Always creative

Sometimes, I look back at the things we make and my mind boggles at how varied they are! Between the six of us, we seem to cover most kinds of creative activity. Here's some stuff we've been doing lately:

These cupcakes were made by Carol, and they tasted very good indeed. She's been making Easter cupcakes for Scout fundraising, and we got the benefit!

These roses were made by Bev and her daughter from the pages of an old dictionary, for her daughter's engagement party recently.

Carol is still on a roll with those zippers and Gang Show scraps, making this brooch at one of our recent meetings.

These are more Orizomegami papers, made by Helen with food colouring. The red one has spray gold web, a rare thing these days as everyone hoards the last of their cans!

Here's Tricia's quilt top finished - looking very good!

Recently, Helen gave each of us a kit of fabrics to make a Harlequin Bag. I suspect she might be taking the opportunity to clear out her stash! Tricia made this one...

... and Nola made this one. They are very quick to make and rather sweet.

Nola finished off one pair of her earrings, which we saw in pieces last time.

She was also working on some postcards for future swaps. They came from the one piece of fabric, which had been painted and drawn on, but each one is being individually painted now. In the beginning, they were all the colour of the light one in the centre of the lower row.

Bev has been doing some rust dyeing, with oddments from her Dad's shed. I love how the washers and other bits have yielded such clear outlines.

Bev also brought her breakdown printing.

And here's another piece.

Maz brought along hers too. This one is on organza, so it's very delicate.

Here's a quirky doll that Helen made. Her name is Inga. Isn't she wonderful?

Last year, we did a lot of printing and painting, so we bought some cotton fabric as  drop cloths on our worktables. At the end of the year, we cut them apart and shared them out. Helen brought along one of her pieces, to try to workout what to do with it.

Here's Maz's piece of the cloth. She was printing on it with a round stamp made from furniture protectors - those little rubber shapes you can buy to stop furniture scratching the floor.

Here's Nola's piece of one of the drop cloths. She printed hers using breakdown printing and here's how it looks now:

It's looking very interesting, isn't it?

Bev was using up the last of the transfer dyes, by stamping with the thickened ones onto paper, using her own hand-carved stamps and some Indian woodblocks.

Carol was working on her inkle loom. She was making a sageo, a kind of strap, for her iaito, a blunt Japanese sword used for kata practice, in the style of Japanese martial arts that she follows.

Helen was beginning a new canvas work piece.

Tricia was working on her embroidered landscape, which she brings out and works on every so often. It's really coming together now, isn't it?

She was also pondering border options for her quilt. This was her favoured choice on the day, but it may change again before she finishes.

So as usual, we've been busy in so many different ways. I wonder what we'll see next fortnight?

And some other things we've been doing...

And now, a catch-up of a few others things we've been doing, to round out the year.

Our last challenge of the year was Sunflowers, set by Bev. Carol had begun playing with the idea and was making flowers using her flower loom.  This one was made from yarn:

and this one from paper ribbon:

It's going to be interesting to see where she goes with this.

Nola used her challenge to make a cover for her handbag sketchbook. She wanted something without much embellishment, which would get damaged in the bag. She also wanted it to carry the many pieces of paper that currently live inside the covers of the sketchbook, falling out whenever it's opened.

This is the front cover and here is the back:

The fabric is from our sun printing experiments way back in Feb 2009. The flower shapes were made with a paper cutout, from a photograph she took of Marguerite daisies. The circles were made with plastic cups. Then she painted the flowers to look more like sunflowers.

The button and elastic loop fastening, which keeps it closed in her bag, goes to the back, to avoid having a button on the front image. There are pockets inside each cover.

Bev brought along some gorgeous buttons that she bought at the Victoria and Albert Museum on her trip last year.

Maz brought along a stamp she had been carving. She began it at the ATASDA NSW social day in October.

It's going to give an interesting all over pattern. Stay tuned for some examples, I hope!

Tricia has been branching out into quilt-making. She had some Laurel Burch cat prints, and she's added tone-on-tone fabrics and some wonderful wild ones to make this quilt top.

