And now it's March!

We've all been very busy lately, for some reason. Three of us were involved in organising the next travelling suitcase exhibition for ATASDA - see the web page, for more details. Many of us faced various life challenges that kept us away from the blog. But we were still meeting and doing things together and some of us even managed to get some creative time.

One thing we've been playing with lately is transfer printing. This is a fun technique you can use to print onto man-made fibres, using Polysol dyes. Basically, you paint, print or otherwise get colour and/or texture onto ordinary printer paper. When it's dry, you iron it onto the fabric, using just the paper or various resists and cut-outs. Anything that you lay down between the paper and the fabric acts as a resist. You can usually use the papers multiple times before they're exhausted. It's a good idea to lay down baking paper (or parchment paper) to protect your ironing board from stray bits of colour, which will transfer to any man-made fibres next time you're ironing. It's also a good idea to use a layer of baking paper between your iron and the transfer paper, for the same reason.

Here's some papers that Nola painted in one of our sessions:

You can see that's she's added texture in some places, by folding, pleating or crumpling the paper, painting on lines and other elements with the dye or adding salt crystals to the wet sheet. Sometimes, not all the sheet has been painted, which adds shape to the fabric designs when it's printed.

Here's one she printed using freehand cutout paper shapes as a resist:  

The cut-outs picked up dye from the first print so they could be used as dyeing elements in their own right. Nola printed with them onto satin fabric with crystal organza overlaid on the same fabric. The shapes bled a little around the outside, yielding an outline of the shape on the organza.  



Crystal organza overlay with bleeding edges

We also used a lot of plants from the garden. Here's one Tricia did with parsley as a resist, ironing quite heavily...

... and another using dianella seed heads.

Dianellas are grass-like plants, generally known as flax lilies, and these particular ones are native to Australia. The seed heads had marvellous delicate swirly shapes that attracted us at once for transfer printing. We also used daisy leaves, lemongrass seed heads, celery, rosemary leaves and photinea leaves.

Here's one from Nola using multiple layers and photinea leaves.

She laid down a background using a yellow paper. She laid over the photinea leaves and printed with a blue paper sheet, which had random patterns marked into it during painting. Then she moved the leaves a little and ironed again with an older paper sheet that had a magenta ripple effect, rather like a tree shape, in the centre. This method of multiple layers gives the most interesting effects.

Here are some more of Tricia's pieces: 

Yellow background, dianella seed heads and lemongrass seeds as resist with blue

Yellow background, then resists of celery leaves and dianella seed heads, overprinted with magenta

Yellow fabric, lemon-           Yellow with daisy leaf, blue        Yellow background,

grass seed heads with            with dianella seed heads            blue with daisy leaf

blue, dianella  seed heads

with magenta             

These ones are Nola's:

Another interesting feature of transfer printing is using commercial papers. Many man-made fibres are printed commercially using this method and, once the image begins to fade, the papers are sold as wrapping paper. This is like a heavy-weight tissue paper, usually with rather dull-coloured images. Nola had two of these papers to experiment with, one of dolphins...

...and one of leaves.

The second image here has been printed over a first print of yellow. Aren't the colours different?

(More photos to come from the other girls!)

We bought our Polysol dyes from Batik Oetoro. The trick with this technique seems to be to use an iron that is as hot as the fabric will stand. Using baking paper between your iron and the paper and fabric allows you to use a higher heat that you might usually do with man-made fibres. Like so many of these techniques, it's just a case of experimenting until you get something you like.

February already!

Good grief, in the words of Charlie Brown. It's February already! Fibrecircle met again for the third time this year, again with a smaller number than usual.

One of our plans for 2012 involves bringing along some of our many "backgrounds" - pieces of fabric that we've dyed, painted, printed and otherwise altered - to discuss that we can do with them. Helen brought along a clean-up cloth that she'd like to use in some way.

We all agreed that it really needed the white background coloured in some way, perhaps with dyes or inks. It's quite a large piece of fabric, larger than you'd need for a book cover, for example. One idea we had was to make it into a handbag, gathered into a plain band and with plain handles. What do you think? What you do thik she should do with a piece of fabric like this?

Helen also brought along some really striking glass beads that a family member brought back from Jerusalem. They're chunky and quirky, and probably quite fragile.

Helen was working on a piece of canvas embroidery - no surprises there! This one will be a book cover, which she thinks she might sell. Like all her work, it's beautiful.

