A little bit of printing does you good #3

I've also had a play day with Claire recently. Honestly, my life is all play, play, play.. (I wish).
We decided to work with printing inks using stamps and blocks. I had my Permaset collection; Claire brought Derivan printing inks.

Our  main interest was trying our compressed sponge to make stamps, because we'd both bought some, literally, years ago and had never done anything with it. Basically, it comes like a piece of thick cardboard, so you can cut it with scissors or a craft knife. A craft knife feels weird as the medium is a bit bumpy, but it worked OK.

I stayed with trees, because these play days may as well contribute to something I'm meant to be doing! I'm always interested in positive-negative effects, so I cut out my stamp in a way I hoped would allow me to play with that. Well, dummy, cutting the shape from one end  means the edges will move around... Note to self, make sure the outer shape has four solid sides. I don't think I'd want to cut anything really intricate - my tree centre is a bit unstable and needs care when printing.

This is how the stamp looked once it had been expanded in water. That is such a fun process - the cardboard-like material just miraculously grows into a sponge. I could watch that all day.

We dried the sponges out as best we could and off I went, stamping my basic shape first with blue and then adding olive green. This was just to see how to printed and how dry it needed to be.

You can see the sponge has that lovely bubbly texture of a kitchen sponge. When it was a bit wet, it tended to push the ink around, so you lose the texture, as you can see on the right hand side. But I think it does need to be a bit damp to print well.

And here's a negative version, stamping with the surround and the centre. I blended the colour into layers when I put the colour on the stamp.

Then I tried using all three, and this is where the way the background moved around was a problem. I'm not sure it's a medium that works for this anyway, as there's too much of the same texture. I didn't bother adding the tree centre.

 Just a trio of the three kinds of print...

I noticed that you tend to get more repeat prints from the sponge than from other media, each print getting paler and paler. That's probably because the sponge is wet, so the print media doesn't get trapped in it as much. So I decided to play with this process to try to get some depth.

It works OK, clearer in the flesh than in a photo. Just fun to try, really.

Last of all, I made a print with Maz's stamp again, to contrast the printing inks with the thickened dye. This one's on cotton quilters muslin.

You can see how much sharper the print is. I'm going to try making the dye thicker, to see how that affects the process... sometime! 

A little bit of printing does you good #1

I've been printing things lately and having a ball, as usual.

Printing is my first love. It's not the first creative thing I learnt how to do. That honour goes to knitting, which I learnt to do at age 7 (remember these squares that I blogged about back here?), closely followed by hand embroidery. I did my first printing at high school and I loved it. Unfortunately, I had an art teacher who regarded printmaking as a lesser form of art and you were nothing if you couldn't draw or paint. That doesn't mean he actually taught us anything about drawing or painting... but I digress.

I spent a lot of time as a young mum screen printing things, although I didn't have much money to spend on art stuff back then. Then, after a break when I was studying, I moved into quilting. If you are one of the three people who follow my blog, you'll have noticed that printmaking of various kinds has been slowly creeping back.

My first printing this year was simple intaglio, something I've wanted to try for a long time. Intaglio is a process more often used in engraving or etching. Rather than inking the printing surface, you want to get ink down inside the hollows of your printing surface. So printing involves getting your paper or fabric down into those hollows, which, on paper at least, gives a sort of embossed effect as well. I'd read about a two-colour method, in which you put your first colour down into the hollows of the printing surface and then add a second colour to the part you'd normally print from with stamps or similar.

I used a stamp I'd made a while back, by drawing on a polystyrene meat tray with biro. So easy! I figured if it worked this this very shallow stamp, it would work with any of the surfaces I print from. Fibrecircle is currently working on the theme of Trees ,so I was killing two birds with one stone.


I used acrylic paint, since I was working on cartridge paper and just mucking about, and hey, I had them out anyway for something else. My first prints were on dry paper.

I painted the stamp with a sponge brush and red acrylic paint, and then wiped the surface clean with a soft rag. The only red was down in the hollows. Then I painted yellow acrylic paint over the top, trying to stay away from the hollows. I laid the paper over the top and used my baren and my fingers to work it down into the hollows.

Obviously, there was some mixing of colours, especially in the first print. The second print was more successful. Then I tried diluting the yellow paint, so it was runnier that the red. Wow! The colour is quite pale but the effect is more like I was imagining.

The second set of prints were on damp paper. I expected better results, because it's much easier to get the paper down into the hollows. And yes, I got clearer results.

The first image was using paint with the same viscosity. The second has the runnier yellow paint, and there's a lot less colour mixing.

I think diluting the second colour less would still be effective and I'd get stronger colour.

I want to try this now with other media. I'm playing around a lot with thickened dye, because I love the way it goes onto fabric and I'm enjoying the challenge of working with transparent media. I've done that a lot with paint, but my past screen printing has mostly used opaque media when colours were likely to interact.


