The sun shone...

...which is a remarkable thing. Every time we plan an outdoor activity here at Fibrecircle, it rains. This time, it was not only the only fine day in the midst of cloudy rainy days but the UV index was high. We expected great things from our sun printing day.

 

Those expectations weren't really realised. We were using some Dala Sun Colours that Jan left for us. I think maybe we didn't understand the best way to use these colours. We used them in the same way as we'd used the Pebeo Soleil back here and here and Carol used the Sun Paint Kit for Kids here, but that may not have been the best method.

 

One strategy was to paint the fabric and then lay plant material over the top. We'd done this before with good results.

 

For her first piece, Yvonne painted the media onto cloth in stripes...

... added some leaves and yarn and put it out in the sun.

 

The results were quite faint, which was pretty typical of many of our prints.

This one from Cindy was about as exciting..

... as was this one from Nola.

Cindy managed this nice one with leaves..

... as did Maz.

Several of us tried overhead transparencies. Initially, we just laid them on but later Nola held hers down on the cloth surface with clamps, to maximise the contact with the cloth, and made sure the cloth was lying completely flat. These are Nola's..

 

The best of these was from Nola, but only because she accidentally put the transparency face down, and some of the ink transferred onto the cloth, which emphasised the faint traces of print.

 Yvonne's transparency print

Maz tried drawing simple shapes on stencil offcuts with a Sharpie pen.

but that wasn't hugely successful either.

The best results were with stencils, though Maz's first one was such a fizzer, she's asked us not to show it here at all! Cindy's was not terribly clear either

This one from Maz was a lot clearer...

 .. but the best of all was her bird.

But then she was using her own inks, not the Dala Sun Colours.

Then in desperation, we tried other things.
 

This one from Yvonne was with salt sprinkled over it and no resist...

... which came out rather nicely.

Cindy just crumpled up her wet cloth and left it to dry in the sun, with surprisingly pretty results.

As printing days go, this didn't really set the world on fire!

However, we haven't give up on these inks. We're going to use them as inks on paper, and maybe on fabric, when we meet next month. That sounds like a fairly safe bet.

Cereal box books - again!

We decided we needed another day to work on our books. Most of us still haven't finished, but it was good to have another day working together.

Nola was still painting pages. Her book cover was made from a Jatz biscuit box, which makes a spine 6.5cm wide. That needs a lot of pages. She's been painting pages every meeting lately!











She also printed some pages from a sheet of ultra-thick paper towel that she's painted with acrylic paints. The paper towel is super thick so it really slurped up the paint but it also printed a lot of pages.

 

 She says these pages will be useful because they have white areas to write on, as well as some colour.

Carol made a cover for her book. She wanted to make a small book with long thin pages and, of course, her trademark glitz.

Maz was working on her book cover.

These books are all going to be a long term project!

Next time, we're going to use some sun dyes that Jan left for us. Let's hope we have a fine day!

Journals - the trees just keep on coming...

Maz's journal pages continue to focus on Australian native trees. This month, she was interested in the large group of distinctive Australian trees, the Eucalypts.

She researched a lot of facts about this class of tree...

 
 

 ... and drew some leaf shapes. The leaves show the variation that's typical of this group of trees. Eucalyptus trees can be tall, single-trunked forest trees or short shrubby and multi-stemmed, like the mallee.

 She also studied the shapes of the fruits and the typical eucalyptus "mist" that forms over eucalyptus forests.

Nola continued to explore tree shapes in art media. This month, she used compressed sponge to make stamps. The stamps were a tree shape, a trunk shape cut from it, and the background shape from which the tree was cut, which yielded a positive and negative image. She printed them with Permaset printing inks.

 
She layered the stamp with different colours and printed ghost prints.

The backgrounds of her pages were created with Inktense pencils and texture plates.

More trees to come..

And some things we've been working on...

Remember Maz was working on a piece for an exhibition in Blayney, back here in January? Here's how it looked when she was finished.

(Sorry, it's not the best photo!)

Here's what she's working on now...

No surprise to learn it's inspired by her tree photos.

Carol was working on postcards for the next couple of months.

 

We're really looking forward to seeing how these turn out!

Postcards

And  yes, our February postcards...

Maz's postcard was inspired by her travels overseas. She printed photos from her travels onto fabric and added stitch.

Cindy's postcard was stencilled with gold Shiva Paintstik, with computer printed organza and machine stitching.

Yvonne collected dress fabrics and organza ribbon and hand stitched them together. Her postcard had a buttonhole stitch edge.

Helen's postcard has machine couched yarn and machine stitching, with a metallic machine stitch edge.

 

Our records show we've made 152 postcards since we first started swapping. Not bad, eh?

Cereal Box Books

Our project for this month has been making cereal box books. Well, some of us are making biscuit box books and other similar objects! We've had the paints out and the glue sticks and generally been having a lot of fun!

The only person to finish her book so far is Helen.

Her book is the B book. It has four sections, Blooms...

 
... with images and this lovely poem about the little white rose of Scotland...

 ...Bugs..

...Birds...

 ...and Butterflies.

Beautiful!

 

More to come...



Journals

Remember how we're working in our journals on the theme of trees this year? Here are our first entries for the year.

The front page of Cindy's book was spray painted through a stencil with Glitz Spritz.

Her first pages focused on bark, from trees she saw on her daily walks. Her photos included the chunky bar of pine trees, the gloriously pattered bark of the Lace Bark Elm, the corky bark of the European Hornbeam, the patchy  bark of the Stewartias and the papery bark of the Paper Bark Maple.

She got interested in bark and bast fibres generally.

Her last pages were a collage of bark from mostly Australian trees like Angophora and Eucalyptus species.

Maz made a cover for her book with a machine stitched tree.

 

 

She was also fascinated with angophora bark. It's not surprising as it's such a beautiful colour! Green Park in Cammeray has a stand of angophora cordata the Sydney Red Gum.



Nola also made a cover for her book, from hand painted cloth.

She wanted to explore the intaglio technique with one of her hand made stamps. She painted the stamp with red acrylic paint, wiped it off the flat surface and painted it with yellow acrylic paint. The left hand page shows the resulting print on dry cartridge paper; the right hand side has prints on wet paper. The paler prints has the yellow acrylic paint diluted, as often using media with different viscosity results in stronger prints.

Carol brought along a cute app she'd found for her IPhone, called Art Tree. It generates randomly shaped trees that change colour. Curiously addictive! You can see it here.