Jill Sandor
Creating the Cloth
Surface design is a layering process of adding and subtracting color and images to cloth, paper, and other materials. It is often finished with hand or machine stitching and/or other embellishments like beads. There are numerous products available to artists that did not exist just 20 years ago.
My work focuses on color, pattern, and texture and I often use threadwork as my sole embellishment. My inspiration is anything unusual- color combinations, light and dark, city profiles, nature's silhouettes.
And I take a lot of photographs.
A trip to Tucson was inspiration for a palette of hand-dyed colors. Shades of brown, red, green, and yellow will be the starting point for new work.
Yes, I collect rust. Rust printing has been around for a while but there are always different ways of using it to print fabric. "Solar Crust" was created with rusty saw blades and a flexible garden rake.
Surface design can be messy when potato starch and corn mixtures get involved. They are used as resists followed by dyes or discharges. Discharging is a process whereby color is removed- the opposite of dyeing. One finished piece often has many layers of these processes plus threadwork. It all starts with a piece of white or black fabric.
