Evening with Judy Coats Perez

The first day at Craft Napa, I also took an evening class with Judy Coats Perez. The class was for making foam stamps. She had an adhesive foam sheet for each of us, a clear polyester film and tracing paper. I had not used adhesive foam before, I had tried to use Elmers to glue two regular sheets together, which did not work very well. We drew designs on the tracing paper with a pencil, and flipped it onto the foam. Then we rubbed over the back of the paper and it transferred the image to the foam. The designs were cut out with an Exacto knife, the paper backing pulled off, and it was adhered to the clear polyester film. I ended up just using my paper scissors to cut out the design on the foam, unless it was a very tiny area.

Judy had several reference books for us to use, one was flowers and plants, the other animals drawn in different cultural styles. I did the animal stamps from some of the images I found in the book. The back of the alligator was cut with a scalloped paper crafting scissors, as well as some of the leaves in the previous photo. I really liked putting the foam on the clear polyester film, being able to see through it was great for alignment when printing. The sheets are called Dur-a-lar .005 thickness, the pack I got at the art supply was 25 sheets for $12.50. She said you can also order it from Dick Blick catalog. I wonder how it will work for cutting stencils? It was a good weight and certainly cheaper than stencil plastic.

In Sue Bleiweiss' class, she also gave us foam but she used a heavy book cover cardboard, because she used to bind books, and she had a lot of it! At the evening class with Judy everyone was already tired from the full day of class. We thought the class was maybe 6-8pm, no one could remember, but the class was 6:30 to 9:30. Whew, we were tired, but class was low key, just cutting up foam for stamps. We all kind of faded at 9 and left early.

Last week two friends came over and we played with soy wax. Jenny wanted to do a batik for the Fyber Café challenge "Flights of Fancy." I told her how the soy wax was much better than the traditional paraffin and beeswax mix. The soy wax melts at a low temp and washes out with hot water. Even tho I first remove as much wax as possible with newspaper and an iron, before putting the fabric in the washing machine. She is drawing a fairy sitting on a rock, based on a Maxfield Parrish painting. Susan and I just played with stamping the wax onto fat quarters, with different tools.

I used a squiggly bendy straw for the purple dyed one. I already had some dye made up, and I made a dye thickener to paint dye with. The directions for the sodium alginate said "add a little to some fluid" how do you interpret those directions? I put a teaspoon in a pint Mason jar of water and stirred it up. It clumped instantly and took a bit of stirring but it thickened fast. I probably could have used less powder. We had little paper cups, added about 2 tablespoons of goop and a good squirt of dye, then we used foam brushes to apply the dye.

We cleaned up at noon, Susan and I will add more wax and dye layers at another time. We went to Los Dos Amigos Mexican restaurant for Margaritas... and lunch.

I am linking this to Nina Marie's "Off the Wall Friday" click here to see what other talented textile artists are doing this week.