And now we're into June!

Isn't the year flying by? Perhaps it seems faster because we're being so creative lately! Some of us managed a visit to the Sydney Craft and Quilt Fair and were blown away by the work we saw there. Maz had a piece of work on display at the ATASDA stand. The theme was Little Fragment and each work had to fit inside a 25cm (10in) square, and you can see her work here.

Tricia and Nola had some more breakdown printing playdays. Tricia still had her second never-ending screen to print from, and both painted new screens. Nola wanted to try block printing with the thickened dyes onto fabric as a first layer.

She plans to print over these pieces to see how this influences the pattern.

She also painted two screens:

She used her Indian print blocks to print on this one, building up layers on the screen and letting them dry in between. The layers were very thin, compared to other methods she's used so they dried quite quickly. For the last layer, she used black thickened dye. The screens that have been so reluctant to break down were built up using this layering method, so she expected to produce a screen that would print quite well.

The results were mixed. The initial prints were very interesting but the screen discharged very quickly.

The strongest area of print is in the lower right corner, and it's certainly very interesting. But the dried media broke down very quickly. 

Her other screen was painted using more usual methods, using sponge brushes, syringes, stamped elements with plastic containers and thick drizzles spread with a comb. These are the techniques they used on the screens that were reluctant to discharge.

However, this screen also discharged very quickly.

The dye was slightly runnier than last time, because they had a problem with the screens clogging up. The humidity was slightly higher as well, and the screens did not sit unprinted for as many days. A couple of the screens were dried using a hairdryer. Clearly, there's a dynamic between all these things, determining the kind of results.

Meanwhile, Tricia was printing from her second never-ending screen.

She printed from it in various colourways.

Even washing the screen out between colours didn't cause it to break down...

...nor did using very runny media. The screen hasn't  been washed out, since it's making such lovely patterns. The resist design looks more ragged each time, so it is finally beginning to break down.

Tricia also painted another larger screen.

Like Nola's screens, it broke down quite quickly.

They are producing some breautiful fabrics, though, aren't they?

Meanwhile, Bev was creating some interesting effects on paper. She took various leaves from her garden, including eucalypts, oak and other unknown ones. She laid the leaves on paper and steamed them in a bamboo steamer, the kind used in cooking Chinese food. Here's the results:

Aren't they fantastic? Another interesting way of making patterns.

Helen brought along an embroidery she's made, for a challenge in another group, of a puppet soldier. 

Meanwhile, she was working on her triptych.

They're looking good.

Bev brought along her Lost Treasures piece from last year, which as risen to the top of her pile.  It's coming along nicely.

Nola made a visit to the bead shop this week and was making some new earrings.

We also brought along our works-in-progress Fragment sections to share. The group is making a collaborative piece for ATASDA's biannual exhibition at the Palm House in the Sydney Botanic Gardens in August. We cut a photo into sections and each of us is making a work inspired by that section of the photo. The finished works will be 8in square and will be mounted into a cube for exhibition.

This one is Helen's...

(which is finished, of course), and Maz's...

...and Nola's, she's building up layers with applique, stitch and Inktense pencil...

... and Tricia's...

... who's also building up layers with applique, pencil and stitch.

Stay tuned for images of finished works!

Catching up a little

Are we the only ones or is this a very busy time of year? Our meetings have been rather scattered lately, but we have been getting together to share our work and inspire one another.

Helen is the most productive member of our group. Every meeting, she seems to bring along incredibly beautiful and intricate work. She brought along this collaborative work from her embroidery group at Mt Colah.

Each member had a section of an image of the Ian Potter Centre in Melbourne, to inspire their work. The individual members could use all of their section or just a part of it, but all works had to be black, white and grey. All the pieces were mounted along with the original photo for an exhibition. It's not easy to see in the photo but the individual works are hand stitched and have a lot of gorgeous texture. The enforced limitation of the colour palette made all the members focus on the shape and line in their image - a very interesting exercise.

Helen also brought along another work she made, on the theme of Faces.

She enjoys manipulating photographs, so each page of the accordion book has a different face image. Isn't it wonderful? Making self portrait or portrait works can be really daunting and this is such a fun take on the idea.

Helem also brought along a book cover she'd made. One of her groups had a mini workshop on this technique and this is how she used the resulting sample.

They began with washed calico fabric, and bonded tissue to it, using fusible web. The resulting surface was painted with acrylic paints and gesso, so it had a very stiff and textured hand. Helen has added some of her signature rug canvas, stitched with a metallic medium rubbed over the stitching. She added a bead and a thread tassel and stitched it into a book cover. She's not sure if she likes the result, saying, "it's very blue..." but we think it's altogether lovely.

Tricia and Nola had been doing some more breakdown screen printing.  Tricia had a couple of screens that really did not want to discharge, but they continued to give such interesting prints that she was reluctant to clean them off. Here are some of her prints:

These two are very similar bit the colours are more muted in the second one. Tricia was printing with just the thickened medium, in the hope of loosening some of the dried dye on the screen.

In this one, she was spritzing the screen with water, or adding thickened dye directly to the screen, rather than in the well, to try to soften the dry medium. Hasn't it given interesting prints?

Eventually, she gave up on this screen. A few days later, Nola took some prints from the same screen.These three were taken in rapid succession, using different colours.

When you see them together, they look like different colourways of a fabric range.

In later prints, she was adding chemical water to the dyes to try to break down the resistant areas. The resulting prints were very runny, but there are still traces of the pattern.

