Back to thickened dye

Printing with thickened dye is something that's really interesting me at present. I think it has a lot of potential for me to combine my love of more formal printmaking with my need to work in textiles, rather than printing on paper. I love the way the hand of the fabric is still so soft, and I love the way you can  build up layers of colour in a fairly controlled way.

Well, that's the theory. My latest screen printing play day with Maz was a lot of fun but none of the results are likely to set the world on fire. I did find it instructive, though, which is the point of the exercise.

My first prints were on paper. OK, I know I just said I prefer fabric but remember that I'm also trying to include some tree prints for my Fibrecircle tree journal every time I do anything. I used the screen I created with wax resist back here and added some tree cutouts I've made from cartridge paper.

The results were a bit dubious, because the background was so busy that the tree silhouette tended to get lost. (The tree shape is also rather weird!)

I printed eight of these, thinking I could do different things with them, so I set a couple aside and put the rest in the to-do pile.

While I was doing paper, I tried a print with my oldest screen. It's was originally made by cutting jagged paper strips with scissors but I liked it so much I gave it a coat of resist so it's actually the reverse of the original screen.

It's quite interesting and I like it, though I have no idea what use it might be!

I used the same green on two samples I printed on the same day , the yellow one and the pale orange one.

Not terribly exciting but it's another layer. More to come...

Then I printed a calico bag that I dyed back in 2013. It was a bit boring...

 ... so I decided to add some printing. The first side was OK, though not exciting...

...but the second side wasn't much good, because the screen dried out a bit much between prints. I always forget it does that.

I think it might be quite interesting with some more layers added. We'll see.

Then I took some quilters' muslin fat quarters that I dyed with Maz last time. They were ones I thought were the least interesting. This one was printed with the oldest screen.

It's OK - quite interesting.

These two were printed with the newest screen. The first is OK but needs more to happen to it.

 This one is rather nice - I do like it.

 

As printing days go, I've had better results but it was fun anyway!

A little bit of printing does you good #2

My second lot of printing was a play day with my friend Maz. We decided to do some screen printing with thickened dye, which is something I want to do a lot more of. I've done quite a bit of breakdown printing, which is making patterns with thickened dye on the screen and then printing it with other thickened dye or the thickener, so the pattern slowly breaks down. But I haven't used thickened dye in the same was as I'd use printing inks. Well, it's not the same way, because the consistency is different and the way the colours interact is more like over dyeing. Plenty of opportunity to make a mess..

Before our play day, I decided to  experiment with a product that my friend Kirry gave me. It's called Mask-Ease and you can see it here, as well as a stack of other places, including You Tube demonstrations. Basically, it's a system for putting a solid, reusable resist on a silk screen, without losing those pesky little bits or having to wash the screen for hours to remove it. I kept my design simple on purpose, because my paws don't always behave as they ought and part of the experiment was to see whether this process suited me.  The yellow medium is very soft but I still found cutting the stencil slightly challenging and it took me several sessions. But if you have paws that behave properly, it would be a breeze!

And transferring the image, which had those little fiddly bits was just fantastically easy. The whole process is way easier than most other methods, so I'll certainly use this when I want to print with little fiddly details.

Here's what the Mask-Ease looks like on the screen. (This was actually taken after printing, hence the green tinge to the screen from the dye). The design is repeat in both directions, so I can use it on a large piece of cloth.



 

First, I tried the screen on paper. Printing with thickened dye on paper is never as sharp, as with printing inks or other media, but I wanted to see what the design looked like.                                                                It's a stronger line that I'd usually use but it looks pretty much as I expected, since I was keeping the design simple. The blurriness is just from the dye pooling on the cartridge paper, as it's such a wet medium.

 

OK on to printing fabric. Part of the point of this play day for me was to explore how thickened dyes differ from printing inks. I printed with yellow mixed with the blue from the earlier print. I didn't tape or pin the fabric firmly, as I wanted to break up those areas of strong colour.

