A long time between drinks!

Anyone checking my blog would think I've been entirely uncreative since August. Not entirely so - I've been managing the Fibrecircle blog, the SCQuilters blog and a whole lot of other stuff, mostly for ATASDA, but I have managed to squeeze in tiny bits of creative stuff into my life as well.

Of course, I did a stack of knitting. I have two cardigans ready to block for sewing together, but they don't look terribly exciting as they are, so photos will have to wait. I don't know why I put off blocking - maybe because sewing knitting together is my least favourite job in all the world? One is my blue cardigan, knitted from Bendigo Highland yarn, which I just love. The other is my "arty cardy". Whenever I do anything for ATASDA, someone seems to tell me, "dress arty". I delight in making textile art, and I delight in making my own garments, but, no disrespect to others who feel differently, I just don't "dress arty". Fancy dress is torture for me, and while I can see that looking the part is important if you're out there selling work, it just isn't me. So I have made myself a striped knitted jacket for "arty" occasions. By my arty friends' standards, it's tame but it will have to be enough for me. Yes, there will be photos... though probably not showing me wearing it.

What else? Oh yes, the Forest piece I was talking about last time. I showed what the painted cloth looked like once I'd drawn and painted and generally played with it. It needed some contrast fabric for the bag so, naturally, I painted some. I mixed some grey-browns on my palette and slapped them onto cream quilters' muslin, deliberately making it streaky. I added in a few strokes of black, while everything was still wet, to add some depth. Once it was dry, I drew lines on it to make it look somewhat like bark. Here's a detail shot of how it looked:

You need the detail shot because it's hard to see the textured pattern in a photo of the whole piece. I used the bark fabric to make the top and handles of the bag, with the forest fabric as the body.

I wanted to keep the forest fabric whole, but I also think no bag is compete without an outside pocket. So I made a welt pocket with a zipper for the top of the outside pocket - it's there but it's hardly visible.

Here's the finished bag:

It has everything a bag should have. Four inside pockets with elasticised tops, for keys, wallet, phone, etc. That essential outside pocket. Long enough straps that I can sling it over my shoulder easily. It has one tiny drawback - that it doesn't take an A5 sketchbook as comfortably as I'd like, though it does fit in. My current bag is just that bit bigger, and I've got spoilt. This one is probably better for my back, since I'm not tempted to toss in the kitchen sink...

I also did some more block printing and stamping. I love making stamps and I love playing around with them. I made a couple of new stamps recently and have played around with them, to see how they work with my other stamps.

These ones are from designs I've drawn in my sketchbooks over the years, which I've now drawn (sorry) together into my Lost Treasures book. The upper one is from a sketch I made at the Arts of Islam  exhibition at the NSW Art Gallery a few years back; the lower one from a sketch at another exhibition at the Gallery, of Chinese art. See how it pays to take a sketchbook with you?

I did some sample prints:

You can see a few of my stamps from back in May crept in to make secondary patterns. I was experimenting for another project I was working on, for Fibrecircle, on the theme Geometric. It hasn't quite worked out the way I planned, but so far it looks like this:

Basically, it's a little pot, using the stamps as decorative motifs. It was going to be a dice pot for my daughter, who's a keen gamer, but I haven't quite worked out a satisfactory lid for it yet - one that will keep the dice firmly inside between games. But it's a cute prototype.

The block printing was basically adding another layer to some of my paint rags. I had one that I'd used for playing with resists that looked very dark:

I stamped over it using white Permaset Supercover, which, as you'd guess, is very opaque printing ink. I used several of my stamps, plus a piece of window screen to give a gentle overall texture.

It  may not look brilliant in  the photo but the white has really give it some wow factor. I'm thinking it may be a journal cover when it grows up.

The other fun thing I've done lately is some breakdown printing. It's a fascinating process, in which you paint thickened dyes in patterns onto a screen, allow it to dry and then print using the same medium. The medium gradually breaks down the dried dye paint on the screen, with thicker areas acting as a resist. It yields these beautiful complex prints, related to one another but not quite the same.

I don't think I'm anywhere near done exploring this technique yet.

I've also made these quilt blocks:

and these:

(actually I've made 26 of these ones now), so I've not been entirely idle, have I?

Painting fabric

One of the great pleasures of my life is painting on fabric. It's really a Zen kind of thing to do! You become totally absorbed in the pretty things you're making, and before you know it, time has flown past and you discover you should have been somewhere else half an hour ago. It's also surprisingly quick to do, if you only have a short time available, assuming you remember to set a timer a little while before you need to stop! Finishing that last little bit and washing everything up does take extra time.

