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?

Things I've done this year...

This blog is always way behind, because so much of what I do creatively ends up on the Fibrecircle blog. That's not all I create, of course, but managing two blogs does take rather more time than one.

So what have I done this year? I finished a blouse for my daughter but photos of clothes look nothing much lying flat and she hasn't posed for a photo (nor is likely to, really!) So you'll have to take my word for that one.

I finished all the blocks for my Dutchman's Puzzle quilt, including the half and quarter blocks for the sides, since the blocks will be laid out on point. This may not sound like a huge achievement, until you realise that that these blocks were from a swap with my library co-workers back in the 1990's. I blogged about here about twelve months ago. Here's where I mention that I hand piece my quilts these days, mostly as an end-of-day therapy, and hand quilt them too. I realised that one of the things I enjoy about quilting is the meditative process of putting a needle through cloth and that I wasn't enjoying spending all my time at the sewing machine. I sew clothes by machine, and machine embellish and assemble things I make, and that's plenty of time on the machine. 

My plan with these blocks is to sash them, so I'll make a template for the sashing and contemplate whether I want to use one fabric or many for the sashing. In the meantime, I'm making more 6in Prosperity blocks for my grandson's quilt. I have a nice pile of them but I think they'll be set on the square, so I'll need a lot more yet.

I've also made a pair of earrings  and have two other pairs in the making. I'm a real sucker for earrings and, while I don't yet have a different pair to wear every day of the year, I'm working on it! These ones are inspired by in a book called Making Vintage Accessories, using lace as an element. As I had some genuine elderly lace (if it isn't quite vintage), bought when my daughter was a baby, I thought I'd play with some of it.

I painted the lace elements to suit some feature beads I bought a couple of years ago.

I've assembled one pair and even worn them! Aren't they so girly? The lace is silver, which was hard to photograph well.

I also made a little bag. Helen from Fibrecircle gave each of us a kit of fabric and some instructions. I suspect a sinister plan on her part to be rid of some of her stash, an idea I have stored away myself! It's a cute little bag, with a ring closure.

I've been busy all the time this year, sometimes creatively and much more on administration for the new ATASDA travelling suitcase exhibition, which is now on the road. My friend Maz and I decorated one of the suitcases this time, and here it is drying on the floor.

The design was inspired by a desert flower called Apteranthes europaea, common in Morocco, and other parts of North Africa. It used to be known as Caralluma europaea, so the suitcase is called Cara for short. Both suitcases are now on the road and can be booked on marrakesh@atasda.org.au.

I've also made two postcards and I'm currently painting a couple more, played with transfer printing, done some shaving cream marbling, painted quite a lot of fabric in different ways, dyed fabric and done some serigraphy monotypes, also known as deconstructed screen printing or breakdown screen printing. Most of that is over on the Fibrecircle blog, and you'll have to wait for the rest!

Why this shopping bag was a dumb idea...

Remember back here and here in 2009, when I was weaving plastic to make a shopping bag? I did say at the time it was "like a crazy woman" and indeed, it was.

First, here's the reason why I'm talking about this project again. I finally added handles to the bag and sewed down the top hem.

Such a small thing, but there are Reasons why this project has languished for more than two years.

First, the details. I decided to use the same yarn for the handles, so I wove the straps using pencil weaving. Some people call this finger weaving, but it gets confused a lot with finger knitting, which is basically crochet without a hook.  Pencil weaving is an actual woven process and it's incredibly easy to manage. Unlike inkle loom weaving, it doesn't require anything that you don't already have in your house.

I tied about a dozen strands of yarn about 60cm long to my pencil. You can butterfly or tie up the loose ends until you need then, and that stops you getting tangled up as you go along. You need to use an even number of strands, and for this reason, a lot of instructions suggest cutting double lengths and attaching them to the pencil with a clove hitch in the centre of the length. Take the first strand on the right and weave it under and over the adjacent strands until you reach the other side. Repeat this process. As you go, you'll realise that the pencil is actually on the diagonal. Keep weaving until your strand is long enough or you run out of yarn. Tie all the strands together firmly, with an overhand knot. Slide the loops from the pencil and tie an overhand knot at that end.

You can make all different patterns using this method, just as you can with inkle loom weaving. I knew my weaving would be folded over, so there wasn't a lot of point in making complex patterns that wouldn't be visible. Here are the woven straps:

The handles I wove had one problem. As it's a diagonal weave, the handles stretched when I put tension on them. That's not entirely desirable in a handle on a bag that will hold heavy stuff, like shopping, so I knew I had to back them or support them in some way. I took some cord straps that I'd saved from another shopping bag. They were rather like short shoe laces. I machine stitched across the ends of the weaving, so it wouldn't unravel, folded the finger weaving around the cords and stitched it in place with blanket stitch, using the same yarn as the weaving.

Then I machine stitched the handles to the inside of the bag, at the same time as sewing the top hem down. Then I hand stitched both sides of the handles to the bag, for extra strength.

OK, so why was this a dumb idea?

Well, this kind of weaving works just fine with supermarket bags, which are soft and a little stretchy. The green plastic from cherry packaging that I used in one layer of the weaving worked fine, as it was soft and made a good woven fabric with the yarn warp. The other plastic, from the shopping bags from chain stores that we don't tend to reuse as bags, were too stiff to weave nicely and had incredibly sharp edges, when cut.

The result was a weave that doesn't have much structural integrity. Oh, and hands ripped to ribbons by the sharp edges! They really aren't suitable for this kind of project, which is frustrating. Part of the purpose of the project was to reuse plastic materials like this that normally get thrown out and this clearly isn't the way to do that.

I went ahead and assembled the bag anyway, but I probably ought to have stitched the weaving to the lining and then made the bag, as the lining is the main thing giving the bag some strength. I suspect that the plastic will cut the yarn warp threads fairly quickly, once the bag starts being used. I've already mentioned the stretchy handles, though that was easy to remedy and used other recycled materials. But I wouldn't say the bag is a huge success. So it languished in my workroom for all this time, since it hardly seemed worthwhile finishing it. It's finished because I just want to clear stuff like this out of my workroom, and out of my head!

However, it is finished.

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?

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...

Treasures

I've been too busy and too crook to blog much lately. I have managed to achieve a few things, though.
I finished my Lost Treasures journal cover for the Fibrecircle challenge. It seemed to be one of those projects that generated interruptions. As soon as I would begin work, the phone or doorbell would ring and that would be that! But now it's finished and I'm very happy with it.

I've also been knitting madly. No photos yet, but I have finished knitting my daughter a duffle cost, and I've almost finished blocking it, which seems to have taken as long as the knitting! Once I do that, I can sew it together and take a photo before I give it to her. I've also almost finished my long cardigan in Bendigo Woollen Mills' Highland yarn. Just have to finish the second front and the back. I was knitting them in tandem to be sure I had enough yarn. I seem to have had plenty, even though it's quite a long cardigan.

I've also made some postcards:

Major work, it isn't, but it's enough for now!