Hitting the wall.........

It has been a busy year. We came back from our Christmas trip last year in the knowledge that expat life was about to end and that we were lucky enough to be coming home to the UK. Something like our 6th move in 11 years. It took two months for our main shipment to arrive (including all my art materials and fabrics).

We settled into our house, just the two of us only to find our son descend on us from Uni for the summer. Then our daughter came home in October, bringing with her our beautiful grand-daughter, after the breakdown of her relationship. So here was my favourite little person in the house to play with and my textiles sat untouched in my studio (that's the conservatory to everyone else). Then with the colder weather it was too cold to work in there, it had a heater but who on earth can afford to heat a conservatory all day at the moment? Thankfully my lovely husband worked on a Saturday to move all the dining room furniture into the conservatory and all my materials into the dining room.

Enough procrastination yet? No, I had Christmas cards to make. If I had put as much effort into my painting and printing on fabric section as I had those cards, I'd have been onto the manipulating fabric section back in June.

I feel incredibly disappointed in myself. I was actually firing on all cylinders and doing very well I thought. But if I look back at the past 9 months with a fresh eye, I have actually done very little. What did I think I had achieved? And was I pleased with how I had achieved it? In a word, no. I think I thought that I could simply wander through the coursework, picking it up when the mood took me, when I now know that I should have been eating, drinking and sleeping Textiles.

Although I can see that I've done quite a few physical pieces, my sketchbook has been left seriously wanting,  I haven't been particularly vigilant about research either. I'm determined to fix this. I have made the decision to go back to the beginning of the painting and printing on fabric section and work through it, adding and expanding on what I have done already. Obviously Christmas is about to hit and so this next few weeks is going to be busy. I'm not procrastinating! I'll be working on my sketchbook. The sketchbook has been a major stumbling block for me. I have only really sketched to set out some basic designs for my textile projects. I know that I need to fill those sketchbooks with all sorts of things, ideas, fabrics, papers, photos. I bought Kay Greenlees' book 'Creating Sketchbooks for Embroiderers & Textile Artists' back in June and it has been inspirational. Now I just need to pull the proverbial finger out and get down to some hard work.

I'm going to try to sketch something each day for the next couple of weeks and will be putting the results either here or on my tumblr.

Wish me luck!!

Planning for my silk painting attempt using watercolours

I'm waiting on some silk gutta and a frame to be delivered so I thought I'd try my honeycomb and bee out in watercolours to see how that would look. I tried to use similar techniques that I will be using in the silk painting experiments i.e salt to leech colour and using the paint on wet paper. I also used the lino cut of the bee, painted with watercolour to give a brief outline that I could work with.

I'm really pleased with the end result and I'm looking forward to trying this in silk painting.

Project 5 - Printing and Painting on fabric

As a repeatable pattern, I felt that the honeycomb would be easier to achieve - but only as a stepping stone to giving me the confidence and abilities to use more complicated images. However it was actually more challenging than I thought it would be.

I will be trying to fine tune the pattern today - turning it into a repeatable pattern, using a program very similar to Illustrator.

I spent Saturday afternoon carving a print of the honeybee from the original sketch. This was intended as a print cut to break up the honeycomb pattern in places. It printed very differently on paper using printer's ink, a much heavier and intense image, even when there was less ink on the block.

Using a very thin fabric with a satin sheen to it produced a much lighter print of the bee, giving it more texture. If you look at the black stripes, you can see a slightly 'hairy' effect which was not part of the block cut, unlike the cross hatching on the thorax. This was not evident on the paper print but seemed to be entirely a side effect of the fabric paint on the sheen.

Printing and Painting on fabric - fabric

I decided to take a break from the honeycomb pattern, turning again to my sketches of the horse's skull from our visit to Provost Skene's House in Aberdeen. I'm not sure why but the image has really stuck with me and I wanted to see if I could recreate it in lino cut and print.

I'm now using a speedy carve material for my printing. It's a lot easier to cut into although it is easier to make mistakes as well!

black ink on white paper

white fabric paint on black cotton

I am really pleased with how this has transferred onto the fabric. I like how it has changed from being a simple cross section of one of my sketches to a different object altogether. At one point I saw a caterpillar on a leaf and another time, I was thinking of a spine and muscle around the vertebrae. It isn't an image that seems to transfer as a repetitive image but I'm going to be experimenting with that tomorrow.