Finally, Nola scrubbed the screen off, using a soft brush under the high pressure hose.  She was worried it might not come off at all but it did come clean without damaging the screen. It was reassuring to know that resistant screens like this won't automatically need to be resilked.

Tricia made this print with another screen, which was also curiously resistant to breaking down.

We'll see a lot more prints from this screen, as she's printed from it several times and it still hasn't broken down fully.

As always on our second meeting day of the month, we swapped postcards. Here's Tricia's...

...and Helen's...

..isn't it strange, they are quite similar to look at, but they worked independently of each other. Helen's is made of paper; Tricia's is from fabric.  Here's Nola's:

This one was from a paint rag, drawn on and then painted.

And Maz's:

This one used a paper serviette, bonded to fabric.

More from our June meetings soon!

More fun stuff

How on earth did it get to be May already? I'm sure those Time Monks have been stealing our time!

Here at Fibrecircle, we've added a new member; well, not so much a new member, as a regular visitor who's come Down Under for a while longer than usual. Jan brought along a piece she's working on for her home guild. She began with  some pieces of fabric she dyed earlier. She painted primary colours of fibre reactive dyes onto dry fabric to give the lovely rainbow shapes. Then she scrunched the dried fabric around a pole, in the style called "arashi" in shibori , and dyed with activator in a cold black dye bath. You'd think that the pieces would end up very dark, but instead she had these wonderful patterned fabrics with lots of the original colour.

This one looks like palm leaves, doesn't it? She took two of the fabrics and laid them so that they made a symmetrical pattern. It's going to be the background for an illuminated letter.

The letter will be cut from another fabric Jan created. First she did some rust-dyeing using various nails, brads and staples and then dyed it with used teabags.Then she took some fabric inks, thickened with guar gum and dripped them onto the fabric.

 

Can't wait to see how this progresses!

Some of the Fibrecircle girls are working on a collaborative piece at present. One design challenge is how to represent some large purple textured leaves so Jan and Nola used some of these rusted cloths to try some alternatives. They took some fabric inks and thickened them with DR33, a modified guar gum. First they tried laying down a little thickened ink on a Plexiglas plate and taking a monotype from it.

This piece was painted with rice flour and water and left to dry until the surface crackled. Then Jan took some of the fabric ink and worked it into the cracks in the dried flour surface. It made really nice crackle marks where there were large cracks in the surface but, because the ink was very runny and it was hard to work it down into the finer cracks, it simply spread out underneath in some places, so those lines became very blurry. Interesting, though?

Nola also tried painting fabric with rice flour. The second one was painted with rice flour painted over a net, to encourage the crackles to form in specific ways (they did).  When they had dried, they had thickened inks brushed over into the cracks that formed.

It looked promising but, unfortunately, there was no visible pattern on the fabric once the rice flour was removed. It's possible that there were delicate lines that were not visible on the pattern of the fabric, or that the ink colour was too close to the fabric colour. This brand of rice flour, from the health food shop, was much finer than the one from a Chinese grocery that Jan used, so the crackles were finer. The flour paste really didn't adhere to the fabric well and it was hard to keep it on the fabric long enough to get media into the crackles. It's an interesting technique but the product obviously varies a great deal. Some people have found that rice flour sets so solidly that it's difficult to remove, and that certainly wasn't our problem!

Here's a piece of work that Maz made. It's for a ATASDA mini exhibition of 25cm (10in) works at our stand at the Sydney Craft and Quilt Fair in June.

The theme is Little Fragment, in keeping with the Fragment theme of this year's main exhibition at the Palm House, Sydney Botanic Gardens in August. Maz hand-stitched Aramaic letters onto hand made paper and built them up into layers.

 

Meanwhile, Bev went to the ConTextArt Forum in the Blue Mountains near Sydney and took a workshop on Surface Design with Sue Dennis. In the class, she experimented with different media and various ways of putting pattern onto cloth.

 

This one used Shiva PaintStiks to make rubbings from different textured surfaces.

This time, she pleated the fabric randomly and took a monotype from a piece of tablecloth plastic, rollered with a brayer from the back, first in purple, then in yellow. She added a ghost print from the plastic afterwards.

This one is printed directly from feathers.

For this one, she was interested in anything that made a circular pattern - buttons, washers. drawer liner, bubble wrap...

The first layers of leaves on this one were created by sun printing, using actual leaves as the resist.  Then the same leaves were used to print directly on the cloth in two shades.

 Bev was really excited by the workshop, so she went on looking for interesting textures. This one is a dry roller brayed over the back of a platter that held sushi.

 The following two pieces are from the same piece of cloth. First she sun printed the fabric with Dynaflow and then stitched it. Finally it was dry brushed with Lumiere paints, which picked up just the high points.

This part was made into a journal cover.

We've also been swapping postcards. Here's one by Bev. You can probably guess at the techniques she used!

 This one is from Helen...

... and this one is from Nola.

This cloth has a story, which she's shared over on her own blog, Inch by Inch Textiles.

When we met, Helen was working on another rug canvas embroidery. It's part of a triptych she has in mind, so there'll be more to follow.

Maz was making a beadwork bracelet from these beads:

Nola was trying out monotypes for the collaborative work, as part of the background for her piece.

She laid down Permaset paints on a glass plate, laid the cloth down and ran a brayer over the back. It doesn't look like much yet!

Once she'd done a couple of monotypes, she began drawing on one of her "paint rags" with a black pen. It ended up like this:

It will probably be cut apart for postcards, so I guess it will appear here again in some form!