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?

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?