My favourite way of painting is making paint rags. OK, so maybe they aren't always strictly speaking paint rags, but the best way I know to start a creative work is to browse my paint rag collection.

For example, Fibrecircle's latest challenge is Forest. Actually, it's my challenge choice and I chose it because I thought it was easy! We've had a few that were fairly challenging, and everyone moaned. But perhaps, with challenge themes, it's necessary to moan about it a bit before getting started, because that's what everyone did about this one, too. I didn't have a plan when I picked the theme, though I did discover, once I went to visit the paint rag folders, that several had been earmarked, at some vague date in the past, for a Forest series. And when I used Forest as a subject tag here, all these other Forest works came up.  Is it clever to work in a series and not even realise it, or does it just show a lack of imagination?

Anyway, I thought I'd share something of the process of making something with my paint rags, to encourage other people to have a go at painting on fabric. So here's my personal "how to paint on fabrics".

First of all, I had some neutral-coloured quilters muslin, which I'd pre-washed. I like quilters muslin to paint on, because it has a fairly high thread count, without being stiff or heavy. That means that my painted fabric can be used in all different ways, in garments, quilts, handbags, wall art and so on, so I'm not limiting myself too much at the outset. It also comes in 150cm width, which makes it economical and useful on a larger scale. You can also use homespun or broadcloth, although I'm not keen on the extra thickness and occasional nubs in the cloth, and mostly it's only 115cm wide. The important thing, with whatever fabric you use, is to wash it thoroughly first to remove any sizing. Most fabrics have been treated with something to make them less likely to crush and crumple while they're being displayed, and some will still have products, like formaldehyde, left over from the printing process.

My piece of cloth was used initially as a paint rag, to clean up after another painting session. It might sound weird to use good cloth for paint rags, but how often have you seem a wonderful pattern on a paint rag, but the cloth is old sheet or shirting or a worn tea towel or some other fabric that isn't suitable for your purpose?  Anyway, here's what my fabric looked like after its first few uses as a paint rag:

OK, pretty boring, right? It's been used at least twice as a paint mop-up rag (see the stronger opaque red over the top of the blue?). The pink-beige colour is probably left over transparent paint from another later project, which has been washed over it to cut back the cream background. It was around in that incarnation for a while, until I decided to add some line, to help it on its way.

I used a mixture of Sharpie and Pigma pens. I started out drawing along lines of high contrast, like around the red and yellow areas and the dark browns. Then I could see there were elements of a forest scene emerging (OK, I admit it, my brain is fixated on forests. So there. ....How weird, several kookaburras just started laughing loudly in my backyard. Dead set. So maybe I am being subliminally influenced by birds?) Anyway, I drew other lines to try to encourage that effect, and stopped when I'd had enough.

Then it sat in my folder for a while longer, until this challenge came up. I mined the folders for ideas and this one leapt out, probably because it was further advanced than anything else and I'm basically lazy. I hauled out my Setacolor paints again.

An aside about paints. You can use a lot of things on fabric and get good, fast effects. Fastness means the way it will stay on the fabric, and there are two main aspects, wash fastness and light fastness, though there are other issues (crocking or rubbing, fastness to perspiration and so on). Wash fastness means it won't wash out the first time you wet it and will tend to stay put over repeated washings; light fastness means you don't have to keep it in a dark cupboard to make sure the colour stays put *over a reasonable period of time*. The *reasonable period of time* can be quite variable for commercial fabrics, and may mean just a few trips through the washing machine or visits to the great outdoors. And wash fastness and light fastness are separate issues, as being fast in one way does not automatically means it will be fast in the other. But I digress. In short, you want to use products that have a reasonable likelihood of staying on your work, long enough for people to enjoy it.

Ordinary acrylic paints actually have quite good wash fastness, as anyone who's ever tried to get paint of their clothes will tell you! But, if you want to use up those acrylic paints you have lying around, it's safer to add the same brand fabric additive, to ensure the medium is going to stay where you put it, even if the work goes through the washing machine. I never know what my rags will be used for, so I tend to err on the side of caution.