This was just a little moment of playing away from the many things I *should*be doing. My later printmaking has been a little more on task.

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?

Treasures

Over the weekend, I was storing up treasures. Not actual treasures, but some little things to add to my Lost Treasures journal cover. I originally made a couple of coins from two layers of fabric, joined with fusible web and edges with satin stitch. They looked vaguely coin-like, in the sense that flat round things with a firm edge might be called that! They were not really as luscious and rich and desirable as I wanted.

So I decided to try making some treasures with my hot glue gun. I laid baking paper over a wooden board (my silicon sheet would have been better for this) and started melting hot glue onto the paper. One word of caution: when people say "well-ventilated area", they clearly mean right outside in the open air. Using my glue gun in my workroom, with windows open and venting fan going, is clearly not well-ventilated enough! I truly felt not quite the thing after doing a really small amount of glue melting. I know I'm a canary-down-the-mine kind of person, but be warned.

My aim was to make various shapes, coins, jewels, chains and free-form objects, that I could later paint as treasures to add to my journal cover. The chains were a series of c-shapes added to an initial circle, rather than individual links, since I just wanted the general effect. The jewels were variations of a basic blob, since there's no way I'm going to get anything faceted from a glue gun. The glue coins were circles of glue with some inner fill, leaving lots of gaps and holes. The others were just little bits of pattern.
Most things I read suggested that hot glue gun elements can be painted with acrylic or Lumiere paints, once they're cool. While mine would take both Setacolor and Lumiere, I wasn't really happy with the way the paints went on, and I felt they might easily rub off with handling, such as on a journal cover. So I coloured the treasures in with Sharpie pens, which will write on pretty much anything. That gave me a good base to paint on. I could have tried Gesso, but the pens were handy. Alcohol inks would probably work too, since they seem to go on anything.

Here are my treasures, once they were coloured in with Sharpie. The gold one has been over painted with Setacolor Shimmer Gold (because it was handy and it's a nice gold colour). Some treasures are hard to see because they are the clear material of the glue.

The white on the fabric coins is Setacolor Expandable Paint medium. I decided to add some of that, paint it and then heat it, to give the coins some heft. However, the bottle I grabbed was the old one that has gone a little cheesy over time. I kept it because it gives really interesting lumpy, serious-case-of-mumps effects. You can see this in the next photo. All the shapes have been painted with a couple of coats of either Setacolor Shimmer Gold or Lumiere Pink-Gold.

I felt the shapes, especially the gold ones, were too plastic and extruded-looking, to look like something that is cast. So I added some of the new bottle of Expandable Paint medium, with a paintbrush. Using a bristle brush gave me patterns and texture in the way the medium went on, which gave the coins a sort worn texture, the kind that old coins have. I wanted that worn die-cast effect so I was happy about that!

I decided to make some more coins, and since the fabric ones hadn't been heavy enough, I cut circles from a medium weight card. For those pedantic enough to want details, it's actually the card that comes inside boxes of tea-bags, holding the rows in place. I love these little cards! Perfect for throw-away scrapers for glue and other media, sometimes big enough to be the basis of a bookmark, and easy to cut for little projects like this, that need a little bit of robust card. I painted the circles with the Expandable Paint medium, and marked ridges around the edges with an ice-cream stick. I had to do this to both sides of the card and fabric coins, to prevent curling when the medium expanded. Once they were thoroughly dry, I painted them all with Setacolor or Lumiere paint. A short zap with the heat gun, and I had some significantly thicker coins and jewels. The white medium showed through a little once it expanded, so I added a little more paint in places and gave them all a rub with Treasure Gold. And here they are:

The three coins on the left are the cardboard ones, the large ones in the right hand row are the fabric ones, and the little ones are made just from the glue gun, with Expandable Paint medium used to fill in the gaps. The chains looks surprisingly chain-like. I don't think I'll use the flower on this project; it was just me trying to get my hand loose to make the chains. When I laid them all out on the journal cover like a pile of treasure, it looks very much as I imagined. I plan to dangle the two fabric ones from the gold D-ring clasp with a couple of gold jump rings.

One thing I was going to try, if the coins still looked too flat, was stamping with the Expandable Paint medium. A few weeks ago, I had a stamp-carving frenzy. I love handmade stamps and I always keep some materials to make stamps on hand. At present, I'm mostly using those large erasers that you find in Dollar stores and the many Chinese shops near where I live. At 5in x 2 1/2in, they are a good size for most stamps, and the medium cuts easily and doesn't tend to crumble. These are the stamps I made recently:

I stamped them into my journal, so you can see what they look like. As you can see there are quite a few round ones, because I knew I would need coins and jewels for the journal cover. I also like to do positive-negative stamps, because they are so useful. I carved the top left hand one especially with these coins in mind. It has a tiny skull and crossbones. That's what I say it is, even though two different people have complimented me on doing such a good cow's head! I can only suggest that they obviously haven't looked closely at a cow lately.

