Royal Blue and a rust orange that I mixed myself - extended with some Black and Dark Brown.

So the point of this latest colour study was to test the potential of the pairs of complementaries I had found in the last to produce interesting neutrals and semi-neutrals. I started with the warm primaries (Scarlet / Golden Yellow / Royal Blue), which had demonstrated the greatest potential for producing brown. Then for the sake of comparison, I moved on to the cold primaries (Magenta / Lemon Yellow / Turquoise), not expecting them to produce many neutrals, but was pleasantly surprised by the range of cool greys and blues that did result. The combined results are pinned to my studio wall in the photo at the top of this post. I love how each family has its own personality colour-wise. In the second row are six versions of the same family, as I experimented with the effect of changing the relative strength of the primaries.

When you arrange the results in a grid, the neutrals (if there are any) are almost always along the diagonal - where the "parent colours" are equal in strength and cancel each other out. Either side of that diagonal are subtle semi-neutrals - colours that are definitely blue or green or red rather than neutral, but muted, softer versions of the pure hues. If one of the "parent" colours is stronger than the other, sometimes the neutrals are shifted to a different diagonal, nearer to the weaker "parent".

I extracted the neutrals and semi-neutrals and arranged them into palettes as above. This was when I could really see and appreciate these subtle colour combinations. This is what I would be likely to work from in future. In principle I could reproduce individual shades, but in practice I'm more likely to use them as a basis for decisions on which combination, strength and ratio of dyes to use and tweak the results according to what I need.

As is the way, doing this prompted some small eureka moments and further ideas to explore. So, while I thought this would be the last major colour exercise for this year, I have an idea for a third ...

Summer school

August 3, 2014

I spent last week in London doing a Summer School course with June Fish at Central St Martins. Aside from the fun of getting to work in CSM's fully equipped dye and print studio for a week, this was an opportunity to explore different types of dye and application techniques. We covered lots of ground. Not everything will make its way into my practice but there were two techniques that really appealed to me and have potential for development.

The first was painting directly onto the silkscreen with thin dyes - a technique I knew about but hadn't tried before. It's a form of monoprinting I suppose. Now I have done this with thickened dyes ("breakdown printing") but those need much longer to dry and the effect is quite different. I really liked this and could see this being a way to interpret some of my ink drawings.

The second technique involved wax. June demonstrated basic wax resist using batik wax, which I found frustrating to iron out of my samples. However I knew I had some soy wax and began to wonder about combining this with clamp resist (itajime) or pole wrap (arashi) techniques. I know other people have had success with this.

Now, because soy wax has such a low melting point I had to iron out the wax before the dye could be steam-fixed. When I removed the clamps and pulled the cloth out flat, the effect of the wax against the (damp) dyed cloth was just stunning:

After processing (removing the wax, steam-fixing, washing out) the effect is more subdued - the inevitable difference between damp versus dry cloth - but still interesting. Clamp resist is ideal for workshop conditions because it can be done quickly - but I'm not sure how I feel about the geometric patterns.

So much to explore, so little time. The whole point of doing workshops like this is to expand the range of techniques and knowledge I can draw upon but I also need to keep focused on the things that will really help my work and not get too distracted. When I consider all the different things I want to explore, I am quite daunted, given the time I have available. However making time for this developmental work alongside simply making more work is important - otherwise I'll end up just making "more of the same". So I need to select the most promising ideas and set aside some time to experiment intensively with them.

Five hundred colours on my studio wall

July 6, 2014

I finally completed this colour study this week. I had planned five variations (out of a possible eight) and ended up doing six. That's eighteen rounds of dyeing with twelve dye baths to set up and rinse out each time. Even by my standards that is a mammoth commitment. I definitely need a break and to do something else for a while now.

What I learned

This was all about dye colour theory. The point of the exercise was to explore what neutrals and semi-neutrals could be achieved by over-dyeing each colour with its complementary. I also tried this with the two split complementaries.

I learned that:

The three warm primaries (scarlet, golden yellow, royal blue) are the most likely to generate neutrals (top row, middle card in the image above). You also get some lovely earthy greens.
The three cold primaries (magenta, lemon yellow, turquoise - bottom row, middle card) are the least likely to neutralise - hardly any in fact. But replacing the turquoise with royal blue (bottom, left) resulted in some interesting blue-greys.
Green over-dyed with red or red violet was more likely to result in a neutral than other combinations.
If you only over-dye once, using the complementary is the most effective way to neutralise a colour. If you over-dye twice, the results achieved using the split complementaries are richer, more interesting and you generally get more neutrals.