 

OK, that worked. But the areas of white bugged me, so I overprinted with yellow using another screen I created back here. It broke up the white but in retrospect, yellow wasn't a good colour to use. That's fine, that's what this is all about...

This will have a whole lot more happening to it, if it's going to be a useful piece of cloth. But then again it may just be a sample to experiment on..

Time was passing all too fast and I wanted to try out my other screen.

I made this one the night before, in front of the TV, using my wax screen resist from Batik Oetoro and a whole lot of bits and pieces like paper doilies, cotton reels, wooden craft shapes and the brush I keep for wax resist. Basically, I just stamped and painted around shapes and filled in with texture, all over the surface of the screen. It was more like we do for breakdown printing, but with the wax resist. Fun!

My first print as designed to be overprinted later, once it was dry, so I printed in yellow.

It's lovely and sharp, so you can really see how the screen looked, but it's fairly pale, of course.

 

For my second print, I added red to half the screen and allowed it to mix randomly with the yellow on the other half. I wanted to see how the colours blended, as this screen would also work for a larger piece of cloth with multiple repeats. I didn't allow myself to get distracted into printing yards of cloth though..

 

The screen was rather wet, by this stage, which makes me feel we need to thicken the medium rather more for this kind of printing. So I did two pulls to dry it out a bit.

 

They turned out as quite good prints too.

 

For my last experiment, I wanted to see what happens if you print wet on wet. You never do this with printing inks, but we've done it with breakdown printing and it goes back to my attempts to understand how dyed colours overlay each other and whether wet on wet is different to over dyeing later, after the first print has batched and been rinsed. First I printed in yellow, so it looked very much like the yellow print above. Then immediately, I moved the screen about 1cm offset and printed in orange. Then I turned the screen 180 degrees and printed in a magenta purple colour.

The colours interacted in interesting ways. Where the yellow and orange met, the yellow acted almost as a resist to the orange, pushing it out to the edges. When I printed with the purple, it turned brown in some places, as I expected, especially where the lines of colour were fine. But the orange and yellow also acted as a resist to the purple in places.While sometimes, the warm colours pushed the purple to the edge of the shape,in others, the purple actually over dyed the yellow. Frankly, it leaves me scratching my head (in a delighted kind of way). I've experienced this before with breakdown printing, with some colours resisting others, but that's such a harum scarum kind of printing process, it's hard to work out which colour is doing what!

 

As experiments go, it was a useful process and will be more so when I overprint the yellow piece and see how that differs. I can see that this kind of printing will be fabulous on my scarves and on large scale cloth prints. But I'm disappointed to see that, unless I get a whole lot better at predicting the interactions, I'm pretty much going to have to stick to printing inks on fabric, when I want a distinct outline in my colour layers and a lot of control.

 

Last of all, just for fun.. Maz brought along various print blocks and linocuts. She inherited this one from Mary Beeston (there's some pretty basic info here but just Google her) and it has seen hard use in its time.

It was one of three similar linocuts that belonged to Mary. I'm not sure what she did with them - images of her work are few and  far between on the net - but it was fun to print from one of her blocks.

 

Maz also brought along a tree stamp, because the girls from Fibrecircle are working on the theme of Trees in our sketchbooks this year. I used it to stamp some trees onto a paper background I'd created when we were drying off the second screen.

OK, that's going in the sketchbook!





Breakdown printing

Tricia and I had some more breakdown printing playdays. Tricia still had her second never-ending screen to print from, and both painted new screens. I wanted to try block printing with the thickened dyes onto fabric as a first layer.

I think I will print over these pieces to see how this influences the pattern.

I also painted two screens:







I used my Indian print blocks to print on this one, building up layers on the screen and letting them dry in between. The layers were very thin, compared to other methods I've used so they dried quite quickly. For the last layer, I used black thickened dye. The screens that have been so reluctant to break down were built up using this layering method, so I expected to produce a screen that would print quite well.









