Thursday, September 12, 2013

Round Robin Surface Design

After my last post about the Printed Fabric Bee, I remembered a Round Robin that I participated in a few years ago with members of the Complex Cloth Yahoo Group.
As I recall, we stated with a yard of our chosen fabric, dyed it and then sent it on to the first of four other artists. It took almost a year before our fabrics came back and it was such a delight to see how different they were. I had sent off three different fabrics, a cotton and linen blend:




A cotton lawn:




And a PFD cotton, they all started as a pale yellow:




Participants had screened printed, overdyed, stamped, discharged and painted with thickened dyes, it was wonderful to see the wide range of techniques.
I learned so much in the process, especially to honour the colours and designs that others had done previously and to enhance that work rather than detract from it.
Perhaps some of you might like to build your own Round Robin?
Enjoy, Susan!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Four friends and I are doing a round robin similar to yours. We had hoped to be done by the end of the year, but life keeps getting in the way for each of us.

We have journaled about the processes used in each step and it's been challenging to keep each technique different from the rest. Some weren't happy with their results and apologized to the owner of the fabric and every one else at the table declared it to be totally successful. Two more rounds and we'll be done.