Testing the effect of changing the dye strength

Following my last post, where I noted there seemed to be a bias towards green, I also tested the effect of changing the strengths of each dye concentrate. This confirmed that changing the strength of each dye in relation to the others would alter the colour. I know that sounds obvious but it was fascinating to see the effect of actually doing this. Basically, if I had mixed the yellow dye stronger and kept the red and blue equal, I would probably have had less greens and more browns. And if I had mixed the blue stronger instead, I might have seen more greys and blues.

The disadvantage of this exercise was that it was not logistically possible to try out different values of these colours at the same time. So I am planning a phase two, which will involve selecting some of the colours from these results and using them as the basis for dyeing a "family" of lights and darks. Not yet though ... I need to do something different for a while!

So, why?

Effectively I have dedicated three weeks of precious studio time to this exercise. I had plenty of opportunity while dyeing, rinsing, cutting and mounting swatches ... to contemplate why on earth I was doing this. Was it the best use of my time? I could have been drawing, making new work, preparing cloth for shibori, mark-making with thickened dye, experimenting with wax resist ... all on my studio to do list.

Part of it is just that obsessive wanting to know "what will happen if ...?" - that itch to resolve the tension between knowing the theory and not knowing what will happen in practice. The reward is all those surprise results - seeing two colours mixed together result in some gorgeous, unexpected new shade. That's the playful, self-indulgent motivation behind this exercise.

But I came to the conclusion that there is a more serious purpose. I realised last year, when I did a workshop with Dorothy Caldwell, that colour is as important to my work as mark-making. And the kind of colours I want to achieve are the subtle, hard to define ones. Which means I do need to thoroughly understand how my dyes behave and how to mix those difficult colours. So the real reward for all that labour and studio time is the learning and the mountain of information I now have that I can draw upon in all my future dyeing. It's part of the underpinning research that will help me make better work.

I'm also starting to think about developing a workshop based on this. Or maybe an ebook. I'm thinking not so much of an introduction to dyeing, but more of a colour theory for dyers course. Is there a demand for this? Would people prefer a course or some kind of online option? Leave a comment or email me via the contact form - I'd love to know what others think.

Colour study progress

June 22, 2014

A short hiatus. I went on holiday - and flooded Instagram with photos of Norfolk skies and tide lines and sunsets - and then lost three days of studio time, waiting for dye supplies to arrive. I wish I could say I made good use of the lost time but it seems I don't respond well to my plans being thwarted!

However, I've been making maximum use of studio time since to progress this colour study. At any one time, there has been one batch of cloth in rinse buckets and another batch sitting in dye, while I'm trimming and sticking swatches into my dye books. I'm now about half way through and am starting to see results.

The aim of the exercise is to explore over dyeing of complementary colours - which should yield some neutrals. There are some good, rich browns but overall I seem to be getting a bias towards green. I think this is because I have increased the strength of the yellow and blue dyes to stand up better to the red. I've decided to stick with this for the remainder of the exercise to maintain consistency of the results. Of course it helps that I like green - if I was getting loads of purple, I would probably be changing the recipe. I think it is interesting in itself to see how I can influence the colour by doing this.

My dye book is starting to look exciting. It's worth remembering that the product of this exercise will be the sample swatches in this book. All the dyed cloth is simply a by-product. Albeit one that will leave me with a glorious range of colours to use as needed. Although people who love bright colours would probably weep to see me turn them into sludgy browns and greens ...

When things don't go to plan ...

April 25, 2014

There was no question about it when I looked in the dye vats after the first round. I had pink. Not bright Barbie-doll-pink (thankfully). A sort of greyish-plaster-pink in the pale vat ... maybe more like dull purple in the other two. Unfortunately pink happens to be one of my least favourite colours. I had about six metres of cloth divided between three vats and it had taken two or three days to stitch and bind all the resists ... definitely time for a major rethink.

First step - figure out how a dye mix that was meant to result in a greenish brown had ended up pink. If anything the mix had looked too green when I made up the vats. The two purplish vats probably reflected how I'd adjusted the mix accordingly. My guess was that the lemon yellow dye had been shamefully bullied by the (tiny amount of) magenta and wimped out on me. Which reminds me (too late) why I usually prefer golden yellow.

