The Dye Factory Is Closed for This Year

All images are protected by a Creative Commons Copyright, 2011, Yasmin Sabur.

I usually dye as much fabric as possible during the summer months.

All images are protected by a Creative Commons Copyright,

 2011, Yasmin Sabur.

In San Diego the summers are warm enough to use the sun to set the dye into the fabric. (I work with fiber reactive dyes, that require heat for the dye to form a chemical bond with natural fiber fabrics.)

Sometimes I am still dyeing well into the fall. Today I dyed the last piece of fabric for the year. Yeah! Ahead of schedule, well kind of.

I'd planned to spend the month of August cutting lino blocks and printing cards for the holiday season. Every year I forget that it is too hot in the summer to work with printing inks. All kinds of disasters can and did happen this year.

Well art is about exploring disasters and creating something out of them. So, I took many of the designs I'd cut into block and turned them into stencils using my favorite stencil material - freezer paper.

All images are protected by a Creative Commons Copyright, 2011, Yasmin Sabur

Maybe, I was just in the mood for disasters. Remember that fiber reactive dyes need heat to form a chemical bond? Between not enough steam setting  and too little baking soda (the activator) in my print mix, I ruined the first set of a dozen or so small stencilled pieces.

All images are protected by a Creative Commons Copyright,
2011, Yasmin Sabur

Did I go to bed for three days? No, but believe me I wanted to. Just soldiered on, and finally three weeks later, got some pieces, stencilled, dyed, steamed, rinsed, pressed and looking good.

A constant in the life of all but the most successful artists is the production of small affordable works.

The small works, hopefully, sell in large quantities. Are representative of the quality of an artist's larger works and speak with the same voice.

The idea being that you, the collector will be intrigued by the small works, and will eventually purchase something larger (also more expensive).

The cards have for years been one of my small artifacts, as are my scarves.

All images are protected by a Creative Commons Copyright, 2011, Yasmin Sabur

These new small stencilled pieces (10X8 inches) are much too detailed to be sold in the same price range as the cards and scarves (under $60 for the most part). So I needed to come up with a way to make them more affordable.

All images are protected by a Creative Commons Copyright,
2011, Yasmin Sabur

I turned to digital fabric printing on organic cotton.

For the next month as I work through the process of turning these one of a kind monoprints into digital works of art I'll blog and let you know how I did it.

For starters, the monoprints will be scanned.

 I'll go to my local adult ed center and use the Mac lab scanner to do this. Better quality than my all in one Epson printer/scanner/copier at home.

If you live in San Diego, the center is located on Aero Drive. There is an open MAC lab on Saturday morning from 8am to noon.

Next, because I will be color correcting and matching in PhotoShop, I signed up for a month long subscription to Lynda.com. I'll use the video tutorials to brush up on my skills. (Creative Suites is now on version 5, I have version 3.)

The images are from photographs I took this morning. Complete set of stencilled monoprints can be seen on Flickr and Facebook.

All images are protected by a Creative Commons Copyright, 2011, Yasmin Sabur

The line of prints are named "Tribe of One." Each print title is the name of an African country.

As this blog series progresses, chime in. I am sure to get stuck at many points along the way and your help will be greatly appreciated.