Habitat For Humanity Auction

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Well I did it!  I finished my first scarf.  And silly me, I decided it HAD to be a hand-painted piece... which resulted in over 50 hours of work! I am SO glad to be done! whew!!!!

I do love what I made... but I think I definitely prefer working on smaller pieces - items meant to be wall-art. 
My official test-piece




I started off doing a test piece - which I am not sure what to do with.  It's really not what I would have done for an art piece..although it's pretty. 








The beginning






This is me at the Fiber 19 spring retreat.  I've begun to work on the scarf. 













The scarf, back in my studio







This is the scarf after probably 30 hours of work.  Each flower takes about 2 hours to complete.  Yes, that's my studio.  And no, I do NOT have a table/workspace big enough for scarfs! 











A close-up of some of the flowers





This is a close-up of some of the flowers.  If you look closely, you can see some of the vein-work details - which added a good deal of additional time to creating each flower.












Almost done!






This picture shows the scarf finished, with the lavendar-grey background painted in.  But it is not yet steamed to set the dyes and remove the wax resist.











It is amazing to me how stressful silk painting can be.  A slip of the paintbrush and you're forced to work with the mistake (because dyes don't usually remove from silk!).  And even when done painting, there is still a chance for the piece to be ruined during the steam-setting process.  So I basically feel like I spend the entire time I'm painting and steaming, holding my breath!  (Hmmm... perhaps I am more of an adrenalin-junkie than I realized!)

The finished scarf. 





After 50+ hours (really about 61 hours), the scarf came out pretty close to how I envisioned.  It's been carefully cleaned, ironed, photographed (of course), packaged, and mailed.  It's now winging it's way to New Jersey.  I wish it well and hope it brings a decent amount of money for the Habitat for Humanity Auction and a lot of joy to the person that buys it!!


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