Specialist fabric paints are really the best, though. They have come a long way since they turned everything you painted into cardboard. I personally like Setacolor, made by Pebeo, because the painted fabric has a nice hand, they last well without going gluggy, they mix well, come in transparent, opaque and metallic, and I can buy them easily, in person and online. I'm also partial to Lumiere paints from Jacquard, because they have a fabulous range of metallic ones that are different to the Setacolors, and they have lovely dense coverage over all manner of sins. But they are more expensive than Setacolor, so I tend to focus on the ones that are different to Setacolor's range. For screen printing and stamping, I like Permaset, since it's water soluble until it cures and is heat set, making clean-up a doddle. But there are many other products around. The best way to decide which you like the best is to try out a few different ones and see what appeals to you.

The essential thing to know about fabric paints is that they are usually heat-set. That means they are not necessarily wash-fast on your fabric, unless you heat them to the specifications listed on the product. Usually a few minutes of ironing is all you need. Fabric paints will air-cure over time, but it's best not to rely on it.

OK, back to our Forest piece. I decided it needed some areas to be enhanced to make it really forest-like. So I painted some areas in green.

OK, that's a lie already. I painted it in many greens. Basically, I put red, blue and yellow transparent paint on my palette and mixed different greens as I went along. "Red?" you say. "But isn't green made from blue and yellow?" Well, yes and no. Try it sometime. Take equal amounts of standard mid-range blue and yellow and mix them into a green. OK, that's definitely green. Now take a little bit of red and mix it in. Is it still green? Usually, the answer would be yes, a slightly browny green but still green. You can add a surprising amount of red to your 50/50 green before it become a definite brown. Remember how red, blue and yellow mixed together make brown? Yeah, I figured you knew that one, because murky brown is the easiest colour of all to mix!

I also wanted to add some strong browns to my forest. Forests are not all green, least of all Australian forests, which can be surprisingly colourful. That wasn't my only reason, though. One thing guaranteed to make your painted fabric look blah is to have everything in a medium value/tone. Tone is generally an undervalued thing in the textile world. Quilters call it Value, because, hey, we've got to be different. If you look at a quilt with real wow factor, usually it has some strong tonal contrasts happening. Some areas are light and some are dark. Tone is always relative, so your darks don't have to be really strong or your lights equivalent to white. But, just as in a quilt, you need some of that contrast to give the painted fabric life. You probably can't see them in the photo, but this fabric also has a few tiny areas of bright white, which add a little zing and stop it all falling into medium tone.

The browns I mixed for this fabric tended towards blue a little, because I wanted them to be mostly greyed and muted, in keeping with the palette that was there. I didn't want my forest to be autumnal. There are a few very small areas of red-brown, again, to add a bit of zing.

When I finished, I used up the rest of my paints on the palette on these paint rags:

and this was the clean-up rag:

Yes, I've noticed that I generate more paint rags than I use! Actually, this project is also using up a couple of other paint rags from the folders, so I don't actually get smothered by pieces of cloth.

All these paints are transparent. That doesn't really mean you can see through them; it means that when you paint them over the top of another colour, the result will be a different colour to the one you painted with. So if you paint transparent yellow over blue, you won't get yellow, you'll get a greenish-yellow. I really like using transparent paints for this kind of purpose, because it results in very interesting, complex pieces of cloth. Sometimes, when I'm doing a final paint, as for this Forest piece, I would use opaque paints instead, because it would really matter what colour I ended up with. I'd want my yellow to stay yellow, no matter what was underneath. In this context, it didn't, and having the paint change colour according to the underneath colour actually added something to the forest scene, since things in nature are never just one colour. It's something worth experimenting with, because, after all, you can always overpaint with opaque paint if you don't like the result!
More about Forest soon...

A sad absence...

.. of photos anyway. My computer is being reconstructed as we speak and this rather elderly laptop doesn't have the graphics capability to allow upload of photos. So you'll have to wait a little while to see what I've been up to.

I've not been entirely idle, though. More stitching has been done on Like Honey from the Rock, though there is still a daunting amount of stitching to do. I'm putting the third (and final) borders onto the Secret Quilt, which I'll photograph for you after the 21st, the day of the great unveiling. You can see the fabrics for the challenge on Rooruu's blog. I had hoped to have it finished completely but I don't think I'll have it quilted in a fortnight. Well, we'll see.

The scarf motif I showed you before has been traced onto Romeo and one end has been pinned ready for stitch. I might start that this afternoon. I've also just begun a stitched piece for the DBDU monthly challenge, which is Dream Landscapes. I'm actually cheating a bit as it's one of the images I printed when I was doing the Forest postcard, but I printed it back them because I knew I would want to stitch it sometime soon. I haven't given a lot of thought to the Like Minded Threads challenges this month - there are a lot of deadlines this month! I'd really like to do something for them this month. As always, there's more ideas than time!

