Printing with acrylics on paper and fabric

At February's meeting we experimented with printing on paper and fabric using simple shapes. Here are some examples from around the room (in no particular order):

Do bring anything you make from your printed pieces along to a future meeting, we'd love to see them.

Karen

Disappearing blocks at January's meeting

Hi everyone,

Liz showed us how to design 'disappearing blocks' using paper and masking tape at the meeting in January, then we all experimented with some designs. Here are a few examples.

Four-patch block with straight cuts

Four-colour, four-patch blocks (two identical blocks) with diverging cuts and the centre sections swapped

A variation on the last design

This one gives a basket-weave effect (which might be more visible with the right choice of colours and tones)

And finally a nine-patch block (two identical blocks, diagonal cuts and alternate pieces swapped over)

At the next meeting, we will be trying out some simple printing using every day objects. A requirements list will be posted here shortly and also emailed to members of the group.

Please make a comment below if you would like to receive information about the group.

Best wishes

Karen

Making simple books - November's meeting

Eight members of the group met up at Croft in November for a session on making simple books. Julie B led the session and demonstrated the techniques.

We started by practicing mark making on strips of paper. Then did a group exercise, where we made marks on a sheet of paper, then passed it to the next person. Each piece finally ended up back where it started, with marks made by everyone on it.

The strips were then made into little concertina books like these and we learned how to make evenly-spaced folds.

Then we made the other sheets into little 'one sheet' books by folding and cutting. Here are some examples.

And here are some more. The black one has panels from the mark making added after making the book and would be a good way to present small samples.

After lunch, Julie demonstrated two ways to stitch pages into a book. One was created from a single signature stitched along the fold (including the cover) and the other used a Japanese stab stitch binding to join unfolded sheets of paper. Here are examples of both.

Thanks, Julie, for an enjoyable session.

We will next be meeting up after the break in January, when the session will be on designing disappearing patchwork blocks.

Best wishes for the holidays and I hope to see you in the New Year

Karen

Transfer prints from September's meeting

As promised, here is another instalment from the backlog of photos I have taken at recent meetings. This time it is painted papers, printed fabric and stitched pieces produced as a result of September's meeting. Thanks to Ann for leading the session.

Painted papers

Some people ironed their papers onto fabric on the day

Helen and Liz had already stitched into some of their fabric

Thanks for visiting. The next photos will be from October's 'Beyond Celtic' session.

Dyed fabric from July's meeting

Apologies to anyone who has been looking for posts about the group, but you'll be pleased to know I've got lots of photos to share with you. The first ones show some gorgeous pieces of dyed fabric from July's meeting. Thanks to Leah for bringing along the dyes and leading the session.

Notice the lovely orange bag in the middle of this last picture.

I'll post some more in the next few days on the transfer dye session at September's meeting.

Stitched resist from June's meeting

The last meeting was an opportunity for us to prepare fabrics for dyeing in July. I described some techniques that I had been trying and showed my samples, which can be seen below.

I used two different approaches in producing these samples:

* hand or machine stitching, then drawing the fabric up tightly

* dense machine stitching which did not need to be drawn up

The first sample shows hand stitching, in lines, in a block and to outline shapes. The four lines at the bottom are running stitches through one, two, three and four layers of fabric. I used polyester thread double for the stitching.

I started pulling up the threads with the nested squares on the right and I definitely got better as I progressed, because this part did not come out well but the other areas were better.

Here are the results for the parallel lines at the bottom.

And here are the results for the top portion.

I also had a couple of samples using machine stitching, where I had loosened the top thread so I could draw up the stitches. Both used parallel lines of stitching, like this.

This first sample is a bit patchy, the gap is where the thread broke as I tightened it. (I used the same polyester thread as for the hand stitching.)

For the second sample, I used a thicker (quilting) thread in the bobbin, which meant that I didn't have any breakages.

The second approach was something I'd heard about at a show last year and wanted to try for myself. The idea is that stitching will block the dye from fabric covered by a close zigzag or other dense stitch patterns. I tried two stitches in these three samples, in which I pleated the fabric before stitching through all the layers. The stitches are all close zigzag except for the thinner lines in the middle sample which use a stretch stitch. This was an easy way to get a repeat pattern.

The straight lines came out rather faint, but the others worked better. Here are the results.

Finally, I tried stitching a pattern through a layer of fabric on top of wadding. I don't have a picture of the stitching, but here are the results with the wadding on the left and the fabric on the right.

For more ideas, see the blog 'And then we set it on fire', where October 2014 was devoted to stitch resists.

Dabbling with design - May's meeting

Thanks go to Liz for leading last Sunday's meeting on developing designs. We tried a series of exercises:

1. Combining squares of different sizes

2. Distorting block designs

3. Cutting up magazine photos

Here are a few photos of the results.

Thanks to everyone who came along. I hope you enjoyed the meeting.