Yes, dyes have their own personalities. Red (especially magenta) is a bully, reacts quickly and easily overwhelms the others. Blue is slow to react, needing twice as long to reach a full depth of colour, but quite resilient once it's got there (try removing an unwanted turquoise stain). Yellow (especially lemon) reacts quite quickly but is a wimp and is easily overwhelmed by the others.

It's relatively easy to compensate for all this when you dye with pure colours, but there are good reasons for using a mixed colour in shibori. I've worked out most of my mixes using thickened dyes (more convenient) but I'm finding that a mix that works fine that way can behave differently in the vat. I think this is because of differences in the way the dye reacts with the cloth in each case. The daunting implication is that I am going to have to figure out a system to re-test a lot of my mixes in the vat.

Meanwhile, I needed to figure out how to deal with all this pink. My original plan had been three blue-black vats, which should have given me a range of dark blues, browns and greenish neutrals. But to cancel out the pink tone, I needed some green. I decided to substitute turquoise for the royal blue I had planned to use ... and crossed my fingers.

On the whole it worked. I didn't of course get the colours I'd planned ... I ended up with a lot more blues ... and I still have more pinkish tones than I want so may be over-dyeing some of these. Overall not the most successful results - although, as ever, there are some stand-out pieces.

I was also using this dye session to experiment with clamped resists, in particular, partially clamping the pleated and stitched pieces. The results were interesting but on the whole the edge between the clamped and the unclamped section is a little obvious so this needs more thought. It didn't quite work for what I have in mind. The other experiment was to try out ways of restricting the pleated shibori to just one section of cloth - without resorting to wax or similar.

The colours were really not good, so I've greyed them out to focus on the marks. The one on the right is quite exciting with lots of potential for development. Guess what, this was the only sample in the whole batch with lemon yellow on it ... in all the wrong places!

The importance of losing pieces

April 17, 2014

“It’s important that we lose pieces. You get there faster, I think, by losing pieces, because you’re pushing yourself and you know how far to come back.”

— Dale Chihuly

I have that quote pinned to my studio wall to remind me not to be afraid of mistakes and to counter my inner control freak. Although it is possible to exercise a lot of control over the dye process, that's not the kind of dyeing I'm interested in. What I like about dye are the surprises - when you finish the drudgery of rinsing and remove the resists to see what you have. Sometimes it's not what you expected (although I can usually figure out why "that" happened these days); sometimes it's a disappointment; but sometimes it's more than you were hoping for - and that's the dance around the studio moment.

There were several things that didn't work for me in the last batch of dyeing. I felt the dye was too strong and too red. I don't think I used enough soda. And, for the effect I was after, the resists needed to be tighter. I still ended up with some lovely pieces but for the second batch, I adjusted what I was doing accordingly.

I'm very happy with these. I used the same pleat and stitch technique as before but added clamps and / or binding to preserve more white. This means you can see the under-painting, which was lost on some of the previous samples. Some of the clamps were shorter than the cloth, so I experimented with only partially clamping some samples (not shown). The results were interesting so I'm going to play with this further. The dye colours were exactly the same as the first batch, but I halved the strength and altered the brown I mixed by skimping the red and being very generous with the yellow and blue - this seemed to work and gave me an almost perfect neutral.

The disappointments in this batch were some of the over-dyed samples. This time the dye was too weak to have enough impact on some of these. Lesson learned - strong dye works better here. The "failures" are going back into the over-dye pile - if all else fails, I'll scrape a dark, thickened dye over them to get some interesting darks.

These were some of the more interesting of the rest. Some of these were over-dyed. The resists were a mixture of clamp (itajime), sticks and pole wrap.

I'm now preparing more cloth for the next batch. I have some new ideas I want to try and I'm thinking about altering the colours to get some grey-greens. I'm preparing lots of pieces because then I won't worry if some don't work out and I can be braver with the ideas I want to try - you have to be prepared to lose some.

Remedies for over thinking

March 28, 2014

When I start to feel as though my mind is going round in circles, I know it's time to get out of my head and do something. Anything. I'm reading a lot at the moment. This is generating masses of ideas but they are confused and abstract. I need to connect my thinking back to my work.

A flying visit to Norfolk last weekend helped. It was a stormy day and the light was changing constantly - dark, icy cold hailstorms followed by brilliant spring sunshine. Walking along Holkham beach I picked up shells, pieces of sea-blackened wood and bones - tiny rabbit bones amongst the dunes. I found a rabbit skull that was almost totally buried by the soft grey lichen that had grown up around it and held it so tight it wasn't possible to pick it up without breaking it. I wish I had photographed it because it has stayed in my memory. I was fascinated by the patterns on the shells I found - miniature shibori patterns to my eye. We saw spoonbills and watched a red kite soar over the grazing marshes, scattering smaller birds. Later, when we sat down for dinner, my notebook came out and I scribbled furiously, trying to get down the ideas that were flooding my mind before I lost them.