A friend told me that, if you use the unmounted rubber stamps, you can actually stamp into the hot glue shapes before they cool down. That might require an extra pair of hands, though I suppose you could reheat a cooled one with the stamp at the ready. She says they must be unmounted, because they have to be flexible to come off the glue blob, once the glue is dry. But I notice that The Craft Curmudgeon on this forum recommends using any rubber stamp and putting the blob and stamp in the fridge or freezer to set. Some people also seem to recommend inking the stamp first, which they suggest makes it less likely to stick permanently to the glue; other say to brush it lightly with vegetable oil first. This suggests you should experiment with your least-loved stamps!

Fimo stamp Part 2

Finally got to try out my Fimo stamp yesterday. I started out with my luscious Lumiere, which, let's face it, makes pretty much anything look good! First I stamped: Well, that's kinda OK. Bit less clear than I'd hoped.

Then I put the paint on with the roller, laid the stamp down and then the fabric over the top and rubbed gently. Kind of reverse stamping. That's much better! (It usually is).

Then I tried using it like a texture plate and taking a rubbing with my delicious metallic oil pastels. Well, the white background is pretty boring but imagine this shiny metallic on a coloured background or on black! The pastels give a great effect - soft like soft pastels or textile crayons but shiny. OK, so I'm a sucker for a bit of sparkle.

So overall, I declare the technique a success. If you want simple shapes you can reproduce over and over, and you aren't confident of your carving skills, this is the way to go, because it isn't any harder than moulding with plasticine. Of course, you have to wait half an hour for it to bake, so if you're an instant gratification person and you want to stamp with the damn thing NOW, it's maybe not so good.

Since I had them there for no particular purpose, I also decided to try stamping with the faces from the commercial mould. These are done with the reverse method, stamp then fabric, and one of them would be much better if I'd remembered to wipe my fingers between stamps, but they actually look quite good too, better than I'd expected.

I wondered to myself how you could actually use them and started playing around with green Setacolor opaque paints - well, with blue and yellow and black, to be precise. I stamped a few faces onto a piece of cloth, and then overstamped with eucalyptus leaves, by painting the leaves and pressing them down, and then finished off with a commercial leaf stencil I've had for a gazillion years (I think you were meant to use it to stencil cute designs around your bathroom walls, yes, it's that old!). As I went, I added little bits of yellow and black to the original green to vary the colour a little. And it looked like this: A little bit cutesy, but I'm thinking with a background wash to take out the white, and some appliqued leaves and texture and some stitch, maybe it would be more than OK? If not, it could always become ATCs, which might look quite interesting with little bits of faces peering out of leaves.

What I also got from the exercise was this: I like it! It's what you get when you lay your leaves on a piece of fabric to run the paint roller over them, to cover them with paint for stamping. I added some more of those ancient leaf stencils at the end. I also got two face moulds that look like this: Cool, huh? I just wiped off the excess paint instead of washing them.

Playing with Fimo

Anyone who comes here often will know that I'm always interested in different ways to make marks on fabric. I'm especially interested in stamping. So I wondered to myself, how hard would it be to make original stamps for textile work from Fimo? You know the stuff, like plasticine that you bake in the oven so it goes hard? It's a variety of polymer clay, made by EberhardFaber - the other main brand is Sculpey.

So last Fibrecircle day, in the absence of any sun for sunprinting,I thought I'd have a try. The answer is that it's incredibly easy to make a small stamp. I made this: The stamp is on the left, the ones on the right are from my friend Carol's mould that she happened to have with her and I'll probably paint them for use in some piece of art sometime.

I didn't worry about putting the clay through a pasta machine or anything sophisticated like that. I smooshed it flat with my hands, and marked out the design freehand with one of the plastic clay-working tools from my $2.99 set. Then I just scraped away the parts I didn't want to print and smoothed out the ridges so that they were reasonably level (by eye). Of course, it was really easy to work, much easier than carving, but I'm not sure I could make a large design this way. Then I baked the piece in my friend Prue's polymer clay oven, about a half hour at 130degC, basically until it was fairly hard. I'll show you how it works as a stamp, next time I have the fabric paints out.

My try at sunprinting is over on the Fibrecircle blog.

Stamps

Thanks to Margaret's blog, I was reminded about string stamps last week. I haven't made them for years, since my kids were young! We're talking about twenty-five years here! So I decided to have a play.

I made these three stamps in about ten minutes.


I found that the easiest method was to rub a blob of PVA glue between finger and thumb and then run the string through it. The string is nice and sticky, but you can use an awl or tweezers or your relatively clean other hand to manipulate it into place on the card.

I made some prints with leftover red paint.

Then I was overwhelmed by the impulse to colour in.
These ones will get a lot more colour than this, over time. I envisage them as iridescent with colour, eventually.