The results were mixed. The initial prints were very interesting but the screen discharged very quickly.







The strongest area of print is in the lower right corner, and it's certainly very interesting. But the dried media broke down very quickly.









My other screen was painted using more usual methods, using sponge brushes, syringes, stamped elements with plastic containers and thick drizzles spread with a comb. These are the techniques they used on the screens that were reluctant to discharge.









However, this screen also discharged very quickly.







The dye was slightly runnier than last time, because they had a problem with the screens clogging up. The humidity was slightly higher as well, and the screens did not sit unprinted for as many days. Clearly, there's a dynamic between all these things, determining the kind of results.









Meanwhile, Tricia was printing from her second never-ending screen.







She printed from it in various colourways.











Even washing the screen out between colours didn't cause it to break down...







...nor did using very runny media. The screen hasn't been washed out, since it's making such lovely patterns. The resist design looks more ragged each time, so it is finally beginning to break down.









Tricia also painted another larger screen.







Like my screens, it broke down quite quickly.











We're producing some beautiful fabrics, though, aren't we?

Three months of play

Wow, three months have flown by without me! I never really enjoy winter and I certainly don’t find it a hugely productive time. Everything just seems harder to achieve at this time of year. Although, it hasn’t been a total waste either.

Since I was last here, I’ve been doing more breakdown printing. I really enjoy this process and I feel I’m getting the hang of it now. These two below show the prepared screen before it was printed and then the resulting fabric, each about 2m x 1.4m.


Painted Screen

This screen was painted with a sponge brush, stamped with various circular objects like cotton reels, cups and circular sections of bubble wrap, and painted with a sponge brush in asterisks. 

Printed Fabric

The fabric really shows the breakdown process, with the distinctive circles being the last elements to break down on the left hand side.

The second screen was painted in uneven coloured stripes and then I drew an overall swirling pattern with a syringe.

Painted Screen

These thick swirls formed a strong resist at first (left hand side) and then began slowly to break down, yielding the same pattern in red. 

Printed fabric

I particularly like these fabrics because the breakdown process is so clear. In each case, the result is a fabric that I can see working well for a quilt, since they are each like three related fabrics.

The above screens broke down pretty much as you’d expect. However, some screens haven’t behaved the way I expected. Several screens simply would not break down, no matter how much we printed from them. I’m not sure if this was a function of moist weather and the consequent slow drying, being dried with a hair dryer, a longer delay between preparing screens and printing, slightly higher levels of urea in the chemical water or, most likely, a weird combination of any of these factors.

These three fabrics were printed from one of these Magic Pudding screens, painted by Tricia Smith. Each is only about ½ metre but I like the way they work together, almost like different colourways in a commercial fabric.

I also printed a silk scarf with a partly exhausted screen, and I absolutely adore the results! It’s become my favourite scarf.

The only disadvantage of the process is that it produces large quantities of printed fabric. My collection of breakdown printed fabrics is now quite extensive and it’s hard to work fast enough to take them a step further, into art pieces. Some are fairly ordinary pieces, so I’m beginning to experiment with discharging some of them. The results so far have been promising - stay tuned for more photos.

Serigraph Monotypes

.. or breakdown printing, if you prefer! My friend Robyn wanted to have a try, so we spent a day playing with dyes and screens at Easter.

This one was a fragment of a cloth we used as a tablecloth under various messy activities at Fibrecircle last year. It began life as off-white quilters' muslin. This part of the tablecloth looked pretty boring, so, before we cut it apart to share, I threw it in the waste dye bucket after an earlier printing session, which turned it pale blue.

Here's how it looks after printing:

It just looks like a tree, in full autumn splendour, with traces of a house behind it. I'd love to pretend that this was an effect I achieved with planning and purpose, but it's basically serendipity! I think it just needs a little painting and maybe some stitch now, don't you?