Isn't it fabulous? And a wonderful first quilt. Her next task is to quilt it, which she hopes to have done before Christmas. I think we've finally got her hooked on quilting!

We meet again in January 2012. I wonder what interesting things we'll find to do in our fifth year?

September block printing

Our September meetings were much smaller, since several members couldn't attend. The remnants decided to keep on block printing for a little longer.

Nola carved these stamps from large erasers. The flower stamp is based on a sketch she made at an exhibition called "The Art of Islam", back in 2005. The cloud motif was a motif she sketched at an exhibition of Chinese art called "Celestial Silks" in 2004. Both exhibitions were held at the Art Gallery of NSW. So it really pays to keep those sketchbooks!

Here is a test print of the flower stamp, with a pair of stamps she made earlier this year.She talked about them on her blog here.

These are some of the stamps she made then.

She had these stamps out  because she planned to use them as part of her Let's Go Geometric challenge piece.She stamped these images on a piece of pre-painted quilter's muslin.

Tricia was also printing.  She laid down some colour with the roller and then added texture with a round cardboard reel.

The shapes on the left of photo above, and in the one below, were made by printing with toe separators.

These were from stamps that Tricia carved. She was very interested in making stamps that could be used to make a repeat pattern, so these were test prints.

Bev was also printing but no photos were taken. So we need photos, Bev!

Bev brought along a postcard in progress. She wove together strips of fabric, including some with hand prints from stamps. Then she began to stitch on the top. Can't wait to see where this goes!

End of August?

We can't imagine how it got to be August already!

Our second meeting in August was a block printing playday. Everyone but Carol decided to decorate fabric using our extensive collection of wooden print blocks and commercial & hand-made stamps.

Carol was busy doing some card weaving, with yarns she'd dyed with food colouring. Here are the yarns:

and here is the weaving:

I love the fresh colours you get with food dyes!

Everyone else was playing around with our combined wood blocks and stamps, using Permaset printing inks.  We used a variety of methods to put colour onto the blocks, and onto the fabric. One method of inking the blocks was to use a plain overhead transparency sheet (not the coated kind for ink jet printers) as the palette. You lay down some inks at the bottom and then roll them up the sheet a little at a time with the brayer to get a tacky surface, before rolling the brayer across the stamp. You get a good coating for the stamp this way, not too thick and blobby but not skimpy either. It's also quite economical on inks, and means that these fast-drying inks don't dry out too quickly. You can also use the brayer itself as a printing medium, once you've run it across the block surface, as a negative version of the block will be left in the remaining ink on the brayer.

 Another method was to use polystyrene trays as palettes, and coat the stamps with a sponge brush. This works well for smaller stamps but leaves brush marks on the larger blocks. This can give interesting effects, but sometimes it's not what you want. Sponge brushes are also very thirsty for ink, and you can waste a lot. You also need to be more careful that the inks don't dry in the brushes before you can wash them clean.

Here is a print from Helen using one of Nola's Indian wooden print blocks.

Helen stamped this one with gold metallic ink. It's very delicate.

Nola also tried stamping with the metallic ink, on a piece of painted cloth, but she also found it very muted.

The metallic ink would be good to over-stamp a coloured print using the same block, which would add gold highlights to the print.

Maz used two different stamps to make a striped design, but once it was dry, she felt it was too regular for what she wanted. So she stamped over the design with a third stamp.

She did the same with this piece, which was stamped with two blocks.

Maz also spent the first part of the day carving a stamp from a block of balsa. The top print here is her test print. She found the balsa tended to split very easily, which wasn't a problem for the kind of block she was carving, but would be very frustrating if you were trying to carve a specific design.

Tricia was also carving balsa. She was aiming to make a block that repeated.

The left print shows the results:

That worked out well! The second print is another stamp she carved previously, without thinking about repeat effects.  The third is one of Nola's print blocks. But blocks don't always have to line up neatly to create in interesting repeat pattern. When she deliberately off-set the prints, the repeat became stronger and more effective.

