November: Other things we're doing

Helen was working on this embroidery this month. Gorgeous!

 

Carol was making temari balls. Incredibly intricate...

Jan's skirt front

Jan was wearing the skirt she made from dyed samples from her indigo dyeing adventures at Haystack in Maine.

Jan's skirt back

Here's a beautiful bag that Helen made for a friend. Lucky friend!

Helen's  bag front

Helen's bag back

Helen's bag open

And last of all, Helen bought this bag  at a recent exhibition at Woy Woy. It was made for a challenge called Present for a Spanish Princess.

 



Double the fun!

The Fibrecircle girls have been busy creating lately, both in the group and elsewhere. Our first October meeting was crammed full of creative energy and two different activities.
Tricia brought show and tell from the dyeing workshop she did at Virginia Farm Woolworks last weekend. She had some fantastic cotton squares, which she thinks will be perfect for a quilt. They really are a short primer of ways to tie fabric for Shibori dyeing.

1. fabric wrapped around a CD
2. twisted from edges with object in middle
3. bobby pins strategically placed
4. twisted in circular motion from the centre, keeping it flat
5. wrapped around another CD, corners fan-folded
6. fan-folded from corners, then bobby pinned and tied in the centre

7. concertina fold and clamped between tongue depressors
8. marbles tied with string
9. stones tied with string
10. scrunched up and tied
11. stitching with tied corners
12. clouding - pole-wrapped and tied 

13. Tied with string in clusters
14. concertina one way and then the other, then tied
15. Large piece showing clouding
16. Pole-wrapped diagonally
17. wrapped length of plastic chain
18. pole-wrapped, scrunched and pushed along the pole

Maz brought along samples from her week-long workshop with Marie-Therese Wisniowski at Fibre Arts and Hunters Hill last week. Marie Therese was teaching a method of transfer printing she calls Multisperse Dye Sublimation. The result is visually complex art textile pieces on man-made fabrics. Maz's samples show some of the possibilities of the technique.

1. Sample of the transfer printing, repeat of the print, light colours first
2. as above
3. multiple layers on delustered satin, using plant material as resist
4. colour sample on synthetic chiffon
5. sample on synthetic lace
6. two pieces – one on ordinary satin – Maz wasn’t happy but Marie-Therese suggested printing again onto organza as an overlay

7. reverse layering – dark to light – on delustered satin
8. Printed using plant materials, moving the plants with each colour to create shadows
9. printing without laying down a background colour first, and moving the objects to create shadows
10. multiple print – paper stencils, some reversed, and line drawing on transfer paper
11. postcard size pieces using different techniques she’d learnt

During the week, Maz won a raffle, and this was the prize – a large piece of printed silk fabric by Els van Baarle.  This is just a section of the fabric, as it's way too big to take the whole.

Isn't it just gorgeous? We all wanted to sneak it into our bags! Helen brought along two bags she’d made since our last time together. This first one uses fabric that we printed last month. She cut the fabrics into strips and wove them together into a piece of fabric. She also made her own braid by stitching over yarn on the machine, and used it to embellish the front.

The other bag used a piece of monoprinted fabric, embellished with appliqué, stitching and beads.

It was also time for the unveiling of our latest challenge works, on the theme, Let’s Go Geometric. Maz’s unfinished Geometric piece is worked on rug canvas with embroidery threads. She’s not sure where it will go next, perhaps a book cover.

Nola’s Geometric piece was also unfinished, but is almost there. She’s making a dice pot for gaming, using fabric she painted earlier and then block printed a couple of weeks ago.

This is the lid, which needs to have a rim added.

These are the sides of the pot, individually stamped with hand-carved stamp motifs.

Bev’s Geometric is also unfinished. It’s inspired by the windows of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, and is made from snippets of fabric trapped between layers of silk organza. You can see her sketchbook with sketches for the work, along with the piece itself. 

Helen is the only one to finish her challenge (no surprises there!). But she surprised us by producing two challenges. The first one is this notebook cover from embroidered rug canvas.

Here's the whole cover.

But she said that she thought we would all expect her to make her challenge from rug canvas, and that wouldn‘t be a challenge, so she decided to do another one. The second one is a concertina book, with pockets containing different geometric patterns.

The side with the pockets..

The other side...

Then it was time to start work.

Carol wasn’t participating in the activities this time, so she was busy preparing craft for her Joeys Scout group. She was making flowers from egg cartons, as samples for the kids to follow.

Our first activity was to prepare screens for some deconstructed screen printing/breakdown printing. In this method, printing screens are used to create a series of similar-bur different prints, unlike traditional serigraphy (screen printing), which aims to produce identical images over multiple prints. Basically, thickened dye is added to the screens in a pattern, and allowed to dry thoroughly. When the screens are printed with the thickening agent or some more thickened dyes, the dry material is slowly softened and dissolved from the screen. Thicker areas of dye paint take longer to break down and act as a resist. The result is usually complex layers of colour.
Before everyone arrived, Nola had prepared some Drimarene K dyes, mixed with urea and DR33, a thickening agent. We were using several different methods to put colour onto the screens. This screen was laid over a texture plate and several pieces of bubble wrap, and printed with a squeegee in the usual screen printing method. The texture of the materials underneath was reproduced on the screen and allowed to dry.