I have a real problem with acquiring or making samples. I'm trying hard to use them up but I currently have nearly 200 pieces of cloth, of various sizes, all painted, printed or block printed, often more than once. If I use ten a year, that's 20 years' supply! Friends have suggested it's time to weed out my sample folders and toss ones that I can't see myself using. But I hate to do that, not because I'm unable to throw useless things away! Here's why:

This is one of my paint cleanup rags. It was first photographed for my files in mid 2010, which was probably when it first had some colour added to it. I made a patchwork cushion for the Kambra Challenge, with fabric I block printed and I think I used up the leftover colour on this piece of cloth. It was used as a brush-wiper a few times. Then I grabbed it to wipe off a Shiva paintstik and I ended up with blobs of paintstik in the middle. Not very exciting, is it?

Ever the optimist, I drew lines on it with black pen, which made it look a bit more interesting. But it still had that awkward blob of paintstik right in the middle, which was thick and ugly and would not peel off. I thought of tossing it again then, but it just didn't happen.

Then a month or so ago, I was looking for something to use as the basis of a postcard. I realised I could cut six, 6in x 4in postcards from this cloth, and still miss most of the chunky stuff.

The postcards looked pretty boring, when cut apart, so I started painting. I laid down a transparent wash of colour on all of them, using Setacolor paints - some yellow, some green, some blue, just to unify what was there and see what emerged. Then I began to build up layers, mostly with transparent paint but some small areas of opaques. Here's the first one in progress:

I finished it in time to swap with the Fibrecircle girls last meeting.

It's very stylised but I quite like the way it's turned out. I have a couple more in the works from the same piece of fabric, also forest-themed ones.

Now see, if I'd tossed that fabric as useless, I wouldn't have made those postcards. What's a girl to do?

Printing, dyeing, painting...

... and all that lovely fun stuff! That's what I've been doing lately.

I'm really quite enamoured of the breakdown screen printing process. I've set up and printed several screens now and I have some really interesting fabric to show for it.

This one has been printed twice, and also been painted with the dye paints.

This one was printed with the screen after being used to exhaust the dye in an earlier screen, once most of the texture had disappeared. So it had a pink background, and some of the dye on that has acted as a resist to the second print.

For some reason this piece of fabric is narrower at one end than the other - it isn't just my poor photograph!

In this session, I was interested in finding ways to break up the very obvious rectangle of each screen print. I printed with and drizzled over some black dye paint, and I also used a sponge brush to blend some of the hard edges. Dye paint behaves quite differently from fabric paints on fabric and the results seem to be less predictable.

I've also been doing some Eco-dyeing, as dyeing with natural materials seems to be called these days. The results were quite variable, but I did create some gorgeous scarves.

I wrapped celery leaves and grevillea leaves in this silk piece and boiled it in a bucket with Ironbark bark and ferrous sulphate. The photo really doesn't do it justice. I've already hemmed it and it's in my scarf box, waiting for scarf weather.

Here's another dyed with beetroot.

This one is a pink-beige and is absolutely divine too. I have give a couple of others to friends for Christmas, and I have another two that really were nothing much and need to be added to another dye bath to liven them up.

I also made a cover for my handbag sketchbook. I've needed one for a long time, because I tend to throw important pieces of paper into the covers, and it's always falling open in my bag. I wanted something unfussy, not embellished, because embellishments would only get knocked around in my bag, and it had to have a fastener to keep it closed and inside pockets to hold all the essential pieces of paper.

The fabric was sun-printed back in Feb 2009, using paper cut-outs of daisies and clear plastic cups. I painted the flowers with Setacolor paints, making them look more like sunflowers. I'm very happy with how it worked out.

At present, I'm knitting, since it's been so unseasonably cool. I have sewn together my Highland cardigan from last winter and I'm knitting the front band. If it stays cool, I'll do the same for the arty striped cardigan, even though it's a little too warm to be wearing them. It's not quite that cold this summer!

More soon!

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?