Lamination results

So here's what happened. I had a bit of a rethink about the content when my dear heart suggested that the Venetian door might look interesting surrounded by flowers. My mind immediately jumped to my most favourite book in the world, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. For those of you who don't know it, it is the story of Mary, a lonely little girl, orphaned by cholera in Colonial India, who is sent "home" to her Uncle's house in England. Home is a forbidding Yorkshire mansion, Misselthwaite Manor, full of secrets and strange cryings in the night from behind closed doors. Here, another lonely little boy, Colin, is cooped up in an upstairs room because he is an "invalid". Mary discovers him, unbeknownst to the adults and, having been spoilt herself, has no truck with his spoilt ways, ignoring the tantrums and his determination that he is dying. She also discovers a walled garden in the grounds of the Manor house, locked away behind an old, ivy covered door, in which no one has been since the Colin's mother died. Mary finds her way into the garden, and takes Colin there because she is sure it holds a Magic, which will make him well. Gradually, with the help of local boy Dickon, who has a skill and instinct for all growing things, they weed and plant, prune and sow seeds, laugh and play and, as the garden comes back to life, so the children flourish. Eventually Mary's uncle, Colin's father, returns from abroad, where he has been wandering, deep in mourning for his lost wife. He walks out into the grounds of the Manor, to discover sounds of laughter from behind the high walls of the garden, and his son full of life and joy, racing through the door, with Mary not far behind him. 

So, I took some text from the book, my worn Venetian door and some images of flowers from our garden and combined them to produce this - with apologes for the poor quality of the images - the iPad just isn't as good as a proper camera.

Here it is shown laid against white fabric, and below, some of the spare bits put together without much thought just to see what happened. Because the matte medium goes on through a textured screen you end up with a broken image, hence the white showing through the voile.

I think I may be able to work with these, adding embroidery and embellishment to enhance the images. However, I do prefer the lamination laid over some of my previously dyed fabrics, the white shining though the voile is too stark a contrast, dark fabric underneath makes the image look ghostly, whereas here the colours blend together and might become something rather nice. I might try dying a piece of fabric specifcally to get the right colours behind the differing elements of the image but, as a trial, this gives me some ideas.

I've taken elements of the text in the book to give a hint of the story, focusing on the key points. The broken nature of the image means that some of the text is lost, but I think I can reinstate it with stitch to make the story clear.

We also did some laminating onto solid fabric - a similar technique, except you apply the matte medium to the fabric and the surface of the image, rather than through a screen and the layer of voile. This was a hurried amalgam of a picture of a beautiful diamond leaded window in a church in Suffolk, and some images taken from old herbals. I cut the images up and recombined to make a patchwork of stained glass, plants and words. Very fiddly as the individual bits of paper have to be taped together on the back to hold them all as one piece. Once dried and heat set, as with the voile, you soak the whole thing in a bucket of water, then rub away at the back of the paper until only the images from the front are left. Obviously I had to reverse anything with words on them so they came out the right way round. 

Perhaps a grid of black ribbon and some additional stitch might give me a rather nice panel for a cushion cover or some such. It may take a while though, back to work on Monday, so don't expect a fininshed article for a while, or perhaps several whiles!

The danger of blogs

I love wandering round other people's blogs, there are just so many creative people out there, doing their thing, making beauty in the world and sharing it generously with the rest of us.

BUT, they are dangerous. Having returned home from a lovely workshop with Christine today, I came to my computer to add an album to my digital collection, by the band Rising Appalachia, discovered in one of Terri's always inspiring series of posts Tunes for a Monday Morning. I thought I'd "just browse" for a bit while waiting for the CD to add itself to my PC. Seven or eight blogs later, having met Els's wonderful sheep, caught up with Jude and Judy, admired some lovely stitched forget - me - nots, dropped by Penny's daily scratchings and drifted though several other creative places, I realise that I have wandered around the world, but also have run out of natural light to photograph my experiments from today, so they will have to wait I'm afraid. I also haven't confessed to my purchases at the Knitting and Stitching Show yesterday, for how could I go all that way to London and come back without something to add to the creativity store? It was a lovely day, always a delight to spend some time with darling daughter.And now I must run off to watch the latest Battles on The Voice - a pleasure I can't resist - more people sharing the beauty they make with the world, or at least with those of us who love the programme :-)

A workshop to look forward to

I'm going to a workshop at Studio 11 at the end of this week, another try at paper lamination. I had a go in 2013 but was a bit dubious about the results. You can click on them to see a bigger version

The technique involves placing coloured magazine or toner printed images under fine poly/silk voile, then screening acrylic matte medium onto the top of the voile through a patterned screen. Where the medium comes through the screen it penetrates the voile to the images below. You set the medium by ironing, immerse the whole lot in water so that the back of the paper gets soggy, turn over the voile and peel all of the back of the paper off so you are just left with the coloured image; the texture reflecting whatever pattern was in the screen. Looking back at these now I can see that I left far too much space between the images. I've seen other students working with this technique during my Friday sessions - one of the many pleasures of going there, as you get to see people using all sorts of techniques.

So, this time I am a bit forewarned. I'm hoping to do something with some of the pictures I took in Venice when my dear heart and I visited 11 years ago this month. It is a wonderful place, so full of light, texture, rich colours and a myriad of interesting things to look at. I'll print out some of my photos and, using the image below as a focal point, see if I can create something that echoes both the worn and historic textures I saw there and the marvellous byzantine enamels and mosaics in St Mark's.

