Busy in the studio

I've been busy at the studio, busy at my "real" job, busy at home--just plain busy. Everybody's got the same story. It's good to be busy. It takes my mind off of the fact that I lost more money in my 401K this year than I made in my entire first year out of school.

I've been pushing myself to work on some larger pieces of art cloth--around 2 yards. There are lots of advantages to working big: large composition space, room to move, etc. The downside is that if you make a technical mistake the you make it in a big way. I'm working to finish a piece that I started out loving but has since become a bit of a problem child. This is what it looked like in it's first state, still wet (I posted this picture a couple weeks ago). I wish I could have just frozen it that way.

Several layers of dye resulted in some really subtle colors that don't show up here, but are (or were) nice. So the problem is that I had a little discharging mishap. I used Sunlight Dishwasher Gel, which is really great stuff. It takes color out very well. The new version (sorry no pic yet) has a better value range (light to dark). Unfortunately, I now realize that I only hand washed the cloth between dying sessions and did not neutralize the bleach. That probably left residual bleach in the cloth. When I steamed and washed today I lost lots of red and blue.

So you see, big cloth means big success or big failure. Right now I'm doing a little pouting.