I completed a new necklace and pair of earrings today. I love the shell beads, lower right and upper left, that were broken and just nest together with the most beautiful shades of deep rose and dark gunmetal gray mingling inside. This necklace can be dressed up or down, and will wear very comfortably with no large beads in the back to irritate your neck. These pieces will go to the Valdese Heritage Arts Center for sale, as well as in my online shop. I hope you like them.
Facing two new health challenges, I decided I needed a healing tree art quilt near me daily, so I started this new piece. It will hang in my upstairs studio and contain only scriptures about healing. Here you see the batiked tree on heavy weight cotton. I used a tjanting tool, and later a large brush to fill in the outline of the tree, using melted soy wax. This fabric has been pre-soaked in soda ash solution and is pinned with T pins to my favorite print board (I'll have to do a post on how we made this print board, because I love it so much, you must make one for yourself, so you can love yours too!). Now it is ready for the thickened dye, which I usually apply with an old credit card for the background. This is how most of my art quilts begin. In this piece, I dry brushed some of the soy wax into the background as well to give it an aged, antiqued look. Right now, I'm picturing purple colors to match my studio, and maybe some brown and maybe even a little blue in there somewhere.
The pink areas is where you can see the colors of the print board behind the fabric through the melted wax. Sometimes I take the waxed tree off and scrunch it up to create lots of veining for the dye to run into, but this time I plan to leave it on the board and apply the dye without breaking the wax up.
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