Kathy Strauss

Hi Everyone,

I am a fiber artist who has been doing batik on silk for the past 25 years. For many years, I worked on Habotai (or China) silk and stretched and framed my work, much as one would do with canvas. Later, I began to make pieced quilts from batiked silk I had done. For the past 6 years, I have done batik on silk gauze and hung them in layers, one behind the other, and it is pictures of those that I have included here. Many of these works are very large -- I have done one on 14 layers of 36" wide by 96" high each, hung in two rows of seven. People were able to walk through the installation. I have been showing in galleries for many years in the Baltimore/Washington area, and have occasionally shown in Pittsburgh and New York as well. I also work once or twice a year for the Textile Museum in Washington, DC educating docents on batik techniques, demonstrating batik on silk or providing a hands-on batik activity for their Celebration of Textiles events (with LOTS of help from the nice folks at Dharma!).

My earlier work was done on Habotai (or China) silk (the 8mm), and my silk gauze work is done on 3 mm gauze. For all my batik on silk, I use beeswax as my resist and Sennelier's Tinfix Design dyes. Occasionally I have used the chemical fixative to set my dyes (now available from Jacquard), but most often steam set my dyes in a pressure cooker as described in the Dharma catalogue. I am actually saving my money to get a steamer from Dharma, as my work keeps getting larger.