Skills for Making - it up as you go along

pink with silver foil and beaded detail on cotton

Its my hand day for the Skills for Making module next week, and as usual I am just starting to feel the love for it and ideas are starting to emerge for making it work!!! Its been quite a 'problem solving' module with all sorts of different challenges throw up. To start with I didn't quite get the drawing selection right - but nothing ventured nothing gained - this time it didn't quite work - I loved all the drawings independently but  not so much together.  But.... having selected them I persevered and then found the scanner wouldn't scan them 'squarely' for want of a term - next time I'll just use photoshop from the outset but I really wanted this to be a more 'organic ' experience ( not that I'm scared of photoshop haha ). This little hiccup meant the layers didn't sit properly and while it was frustrating it did give me the chance to experiment with different placings and  I did learn quite a bit about skewing and stretching the drawings.

Then the fabric fiasco - I had picked summer colours and its winter!!! No suitable fabrics to be sourced at any price - I went to all the usual places and then less usual cheap shops to look for cheap garments to chop up and then did the rounds of the charity shops but the fabric I imagined I wanted was just plain elusive!!!  So the original colour palate kinda went out of the window - but I'll use it another time - I settled on using black fabric.  Hard on the eyes to work with, but I wanted to use natural fibres so found some nice cotton velvet and plain black cotton and printed on them.

silver foil on black cotton velvet with beaded detail

My main aim with this module was to upskill my screen printing techniques and this was definitely achieved and I had great fun learning how to set screens up, mixing paints and printing.

After quite a bit of faffing about masking off overbusy bits of the screen positives and lots of dummy runs on calico I got some nice clean prints and some good textures and while I was originally stuck for how to move on and into embellishment as I stated, the ideas, with less then a week to go are starting to flow.....

As well as embroidery as featured in earlier postings beading detail is playing a large part - as are foiling papers, while I haven't really achieved the gaudy  South Asian look I was originally looking for, I have managed some vibrant colourful pieces.  (Because the pieces are foiled they haven't photographed that well on my kitchen table),  Its been an exercise in going with the flow and seeing how different strategies work out under certain time constraints.