This is a print by Bev using one of Nola's wood blocks, in which she's working out the registration, to create an overall pattern. The block gives a great all over pattern and the registration (lining up the block elements for repeat prints) is not too difficult.

This is another of Bev's, using a large stamp that gives an interesting all over pattern if you get the registration right, as she has here.

Tricia was also interested in creating all-over patterns using registration. She continued using Nola's print block:

The colour variation comes from laying down two colours on the transparency sheet, without mixing them, and letting the brayer take up both colours on each pass.

 Here's the finished piece. Doesn't it look great?

This piece was made using a string stamp that Nola made a while ago. She glued string to cardboard using PVA glue and allowed it to try thoroughly. She completely coated the cardboard with PVA and mounted it on a wooden block. It wasn't designed as a repeat block, since the beginning and end of the string don't join if the block is printed side by side. But it gives a surprisingly good repeat effect over a piece of cloth painted with Setacolor paint.

Nola was also practising repeats with her newest print block, which has repeat points on the block edges. Although the repeat wasn't perfect, it worked out pretty well.

Tricia continued playing with repeats. Here's an all over-version of the first block on today's blog entry.

And here's the block Nola was using, printed onto chiffon. These print blocks look great stamped onto sheers.

Not all our printing involved us putting paint onto an object and pressing the object onto fabric. We had a pile of texture plates as well, which we printed onto fabric by laying the textured element underneath the fabric and rolling a paint-covered brayer over the top, to pick up the bumps. You can also add the colour to the plate and then lay the fabric on top, and rub with a brayer or spoon.

On this print, Bev used a block with a strong motif and, once it had dried, used a roller over a texture plate to give the motif a textured background. She felt the motifs on their own looked very stark on the cream background, and she likes to create layers and more complexity.

Here's the same motif with a different texture plate underneath.

Not all our printing was done with specialised stamps. This print was made using a piece of rubber non-slip or impact-absorbing mat, which you might buy from a hardware shop, as a texture plate. As you can see, it also gives an interesting all-over print.

Helen made this print as a monotype from her palette...

We all had a piece of cream homespun as a paint rag, because often paint rags give the best patterns. Here's Helen's:

Here's Bev's:

They are going to be very interesting by the time we finish our upcoming painting activities!

Nola was interested in stamping on fabric that already had marks on it. She had several pieces of fabric that had been drawn on with various media in a "graffiti" session. She stamped over the top of these marks using various stamps.

Then she added colour later, to fill in the background:

Another fabric had this star design in fabric crayon:

She added an all over pattern with a wood block

... and then added colour with a brayer.

This is a third graffiti fabric:

and then with colour added:

This piece was an earlier exercise in using resists when painting fabric. Nola cut 1 1/2in squares of freezer paper and ironed them to the cream fabric. Then she painted the fabric using different shades of blue and purple fabric paints, beginning with the lightest shade. As she painted, some of the squares lifted, and were removed, and the paint also bled underneath the squares, blurring most of the lines. As an exercise in resists, it was fairly ordinary, and the fabric ended up very dark and moody. It was also used to test a small area of foil transfer. In our stamping session, Nola stamped over it with window screen mesh and two small stamps, using Supercover White Permaset ink. The white Supercover is opaque, so it really lightened up the piece and gave it a lot more interest. Nola thinks it may be a journal cover one day soon.

Maz brought along her finished Forest piece. She had kept the felted piece whole and used it to make the cover of a book. The pages are handmade paper.

We also swapped postcards this time.
Here's Bev's postcard:

It has a stamped background, from one of our earlier fabric printing sessions, overlaid with a stitched bird. Simple but so effective!
Carol's postcard has tone on tone blue elements added and hand drawn spirals with a silver pen.

Helen's postcard snippets of yarn and fibre trapped under a sheer layer, and stitched. The leaves were lined with Sinamay, a stiffening often used for hats.

Maz's postcard was felted on the embellishing machine.

Nola's postcard was from an earlier playday, when we used paper serviettes to make small art pieces.

Tricia also brought along her first experiments in free motion stitching, from a recent workshop.

This is a clever technique for the drawing challenged!

In September, we plan to do more block printing...