Crackled Vessels and More Circles!

 (Above:  Newly crackled fiber vessels.  Click on any image in this blog post to enlarge.)

I love making fiber vessels from skeins of neglected yarn and unraveled knit afghans and sweaters.  They are a joy to make but also a joy to transform using acrylic crackle medium.  This week I selected nine vessels, applied several layers of Golden's GAC 400, a textile stiffener, and then applied a thin layer of crackle medium.

I generally do this in the evening before bed ... because it is best not to continue messing around with the wet acrylic crackle medium.  I doesn't need help or heat or me poking at it!  It simply needs to dry over night.  This is what I found in the morning!

This is how I left them the night before ... sitting on the top of my picture framing dry mount press ...

... covered over in wet crackle medium.

This is a detail of the crackling!  It reminds me of the dried high desert lake bed at PLAYA, the art residency I've been to twice ... in the remote "Oregon Outback".  The arid soil really was an amazing fissure of dried cracks in hues of off-white, grey, and the subtleties of soil.

I'm very happy with the results ... and please scroll down to see more images of the individual pieces.

 (Above:  Eight new circles.)

In the meantime, I've been working on the next, small batch of circles for my upcoming installation at Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury, North Carolina (Sept. 9, 2017 through Jan. 3, 2018).  I'm excited and my head is still spinning with new idea of "orbs" in various patterns, colors, and edging.

I realized that my earlier post didn't really do the first batch much justice in terms of "size".  Thus, this is the basic size of the smaller circles ...

 ... and this is the basic size of the larger ones.  I'm still looking for a temporary space on which to visualize these circles.  Hopefully, I'll have a place in public, a chance to show an "installation in progress" as I plan on having no fewer than eighty of these things!  I need a large wall on which to work, stand back and study, arrange, and determine how the collection will show best.

 

Above and further below are the individual images of the recently finished crackled, fiber vessels!