Sh'rooms

Morning walks can be a great source of inspiration for me. One of the neighborhoods I walk in, is an older community - lots of trees, bordering on forests. The houses are probably quite dark inside as a result, but the feeling outside walking is wonderful. I think my love of forests and woods is right up there next to trees. 

There's always interesting things to see but when I come upon mushrooms, I feel like I've hit the jackpot. There weren't too many on this particular morning but enough to make me happy - look at this big beauty...

and another with a part of the cap broken away, making it a more interesting shape.

Some smaller ones withe some wonderful caps....

and  splits.

The underneath is so delicate but beautiful for printing as well as deconstructive screen printing which was my goal for the day.

I sliced the mushrooms very thin to @ 1/4" thick making them easy to work with for screening. The long stems on the larger mushroom were really interesting; I was able to get 5 cuts from it.

This is the underneath of the cap of the largest mushroom.  I love this and am thinking maybe I could turn this image into a silk screen.

I combined parts of different mushrooms;  even though they didn't look like a traditional mushroom, I'm interested in the overall effect, which I think I'll like.

I prepared quite a few screens that day, this is only half of them. And there they sat and sat as life got in the way.

Well, week 2 and here I am, finally getting to print off my screens which is always exciting as you never know what you're gonna get.

I used colors I had mixed up some time before as I was too anxious and wanted to get right to it. They were also colors I like working in - think they were blue-grey, stormy sky and blue-green. I also had a little seafoam green left, now discontinued so this was the last of it. The above are the wet dyes screened onto soda ash treated fabric and waiting to be covered and batched. I'm loving the stems.

I prepared a very large piece of pfd mercerized broadcloth cotton so I could keep on printing and printing, luckily I have a large table to handle the size. After washing, you can see how subtle the colors are. The stormy grey is the darkest, the blue greens are in the middle and have a greenish cast and the blue greys are across the top. I like the color palette,  I've always liked the more neutral and subtle colors.

Here are some detail shots. I know, hard to find the mushrooms in many instances but I do like the patterning they produced.

The stems came through great. I tried to overlap the prints as I was screening so I would have a more continuous piece of cloth, some places I succeeded and some not.

The bigger prints are 2 of my favorites as you can see the detail on the mushrooms.

The seafoam is along the bottom.

This is another favorite - the smaller caps and stems which are very recognizable.

This was the underneath side which is shown at the beginning, not as effective in the deconstructive screen printing. It's probably better to use it to print with like below.

And a piece of organza with deconstructive screen printing and placed over the fabric directly above it. I love the sheers for layering and always try to include some when I'm printing. Now what to do with it. I do have some ideas churning and hope they play out the way I picture them.