Nola was painting the Zentangle that Toni Valentine drew at the ATASDA Christmas party in 2011. Members drew on the "tablecloths", which were cut up and shared around. The challenge is to make something for the March meeting.

Bev was working on a piece for an exhibition. It involves postcards, but we can't say more. You'll see the finished work in due course.

Carol was knitting the slippers that she was working on back here. She's really made some progress on these lately.

We decided to play with marbling with shaving cream. You layer shaving cream into a container and drizzle over thinned acrylic paints. Here are Nola and Bev using syringes and spoons to drizzle the paint.

You lay the fabric over the surface and gently pat it onto the colour. Pull the fabric off, with a layer of shaving cream and colour, and set it aside for a little while. Scrape off the excess shaving cream and the colours stay on the fabric.

Then we tried it with transfer paints, which are a kind of dye.

 

We realised after the event that transfer paints only transfer to man-made fibres, so we thought perhaps these ones might not adhere. But they coped fine with initial washing, although they lost some colour. It's always worth trying these things!

Until next time...

January - aren't summer holidays wonderful?

January often passes in a blur for many Aussies. I guess we feel the same way about it as northern hemisphere people feel about July. Holiday season, and not much gets done in the studio, even when the weather is as unreliable as it's been this year. It certainly hasn't been good weather for dyeing or deconstructed screen printing or many other creative activities!

Here at Fibrecircle, we've been in holiday mode too. We have met together, with a much smaller group, as people came and went, but we haven't really been in creative mode. This week, most of us were lolling about, reading creative books and gathering ideas for the coming year. Sounds like last time, doesn't it?

Helen was busy, of course, though at one stage, she had her sewing in one hand and a book in the other. Multitasking, she called it. Here's what she was sewing, when she had both hands on the job!

This is a gorgeous rich purple - it was quite hard to photograph well.

She also brought along her embroidered jacket, which was her major work for last year for an embroidery group she belongs to. We last talked about it here. Now you can see the finished garment!

It really is beautiful. The background fabric is a warm wool, so it's quite warm to wear.

Maz was working on her tile for the upcoming travelling suitcase exhibition from ATASDA, which will go on the road in late March 2012. The title is Marrakesh and, in addition to the main works on the theme, it will have many of these small works, inspired by Moroccan tiles, made from a kit of materials. They'll be attached together with buttons and loops to form panels for hanging. You can see more about the exhibition here. The works haven't all arrived yet, but we hope to have some photos on the web page shortly after they do. Meanwhile, here's Maz's tile in progress:

As usual, on our second meeting of the month, we swap postcards. Nola had been making a postcard but she didn't like the way it was going. So she spent the day making another one, from a piece she'd started previously. It's another in the Bush Road series, of manipulated photographs. The original photos was adapted using a design program, printed onto fabric, drawn on, painted and embroidered, before being backed with fusible Vilene and fabric. She edged it with a hand picot stitch.

Helen's postcard relates to one of the works she's made for the Marrakesh exhibition, inspired by Moroccan tile work. The typical eight-pointed star of Arabic architecture really lends itself to canvas work, her favourite embroidery style. The centre star is very strongly textured, as are the blue bars on either side of the central motif. Click on the image for a better look!

See you next month!

Happy New Year

Today was our first meeting for the year. We were a small group, because many of us are still on holidays. We didn't do very much today - it was a hot muggy day, ideal for lazing about, reading textile books. We had Isobel Hall's Embroidered Books and Janet Edmonds' From Print to Stitch. Plenty of inspiration there!

However, we haven't been idle since you last heard from us! Helen was working on an embroidery in shades of blue, but it's not ready for photography yet. I'm sure you'll see it soon! She also brought along her finished Sunflowers challenge from last year. It's a gorgeous piece of embroidery, filled with a stone to give it weight.

Isn't it luscious? It's like  a field of sunflowers distilled down to the essence.

Maz made a piece of art cloth as a gift. She began by folding and twisting the fabric, holding it together with elastic bands for the first dye bath.

The first dye bath was yellow. Then she added some areas of stitching and bundled it up again as before.

Then the cloth was dyed with red with a little rubinole.

Then she screen printed squares, and stencilled, and drew marks on the cloth. She felt the dark screen-printed squares were too strong, so she did not heat set them for the full 10 minutes, but only half as long. Finally she dyed the cloth again, in a blue dye wash, to unify  it. When she rinsed, some of the dark colour of the squares also washed out, as she'd hoped, revealing the marks underneath from the earlier dye runs.