I was entranced by the special atmosphere there, the richly decorated churches, the colours of the walls reflected in the canals. In particular, we were struck by the complete absence of traffic noise because, of course, there is no road traffic at all.

Here are some of the images I hope to use, somehow. All very experimental, but at least I have a vague idea of what I'm doing this time.

I might also take a copy of this along

Dad as a young boy of around 12 - and this

Mum and Dad together in happy times during a family picnic.
My darling Dad died when I was seven; he was only 44. It would be good to do something with these images, but I have no idea what. Christine might help though, as she has done a series of works about her father and his loss of memory, so has experience of working with personal imagery like this. This one is particularly lovely I think.

However, before all this happens, my lovely girl and I are going here - on Friday. There may be have to be confessons of a retail nature!

Starting and finishing

As these bits of embroidery should be seen from the back and the front, I have no muslin to hide threads behind. One way of doing this is with an "away knot"; you bring the thread through from front to back some distance (at least a needle's length) away from where you start, begin with a small back stitch to secure, then weave the waste thread in once you've finished. As this fabric has a good even weave, and is quite firm, I am lacing the tail end through the very top thread of the weave on the back, where it will be over stitched, then taking the securing stitch. It will save me time and the end result is the same.

Finishing off

The tacking thread shows me the perimeters of the space I'm filling in each quadrant. I've divided the space up in a similar way to some of the carpet pages in manuscripts like Kells and Lindisfarne. I'm quite nervous about all this, truth be told, there are so many fine needle women in the guild, who have been members for many years. I hope my stitching is up to scratch! There has been unpicking already!

Auditioning

I am away from work at the moment, on doctors orders. This gives me some time to nurse the daily hurts that come with having Fybromyalgia and a connective tissue disorder, which leave me feeling drained and exhausted. I don't talk about my health much here, it seems too much like an indulgence, and is only part of who I am. However, I reached a point where I simply had to stop. This allows me to do things at my own pace, to rest when I need to and to take a focused course of Ibuprofen to try and help my body to heal itself. I feel like a convalescent, but the positive side is that I have time to work on a stitch project our Branch Chairman has suggested, a sort of stitch dictionary. We chose two bits of fabric and a piece of folded paper on which was writ our stitch - in my case, blanket stitch. One is to work the stitch in as many variants as possible, using a variety of threads and pushing the stitch to see where it will go. The second bit of fabric is to create an image, using the threads and stitches.

The first task, of course, is to audition threads. I tried a varity, the brief being to use as many different weights and types of thread, and to push the stitch as far as it will go. There were a number that didn't work

This little twist of greens (from Cecil's stash), while full of lovely textures, moves the colour range too far away from "neutrals" which was the brief

likewise, the yellow/orange is, too far away from the initial range. 

So here is what I came up with

the darker piece of fabric will be my test bed, the rosy coloured one I'm keeping for the image. This is my excuse for moving the colours towards the rusty and ruddy, which blend with the darker fabric as well. I have a few ideas for an image, but nothing firm yet. I'm waiting to see what the stitch can do and what it says to me.

Here's what happened

a little late in posting because I had to be at home at a time when there was natural light to get the colours right. Here's the piece I showed you in full before I popped it into the dye bucket. It's roughly a yard wide.

It reminds me a little of sunset clouds over the sea - OK that takes a bit of imagination, but if you stand back, squint a bit, and think of mackerel skies, it kind of works. I'm very happy with the way the patterns of the shibori stitching flow with the orange streaks, they zig zag across the cloth without being too insistent. Some of the colours really zing out and when you look at it close up, as with all shibori, you get lovely shapes and accidental images. All part of the technique, not my cleverness I must add.

And the piece I wrapped around the pole? This one is smaller, around 21 inches wide.

A sort of mandala, that spins and dances on the fabric. The plastic capping at the end didn't work, but I think that's OK as it would have left an uninteresting splodge of white in the centre. Again, the colours have gone very zingy in places, which I like, but might not be to some people's taste.

Of course the eternal question that Aunt Cecil always asks is "but what it it for Kath? What are you going to do with it?"

To which I reply, it's for learning ... rather like life I always think.

Shibori experiments

A lovely New Year treat at Studio 11, despite waking up with a horrible migraine. One of my focuses this year is to pursue Shibori further and I thought it would add some interest to use one of the pieces of fabric I dyed two years ago in the Colour Fun workshop that was my introduction to the pleasures of working with dyes and fabrics. So I took this piece, which was a tray dyed bit of cotton, rippled across diagonally then dyed with a variety of reds, rusts and the odd spot of purple and green

I folded it concertina style

loosely tacked the folds down at each edge, then stitched diagonals across the folded fabric, running the stitching in the same direction as the marks on the fabric

my plan to pull all the stitching up and overdye with another colour. But what colour I wondered? After discussion with Christine, who has a marvelous sense of colour, I decided on a mixture of petrol green with a touch of indigo, colours across the colour wheel from the ones already here, in other words, complimentary, rather than analogous.

I also did a small bit of pole wrapped fabric, not the usual pole wrapping which involves spiraling a single layer of fabric around a pole, wrapping thread round in another spiral, then compressing it all by sliding the fabric and thread to the bottom of the pole. This creates lovely rippling patterns, but I wanted to try for a mandala effect.

I placed the pole vertically at the centre of the fabric, drew the fabric up around the pole and taped that firmly while I wound thread in a spiral. I tied a piece of plastic over the end of the pole, intending to create a bright heart, with the pattern radiating out from the centre.

How did they turn out? I'll let you know when they come out of the washing machine.

I also did some work on the breakdown printing for which I dyed a family of fabrics earlier