Your computer as a tool

This topic came up on a list I belong to. So I thought I'd share some of the ways I manipulated the photo I used in the Forest piece. There are literally hundreds of ways to change a photo if you have access to Corel PhotoPaint (the program I use) or Photoshop or similar programs.

I showed you the original photo on 20 April and the finished piece on 30 April. Here are some ways I manipulated the photograph before deciding on one to print for stitch.


This one has used "dabble" to change the colour in the photo to dabs of colour, like paint strokes. (You might need to look at the larger image to see what I mean.) There are other paint-type changes in most programs, but I usually start with this one, because it basically tells you what's there. If you're not a painter, sometimes it's hard to see the colour changes in a photo. So this is a useful tool, regardless of what you're going to do later. You can use it as a basis for stitch, if you want a traditional look.


This one has changed the photo to a water marker image. It's also useful for seeing the colours that make up the image, but it generally makes the colours brighter, and that can be interesting too. Often, all I do with these images is look at them and see how the colours go together, where the shadows fall and so on.


Isn't this interesting? It's what happens when you use the invert function. Invert is useful in lots of ways. It tells you about the balance of a piece - you can see that the right hand tree trunk has gone white, so this indicates that, in the original, this is going to be a very dark area that might dominate the finished piece. But inverted images are also very interesting in their own right. I actually printed this one for stitching, because I loved the eerie feel it gave to the forest.


This version has had light effects added (under Render in Corel PhotoPaint). You can decide where you want the light to come from and how much light you want. I liked this one, which really feels like a full moon shining into the bush.


All the images so far have basically been representational - you can still see that it's a forest scene, since that's what I needed for the challenge. But while playing about with the image, I also saved this one. It's from Alchemy, smoke effects and isn't it interesting? Couldn't you do a lot with that by adding stitch, and maybe other media like paint, beading...?


And finally, this one. It's using an effect called Icecubes, also from Alchemy. I loved this one too, because it really reminds me of flowers and I just love the way the image has been transformed into something totally new.

I've hardly touched the surface of the possibilities and the best thing is to play with whatever software you have and see what is possible. It's amazing how a quite ordinary photo can be transformed by changing the light focus, or by turning it into something quite different! I've focused on single effects but of course, you can change a single image in multiple ways. And you can isolate small elements of an image and change them, use them as repeat images... whatever grabs your attention!

Jenny's Australian Needleart Journey: Can't See The Forrest For The Trees

And for another take on this theme
Jenny's Australian Needleart Journey: Can't See The Forrest For The Trees

Forest

I also finished this piece today. (Isn't end of the month great?) I called it, somewhat unimaginatively, Bush Road, and it's the first of several postcard-sized pieces I want to make using the image of the old coach road at Mt York that I shared earlier.

I scanned the photo and played around with it in Corel PhotoPaint. I actually printed out three images based on this scene, so I haven't finished with it yet! This size allows me to try different approaches without investing too much time and thread (though it always takes me way longer to thread paint than I expect!).

It's stitched with free motion straight and zigzag stitching, with the colours built up from dark to light. Sometimes I use two different top threads to blend colours, but this piece is so small, I mostly used single threads and overlaid the various stitching to blend. I use the print colours as a value indication but often I use very different hues to the original images. The trick is not to lay down too much thread in an area you plan to blend, or the needle won't pierce the thickness.

I am so happy with how this one worked out! It really feels like the Australian bush to me.

Busy afternoon

Progress has been made on several fronts today, so I'm a happy camper!

I printed out the images for Like Honey from the Rock onto fabric and I printed out images for Forest onto fabric. For once, everything went smoothly, the printer didn't balk at printing on the thicker fabric-freezer paper combination and the prints are just as I expected. I also finished a drawing of Miner's Cottages in Broken Hill. It's not a good scan but I'll share it anyway. It deliberately has no background, as I plan to use it for a textile piece in the future.



I've had a little rethink of Where I Live, so I think I'll take another path with that one. Similar but different!

Forest

This piece is another monthly challenge, this time from Design Bytes Down Under, a netgroup for textile artists who use their computers in their artwork. This is their first challenge, so I really want to finish something by the April 30 deadline, even if no-one else does.

I chose a photograph we took near the old coach road at Mt York back in the eighties.
I like it because it has a sense of the Australian forest, plus the interest of a pathway, in this case what remains of the old coach road. I've scanned it into the computer and played around with it in Corel PhotoPaint. I ended up with some really interesting images as a basis for stitch. Now to choose one and print it out!