Since I missed the printing day this week, today I thought I'd experiment with the things I'd packed to take along.
First, I played with the rolling pin, as seen on the
Threads site. First I tried wrapping the rolling pin in rubber bands.
I spread some textile printing ink on my glass cutting board, rolled the rolling pin in it and printed onto cream quilter's muslin. I repeated this four times, turning the fabric around each time so I began at alternating ends. This is what my print looks like:
Much like I expected. It gives an interesting pattern, but the drawback, not mentioned on the Threads site, is that you only get a clear print for one revolution of the rolling pin (or brayer). If you wanted to print a ripple pattern like this over a length of yardage, such as for dressmaking, you would need to use the normal methods for registration of repeat patterns - a regular mark on the fabric and a corresponding alignment mark on the roller - so the pattern was continuous, or at least contiguous.
I also found a stretchy headband at the local Vinnies shop that I thought might be interesting wrapped around the rolling pin.
The headband was stretched evenly around the rolling pin and held on by rubber bands. I rolled the inked rolling pin diagonally twice across my fabric.
As I'd hoped, it gave a very interesting textural print.
By now the glass plate was drying out but I had some interesting patterns in the remaining ink. I took a monoprint directly from the glass, by laying the fabric over it and rolling it with the brayer.
Very moody! I took a second print, which was much paler.
Then I moved on to the straw placemats I bought at Vinnies.
I wanted to see if the print was any different between laying the fabric over the place mat and rolling the paint on with the brayer or laying fabric paint on the placemat and rolling on the fabric with a dry brayer. Rolling the paint on with the brayer gave me this:
Rolling the paint onto the straw placemat and rolling with the dry brayer from the wrong side of the fabric gave me this:
The difference seems to be that it's easy to overload the brayer with paint with the first method, even when you're trying not to. The pattern is still visible but it's much clearer and more delicate when you take a print from the straw itself.
I had some paint left on the glass plate, so I took a monoprint.
I really like monoprints (even though this one looks like a brown splodge!) because you never quite know what you're going to get.
I also had some Fiskars Texture Plates to play with (thanks, Carol!).
I printed from these by spreading several colours of gouache onto the plate and rolling the fabric on the back with the brayer.
This one had a little too much paint on the plate! The second print from the same paint was better:
It's hard to see how these would be different from inking the plate and using it as a stamp, though! Maybe you have a little more control of the process with the fabric on top.I took a third print, by rubbing the fabric with my fingers from the back rather than using the brayer, so it pressed down a little into the ripples of the plate.
This gave it a softer, more blurred print, with the last of the paint on the plate, which I quite like too. This is possible to do even if you had previously been stamping with the plate.
I can see the plates are going to be fun to play with. I'm not sure I'll bother with rolling pin prints much, though I do like the patterns I made.
This one is two prints from a texture plate.
And here, more printing on paper.
In this one, a piece of grid was used to print.
This one used a mixture of techniques (it's half the piece).
And here is the other half.
This one was her monoprint, from the paint on the tile.