Here's the finished cloth:

...and here's some detail shots.

Maz said, "This was my first attempt at a piece of cloth and the recipient liked it, so that was good."  I bet she did!

Nola was working on a piece of cloth, one of her "paint rags", that she began drawing on some while ago. Here's what it looked like when she began today:

and here's how it looked when she stopped:

It had been painted with Setacolor paints and drawn on with black Sharpie pens and fabric pens. Today, she drew on it with the new Sharpie fabric pens called Stained. They are a little strange to use since they have a soft brush point, meant to be something like a paint brush. It's an odd choice for fabric pens. Nola wasn't very happy with them, since the black pen bled on fabric in the same way as the usual Sharpies can do, the pink and orange were fluro and the yellow is actually an acid green. After playing with the pens for a while, she changed over to colouring with Inktense pencils to add some flat colour, which she brushed with water. It will be interesting to see where she goes with this.

More in a 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?

Deconstructed screen printing #2

As promised, here are the other deconstructed screen printing/breakdown printing pieces.

Maz wasn't very happy with hers, so she didn't pursue it very much this time. It came out rather blacker than she had hoped. I really like it, though!

The fabric is sheer, which made the print look quite different. The process would be fantastic for silk scarves!

Nola has several other breakdown printing sessions. Here is one she printed and then dyed here in our earlier session:

It's been printed over with another screen, on a very humid day, so the colour came off the screen quite quickly. The best fabrics seem to come from repeat prints, building up complex layers of pattern.

One of the things Nola was interested in, during this session, was blurring the obvious edge of screen lines. She brushed over the edges with a dry sponge brush, drizzled dye paint on in places and encouraged stripes of black to form during the printing, to break up the regular rectangular effects of repeat screens.

This one was printed using the same screen, on the same day, over the very pink piece. This fabric was initially printed by spritzing a screen with very little pattern but a lot of dye paint, with water, in the same earlier session.

This print was the last from this screen, which exhausted very quickly. Again, she added black highlights and brushed with foam brushes to break down the distinct edge lines. As the screen was becoming exhausted, there were obvious areas that remained unprinted, so the original wet print effects were not obscured. Some areas of that printing resisted the additional dye paint while other areas absorbed it, so this method of making a background has a lot of possibilities.

She still had dye paints needing to be used up, so she experimented with different ways of making marks with the dye paints. They are very different from fabric paints, due to the texture of the DR33, and the results seemed to be less predictable than using fabric paints, in keeping with the unpredictability of the screening process.

The last fabric printed had already been dyed turquoise in the waste bucket of the second session. Nola was experimenting with stamping, using commercial texture plates. The effect was very subtle, as she used turquoise dye paint, and the intention is to reprint this fabric with a other screen, to see how much the texture print resists the screen pattern.

I don't think this is the last breakdown printing you'll see in this group!

Dyeing with natural materials

Last Fibrecircle session, we decided to try dyeing with materials we found in our local areas and gardens. This kind of dyeing, often known as eco-dyeing, seems to be wildly in fashion at the moment and we wanted to see what kind of results we could get.

We bought wool voile and silk voile to experiment with, as these fabrics take this kind of dyeing well. For days beforehand, we collected leaves, bark and other natural materials from our gardens and local area. Tricia set up several pots, each with a different plant material boiling in it. We also used other plant elements, folded and wrapped inside our cloth , to add extra colour in the different dye baths. Once the plant  material in the pots had boiled for an hour or two, we added various mordants to the pot and allowed them to boil further. Finally, we added our folded and wrapped fabrics to the pots and allowed them to boil some more. At the end of the day, we took home our bundles and allowed them to batch in  plastic bags for a further 24 hours, before rinsing them.

Nola cut her fabric into six scarf-sized strips, three silk, three wool.

Her first silk piece had celery leaves, rosemary sprigs and leaves of a Grevillea, folded into it, and was dyed in a pot of beetroot. This one has more texture than colour, but it's really quite lovely. It was rolled from one end, giving an ombre kind of effect, as the many layers acted as a resist to the dye. The celery leaves don't seem to have acted much at all.

Her second piece was wool, with photinea leaves and polygala flowers, concertinaed and wrapped, and dyed in a carrot bucket with alum and cream of tartar added as a mordant. The pot looked very pale, so the fabrics were left in the pot as it cooled. The red photinea leaves and purple polygala flowers didn't leave any markings in the cloth, although they did act as a resist to add subtle pattern.

