Sun-Drenched Goodness

The past few days have been so sunny here in Snohomish that I decided to do some sun printing with a Setacolor Soleil kit I'd found at Dharma Trading a few years ago. I wasn't sure if the paint was still any good, but thought I'd give it a shot.
What prompted all of this was about the same time I picked up the sun printing kit, I found 6 ultra-cool stencils in the shape of hands on the clearance table at Zenith Supplies in the Roosevelt district. If you have never been to Zenith Supplies, your life is incomplete. They have all sorts of essentail oils, incenses, new-agey foldarol that you will find you cannot live without. Same goes for visiting the Dharma Trading website. I have been buying art supplies from them for over 30 years.

Anyhoo, the stencils were originally meant for using with henna, but I thought they would work just fine for sun printing some panels of fabric.

I slipped a garbage bag over a long piece of cardboard and laid it out on my ironing board. I placed a piece of 12 inch by 45 inch white cotton (or linen - I can't remember what it is...) fabric on top of that and wetted the fabric down with a water mister.

Then I chose three paints to work with - the blue, yellow and fuschia and mixed them up 1 part paint to 2 parts water.

I slathered the paint onto the fabric sort of higgledy-piggledy, then placed the stencils on the paint.

I set the whole shebang out in the very bright sunshine on the deck and waited about 45 minutes for the fabric to dry.






Here's the result of the first try:

Not too bad, all considering. For my next piece I mixed the hand stencils up to see what that would look like; I actually like this design much better.

So here are my four sun-drenched panels!

I plan on incorporating at least one of them into the border of a sleeveless blouse. Maybe the yellow/pinkish one...

Platonic Solid P3 - Icosahedron Ornaments

Sacred geometry being what it is, I've been fascinated with playing around with the Platonic Solids. Here's a shortish tutorial on making Icosahedral Ornaments from a recycled calendar. A few years back at Christmas-time someone gave me a calendar with poems from the Sufi poet Rumi. The calendar had 12 pages of short poems accompanied by beautiful imagery of oriental carpets and middle eastern artwork. I kept the calendar after the year ended; such beautiful artwork needed to be saved for some special crafty project.
The other day I was wandering around JoAnn's Fabrics (as I generally do) and came upon a scallop-edged Squeeze Punch made by Fiskars. I counted the number of scallops around the circumference of the punch and realized there were 15 - easily divisible by three. Whoo Hoo! An idea sparked in my mind - I could use the punch to create three-dimensional ornaments out of the calendar images.
At home I dusted off my Rumi calendar, cut out some of its pages and started punching scallop-edged circles like the mad woman I am!

Each ornament requires 20 circles, but I found that a couple of the designs on the calendar pages weren't large enough to accommodate that many circles so I punched a few extras out of the parchment-colored plain portions so I could write out portions of Rumi's poems in my chicken-scratchy (read that as non-calligraphic) handwriting.

Working on another ornament, I realized the punch created a lovely medieval-esque arch design out of the leftovers. Note to self: file that baby away for a future project!

The next thing to do was fold the scallop-edge circles into triangles. Remember the punch has 15 scallops? That means each side of the triangle equals five scallops, so it was super easy to fold them.

The ornaments are essentially two segments of five triangles each flanked by a middle section of 10 triangles.

I created the top of each ornament by glueing five triangles to each other, then left that to dry as I worked on glueing the middle bits together. They're stuck together in a sort of zig-zag configuration. As anyone who knows me knows, when I even get close to glue it somehow spreads out and mysteriously ends up on everything within a five mile radius. I swear I don't know how it happens. That's why I used Elmer's transparent school glue. It (and everything it's stuck on) is washable.

Here's a shot of one ornament almost completely assembled:

And here are a trio of finished ornaments. I added a tassel to each one by attaching them to a string I threaded through the body of the ornaments, then slapped a couple of large fire-polish beads on top in accent colors.

Oh by the way, here's that ornament with the Rumi poem on it.

The entire poem reads:
I see my beauty in you,
A mirror that cannot close its eyes,
A moth caught in flame's allure.