Another remedy - get back into the studio and start working. So I have been preparing cloth for shibori. I like to do this in batches and so I am piling up various stitched and bound pieces ready for dyeing. Some use traditional shibori methods, some are very unorthodox and traditionalists would surely frown at them. However I'm only interested in what kind of marks they generate. Most are techniques I have tried and tested before but I am also experimenting with some new ideas. One was such a pain to do that I rather hope I don't like the results so I don't have to do it again!

I am still thinking. And my thoughts are guiding my choices about how I manipulate the cloth. But I am out of my head and thinking with my hands. As I handle the cloth, I am making connections with my conceptual ideas, but my hands and my eyes are now contributing to the thinking process.

And a third remedy. Get out of the house. Talk to people. Look at or do something different. Today I went to see this exhibition by Karen Christensen - whose work could not be more different from mine, and yet I still found connections to things that matter to me. I had a nice lunch, spoke to a friend, wandered around Leigh in the sunshine and came back to my studio refreshed and ready to work.

Memory on cloth

January 31, 2014

The conversation usually goes something like this:

They look puzzled. “What is shibori?”

I try. A Japanese term. For a range of techniques that involve manipulating the cloth and then binding or stitching it to create a resist before dyeing.

…

I give in. “Like tie-dye”.

Light dawns.

Techniques involving bound or tied resists are found in many parts of the world, including India, West Africa, Indonesia, Central Asia, South America. In Japan, they date back to at least the 8th century and probably beyond. Sometime in the 14th century, Japanese dyers also worked out how to make stitched resists and how to protect selected areas of the cloth from the dye – opening up a whole new range of pattern-making possibilities.

There is no equivalent word for “shibori” in English. The closest description would be “shaped-resist dyeing”. “Tie-dye”, with all its rainbow-dyed-t-shirt associations (in my mind, anyway), doesn’t begin to capture the range and sophistication of techniques covered by the Japanese term. Yoshiko Wada, who wrote two books on the subject, describes over sixty variations and there are certainly more. There are people who have dedicated their life not just to shibori but to just one type of shibori. And there are Western artists who have learned Japanese and studied with Japanese masters to perfect their own interpretations.

Against that background I don’t claim to be a shibori artist. But I do use shibori techniques. Initially I taught myself from Wada’s book, “Shibori: the inventive art of Japanese shaped resist dyeing”. Her instructions are so meticulous that, with patience and lots of experimentation, it wasn’t too difficult to achieve interesting results. Other books and courses (most recently with Jan Myers Newbury, who taught me arashi shibori) and lots more experimentation have developed my understanding.

Images from Yoshiko Wada's book

Pleated and stitched resists are the method I like best (see this). Depending how I space the pleats and the stitches I can achieve a range of linear patterns – from fine, straight, parallel lines to wavy, broken ripples. I also use arashi (pole wrap) and itajime (clamp resist) techniques. And shibori lines over cloth that has already been painted or screen-printed with thickened dye add a whole other set of possibilities.

There are shibori techniques that can be done quickly but stitched techniques are usually slow. It takes me 30 to 40 minutes to pleat and stitch a quarter metre of cloth. What makes it worth the trouble, are the characteristic soft edges and organic marks that result. They resemble ripples in the sand, the grain of wood, reflections in the water. The nature of the process means that the dye only reaches the parts of the cloth that are left exposed. So, when you undo it, the marks provide a record of the folds and creases, which mimic the processes that shape and mark surfaces in nature.

Found shibori

It is possible, with experience, to work out how a shibori-dyed cloth must have been folded by studying the marks – “it is the memory of the shape that remains imprinted in the cloth” (Wada). Memory on cloth – with all the metaphorical possibilities that offers.

What I like is that even though I have quite a lot of control over how I manipulate the cloth, in the end I have to let go of the process and allow the cloth and the dye bath to do as they like. I never know exactly what I will get and that’s half the fun. As Wada says, “Chance and accident … give life to the shibori process.”

More about this: World Shibori Network

What I learned

So, why?

Helen Terry

fabric, colour, texture, art, craft, creativity.