This screen was painted from the back in several layers. The first layer was a wash of turquoise, from when the dye paints were made up. It was allowed to dry overnight, and then further dye paint was added in different thicknesses, using a sponge brush. The thicker areas were imprinted with pieces of bubble wrap and texture plates, which were left on the surface while the screen dried. Some puddles of dye paint were drawn out into spikes with a comb, and small black lines were added with a syringe.

This screen was built up during the morning, by painting on the back. It had dye paint applied thickly and then two pieces of string were laid down in a random pattern, then a small piece of  bubble wrap, a piece of road guard plastic and more bubble wrap. This screen took a long time to dry, because the bubble wrap tended to trap the moisture.

We’ll show you the printing results after our next meeting!
The second activity was laminating fabric. This process transfers an image from newsprint or similar lightweight paper onto a layer of sheer synthetic fabric, using gel medium. First, the image was laid down on the back cloth, and then the organza or similar fabric was taped firmly down on top. Gel medium was added to the surface, fairly thickly but without soaking the paper. The layers were set outside to dry.

Once they are thoroughly dry, they need to be heat set with an iron for about 10 minutes. Then the fabric is placed in a bucket of warm water for about twenty minutes, to soften the paper. The paper is removed by scrubbing with the fingers and then with a dish scourer, leaving the image behind. Some paper residue usually remains, so the images are usually slightly cloudy and mysterious. They show up well overlaid over strongly toned fabric. We’ll show you the results of that next time, too!

A quiet day in July

We had a quiet day for our second July meeting. It was a day when it was hard to get motivated and some people were haunted by gremlins! But we did have some work to show for our day together.

Maz did an ATASDA workshop with Felicity Clarke on the use of her embellishing machine,  in mid July and she brought along the samples she'd made. In this one, they used the embellisher to create a motif in fibres on a felt background.

This sample shows different techniques to make a heart shape. They look very effective mounted together like this.

This one has various yarns and strips of fabric embellished onto felt.

This one uses various kinds of fabric.

Then they were encouraged to try out some of the techniques they'd learned, using some of the materials to hand.

This one has woven felt as the base

This one uses different fibres and ribbons, onto a sheer fabric.

Maz doesn't have any immediate plans to use these samples. They're more for inspiration when she's using her embellisher.

Carol was busy making a bag for her Japanese martial arts equipment. She decided buying a bag was boring, and she could make one that was much more interesting!

She investigated Japanese symbolism before deciding on the motifs she wanted to stitch in Sashiko on her bag.

Nola was working on her Forest challenge. She took one of her painted cloths, which she'd drawn on after painting. It looked like this:

She painted it with Setacolor paints and by the end of the day it looked like this:

I wonder where she's going with this?

Maz was also working on her Forest challenge:

No surprise that she's been working on it with her embellisher! Hopefully we'll see more at the unveiling next meeting.

Back together again!

Today was our first full meeting after the holidays and the unveiling of our first Challenge, The Language of Threads, set by Maz before Christmas. Four members had works to share.
Helen showed us her completed bag, called Threads of India.
 

The embroidery was done on rug canvas, which was stiffened with pelmet vilene and assembled with calico and braid into a bag. The colours were inspired  by a photograph of dye workers in India.

Carol's Language of Threads piece is called Treasure Islands. She hasn't quite finished it yet.

She began with a felt background, and hand couched hand spun and threads and then machine embroidered. Like most shiny things, it's hard to photograph well, but it looks wonderful.

Maz showed her piece, Impressions, which is also not yet finished.

It's made using fabric lamination of newspaper images and text onto synthetic organza, using matte medium  as the adhesive. If you enlarge the photo, you can see the stitching she's adding, which  gives a lovely rich texture.

Beverley's challenge used her own hand-carved blocks. She carved a positive and negative version of the same image, and stamped it onto different fabrics. She pieced a background from two fabrics and is mounting her images on that background. Some images are a single layer, with frayed edges, while others have been lined. She is adding running stitches, French knots and other embroidery in Perle thread.

We had a perennial visitor to our group this time. Janet Bass from Pittsburgh was making her annual visit to Australia and came to join us. Her task today was to crochet a breast shape from strips of plastic bags, for a future installation planned by a fellow artist.

Here she is crocheting away, with Maz hard at work beside her. Maz was working on a small piece that may become a postcard to swap.

Beverley brought along some little embroidered fragments she has been making. She used an adhesive to hold the elements in place while she stitched them, and used Solvy as the stabiliser.

 Helen was working on another rug canvas piece.

It's very soft and pretty in colour - can't wait to see it finished!

Tricia brought some beautiful roving to spin. Helen was happy to help her manage it, though it did look as if she had plans to make away with it. She does have rather more of it than Tricia, doesn't she?

Tricia is keeping a firm grip on the end, though!



Nola was busy with her orphan blocks project. From leftover quilt blocks and units of different sizes, she's making twelve inch blocks for a quilt top.

Here are some of the blocks she's made already. Today, she was converting a 5 1/2in finished Log Cabin block into a 12in block, by adding double borders - 1 1/2in finished borders with corner posts and 1 3/4in finished pieced strip borders, like the ones in the top right hand block.

Our next Challenge was chosen by Carol. She has set us the task of making a work on the theme of Lost Treasures, to be shared at our first April meeting. So many possibilities! Meanwhile, we're busy making postcards to swap for our next meeting in two weeks' time.