Giant tie-dyed parachute for Cincinnati Ballet

A wonderful puzzle: a giant nylon parachute makes an undulating lake from which three witchy ladies rise up. Its not magical unless it looks like Sandra Woodall’s wonderful sketch for the Ladies of the Lake for The Cincinnati Ballet’s Camelot. I tied it (on three cardboard fabric tubes in lieu of PVC pipes) and several twisted tentacles, and dyed it with union dye, as the parachute was made with lots of different materials in addition to nylon, and union dye gave it a fighting chance to all be blue!

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Then with help from the draper and first hands, we put it in the vestibule of Parsons-Meares (the only place tall enough) on three plastic covered stands. I painted and spattered it with Liquitex Ink!, a product remarkable for its intense color, and nice hand on fabric–and it doesn’t have to be heatset in any way.

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This is a (sideways) detail so you can see that Lascaux acrylic aluminum paint that I spattered here as the Liquitex Ink! silver wasn’t opaque enough for this purpose–to look like light reflecting on water…
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This nice photograph of the Ladies in their pole-wrapped unitards, was not taken by me, but rather by a professional photographer associated with Cincinnati Ballet. When I find out who it was, I will hasten to give them credit…

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