Her third piece was also wool, with Grevillea rosmarinifolia leaves and red onion skins, rolled and tied between pieces of wood. It was dyed in a bucket with rhubarb leaves and alum.

The red onion skins yielded red-brown markings, and the grevillea, green.This one is quite strongly-coloured, more than the picture indicates.

The fourth one was silk, with Cootamundra wattle (Acacia baileyana) leaves and flowers concertinaed in the folds. The wattle was picked when it was flowering and frozen for a couple of months. This one was also dyed in the rhubarb and alum bucket. The wattle gave faint blue-grey markings.

The best one was a piece of silk, with celery, rosemary and bottlebrush (Callistemon citrinus) concertinaed and clamped, and dyed in a bucket of Ironbark (Eucalyptus sideroxylon) bark, using ferrous sulphate as a mordant. The celery left faint traces of lime green, which are hard to see in the photo, and the other plants seem to have acted as a resist.

Nola's last piece was wool, with thyme sprigs and prunus leaves, dyed in dandelion tea and alum. The prunus made splotchy marks, while the thyme gave very subtle texture. The thyme was a complete pain to wash out, though, so we don't really recommend it!

Helen was unwell, but she sent two silk scarves to dye.

The first one was knotted and dyed in ironbark bark and ferrous sulphate, like Nola's.
Her second one was also knotted and dyed in rhubarb leaves with an alum mordant.

Bev dyed three pieces of wool voile.

The first one had prunus leaves tucked inside the folds, and then was dyed in a bucket with ironbark leaves and twigs, and a copper sulphate mordant. The prunus leaves give a very intense red-brown colour, especially with a copper mordant.

Her second piece used wattle flowers in a red onion skin and alum bath. The vibrant colour seems to have come mostly from the wattle, as it was colouring the fabric even before it went into the bath. The flowers were frozen, so this seems to have been a similar effect to what India Flint calls "ice flower dyeing". If flowers are frozen, then placed in a warm water bath, the colour can come out immediately, and with the addition of mordant, can dye fabric. It was quite a warm day, so the flowers defrosted as we were using them.

Bev's third piece was dyed in a bath with an unknown bark, possible Brush Box or similar, with alum. The bark was collected by one of Helen's friends, so we have no idea what it was.

Tricia did a lot more dyeing, because she had the dye pots set up so she continued dyeing in the week after our meeting. This is her favourite. It was folded and clamped, then dyed in a bath of red onion skins and alum.

The first one here is really unusual. The blue came from red cabbage leaves, folded inside the layers, and the bundle was dyed in rhubarb with alum as the mordant.

The next one was dyed with red onion skins and polygala flowers inside the folds, in the beetroot bath, no mordant.

This one had gum leaves and prunus leaves, clamped, in the ironbark and copper sulphate bath.

This is one of several that were double-dyed. It was dyed first in dandelion tea, then later tied and placed in reboiled ironbark leaves, copper sulphate and alum.

This silk one was also double-dyed. First, it was dyed in ironbark leaves and copper sulphate. Then, pieces of bark from the Ironbark bark bath were wrapped in the folds and it was left in the cool bath overnight.

This first piece went in the ferrous and ironbark pot.

This one was also double-dyed, first in dandelion tea and, later, clamped and added to the reboiled ironbark leaves, with copper sulphate and alum.

This one had prunus leaves folded into it and was boiled in the ironbark and copper sulphate pot.

In this one, you can clearly see the outlines of the gum leaves, folded and clamped, and it was put into the reboiled ironbark leaves, copper sulphate and alum.

Things we concluded:
Celery seems to be very variable. Sometimes it yields a lovely lime green; other times it is barely visible at all. There are probably more reliable sources of green.

Wattle flowers are worth collecting, in season, and freezing.

Ironbark is very intense and gave a deep dark colour very quickly after boiling.

Polygala flowers have an intense purple colour but don't dye anything. We decided to try them later as ice flower dyeing, to see if that encourages some of the colour to transfer, but we're not hopeful. It's a shame - it's a beautiful colour, but one thing is obvious, in all the books about eco-dyeing - the colour of the plant is not a good guide to the colour it may produce in dyeing, and strong aroma or oils are a better indication of dye capability than intensity of colour.

A far better capacity to recognise tree species, especially Eucalypts, than we currently possess would be a huge asset in dyeing with Australian flora. Our education in this area is increasing in leaps and bounds!