Frosty the snowman
17 Apr 2012 2 Comments
in felt Tags: felt, gourd, Morley College, nuno, velvet, vessels
Back to Morley College today – and time to start thinking about exhibition ideas.
I have a couple of ideas, based around the work I’ve been doing on textures in 3D felt and shells – but I need to hone them down more and focus. I won’t add any more at this stage – just show you what I worked on today.
The first was intended to be a gourd shape, though it looks more like Frosty the snowman! You can’t tell very easily from the picture, but the top sphere is smaller than the bottom sphere. The “waist” needs to be more elongated – so I’m going to try using a single resist next time (this was made with two different circular resists felted together).
The second was a small velvet nuno pot. I used the same technique as for the silk nuno pot – but should have used blue wool, as the white coming through is a bit intrusive. But it’s the first time I’ve successfully managed to felt with velvet, so two cheers for that at least!
Now I’m off to Italy for a few days – hopefully for some warmer weather and good food! Ciao bellas – see you all in a week or so!
Indigo dip dyeing
14 Mar 2012 2 Comments
in dye Tags: dip dyeing, indigo, Morley College
A few weeks ago I tried dip dyeing in the indigo vat at Morley College. To put it bluntly, it was not a huge success. I now know that this was probably because the vat was too strong to get really pale blues – and I was leaving the fabric in too long.
Also, because we are requested to keep the lid on the vat during dyeing to prevent the indigo oxidising, I had to rig up a kind of Heath-Robinson contraption to try to lower the calico into the vat bit by bit over 10 minutes. You can see in the piece on the right in the photo below where the fabric was suspended by the upper corners that never got immersed in the vat!
The piece on the left was dip dyed in my home vat. Because it’s been six days since I started the vat, my kitchen where the vat is kept is very cold, and the vat was very dilute to start with, my test swatch came out very pale, even after one minute.
So I warmed up the vat, added tiny amounts of indigo, hydros and washing soda, and tried the dip dye. Much better!
Blue is (not) the colour
29 Feb 2012 4 Comments
in dye Tags: acid dye, Morley College, wool
Yesterday I took some of my newly cleaned fleece into Morley College to have a go at dyeing it. I was using acid dyes, which I was told came out the colour they appeared (unlike disperse dyes in the heat press, which are always much brighter).
I mixed some scarlet and turquoise dyes to give a deep blackberry colour, added the acid fixer, and mixed them with water in a tea urn. Then I put some fleece in and heated the mixture so that it was hot but not boiling. I left it for 20 minutes, then removed the fleece and rinsed gently in hot water.
To my disappointment, the wool came out salmon pink rather than deep purple – not a colour that appeals to me at all!
A swift consultation with the tutors elicits the explanation that “blue is a difficult colour”. Apparently you have to leave the wool much longer in blue dye for it to work, and even then it can still be problematic.
So I decided to experiment with locks of wool on a smaller scale (a bowl of dye on a hotplate). The photo below shows the effect of using orange, violet and blue to overdye the salmon pink (top row) and on virgin white wool (bottom row).
Even when I left the wool to soak in the blue dye over lunch, the overdyed sample came out with streaks of salmon pink. A bit more work required to crack this, I think!
More screenprinting with shibori
18 Jan 2012 6 Comments
in dye, print Tags: indigo, Morley College, resists, screen printing, shibori, stitch
Yesterday at Morley College I continued with some of the experiments I started at the end of last term, printing with an open screen on fabric that had been stitched, pleated, or folded in some way, based on shibori techniques. I wanted to try some different resist methods as well as experimenting with two colours.
First, I repeated the pleating method I used last term, but with two colours. I started with pale blue and when it had dried shifted the pleats a bit (I also restitched a couple of lines) before overprinting in red. The red wasn’t quite the colour I had in mind: I wanted a deep scarlet, but it turned out more of a claret. Great if you’re a fan of Aston Villa or West Ham, I suppose:
Next up was a piece of linen stitched with circles of different sizes, with the threads pulled tight and tied off. Some of the “puffs” were above the fabric; others were below:
Here’s the result after printing the first colour:
Then I stitched some more circles and printed with a second colour:
I also tried using a piece of cartridge paper as a resist, cutting slits and pulling sections of fabric through. It looked a bit like a mushroom farm:
I did this twice with different colours, but there were still huge gaps. I need to make the slits closer together, repeat it more times, or pull more fabric through:
Then I repeated the pleating experiment but with far more lines of stitching much closer together. I decided to use only one colour on this from the outset, so I chose the darker blue. I love the marks this has created, and I think the red thread I used for the stitching looks really effective, so I’ll probably leave it in rather than removing it:
Finally, as the indigo vat was charged up, I also did a more conventional piece of stitched shibori dyed with indigo:
Quite a busy day, then – no wonder I was completely exhausted when I got home!
New term, new technique
12 Jan 2012 5 Comments
in paper Tags: Morley College, papermaking
It was back to Morley College on Tuesday, and time to learn about papermaking.
Over the Christmas holidays I’ve had a large bucket in my kitchen filled with shredded envelopes and water. To make strong paper you need long fibres, and every time paper is recycled the fibres get shorter. So it’s not a good idea to use paper that’s been recycled before if you want to make your own.
The longer the paper is soaked, the better, especially if it’s thicker, like brown paper. Apparently it can start to smell after a while, so you can add a couple of drops of bleach if this happens. However, mine didn’t smell at all, even after soaking for a week, though I did have a lid on my bucket.
To take the paper into college, I took a handful, squeezed it into a ball to get rid of the excess water, and put it in a plastic bag. Then it was off to Morley with a bag of soggy balls!
At college, we soaked the balls in hot water to loosen them, and then put a small handful in an ordinary liquidiser with a lot of water and blended for 15-20 seconds. We filled a deep tray – a (clean!) cat litter tray is ideal – with water and added some pulp. Then we agitated the mixture, dipped in a screen and lifted it up vertically so that a layer of pulp settled on the top.
We put this face down on a damp J-cloth on top of a damp blanket, and gently pressed with a sponge to mop up the excess water. After this we peeled off the screen carefully from one corner, and – voilà - a sheet of paper!
We then folded over the top half of the J-cloth so that the paper was completely enclosed, and put another J-cloth on top to make the next sheet. At the end, we squeezed out all the excess water using a Victorian screw press.
Because the paper is very fragile when wet, we had to take the J-cloths home and peg them out to dry before unpeeling them to reveal the finished paper. So we have to wait until next week to see how everyone’s samples turned out – very exciting!
But here is a sneak preview of some of my samples, with various inclusions such as yarn, paper, eggshells, muslin, and raffia.
The paper pulps were all different colours, depending on the mix of coloured paper and envelopes people had used. Mine was pale lilac; one of the other student’s looked like beetroot soup!
The finished paper looks very different when it is dry. When wet, it is much more translucent, so if you want to items that you have embedded to show when it is dry, it’s best to scrape off some of the pulp while it’s wet.
I think it will be really interesting stitching into some of these samples to add further texture, though I’m not sure how robust they are. More to come on this, I suspect!
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