Too hot to handle

Finally a fairly catastrophe free week... a week full of screen printing at college learning discharge techniques - all of which produce interesting effects - take up loads of time and energy and don't particularly appeal to me!  I think it about practicing and finding the right colours and images, I have dyed a lot of fabric this week and I quite enjoy the process but I cant get the colours right - I cant get the depth of colour I want in the cotton fabrics and I'm loathe to use expensive silks until I either know what I'm doing or can get colours right!!!

drying dyeing - but more colour but still not deep!!!

I've had a further play with heat transfer printing and continue to be amazed at the colour transformation from paper to material.  Using an A1 sheet of paper I mish mashed a load of greens and blues and threw in a bit of bleach to lighten some of the tones - I swirled it about using a big brush and then dried it off with a hair drier - the ended result looked very dark and I wasn't sure but I decided to print it on a piece of voile - and see what would happen.   Heat transfer can only used with synthetic materials and up to now I really tried to only work with natural fabrics so  heat transfer stuff is quite new to me - I was joyfully astounded at the resulting fabric that emerged too hot to handle from the A1 heat press...  glorious technicolor - brilliant hues and gleaming colour!!!!

heat transfer cats waiting to be trimmed and stitched

Emboldened by some degree of success finally with dying fabric - getting some deep tones I decided to experiment with painting some images using heat transfer paints and also to take some advice from a group crit we had earlier in the week and go 'large'.  I drew two giant cats using the special pen (available from Wilkos) that disappears when heated and then filled them in with the paints.  Again they lacked any depth and the colours looked flat and uninspiring but I was hopeful that they would rise to the heat press and so they did!   The colours are very vibrant - the pictures are quite naive, it has a childish appeal - looks a bit bonkers - in the words of my tutor... I have bonda webbed them onto the vivid green background and done a little bit of outline stitching on the sewing machine using black thread.  Its a work in progress and more of an experiment in colour then anything else... I always get a bit colour deficient while collating black and white line drawings....

too christmasy for me...

We also investigated alternative embellishment - looking at inventive ways to add embroidery and detail to fashion and gift items.  We had a demo where cocktail stirrers, plastic cups - charity shop necklaces were all recycled and transformed into decorative swatches - I had a go with fake grass wire and some beads - it was interesting but too Christmasy for me!  I also messed about with wool and some coconut beads but I think this is the kind of thing that come as inspiration - i.e. you see something and think yes that would embellish.  I wandered around several shops looking for such inspiration but it never really came - I shall bide my time and see what emerges.  In the mean time its more playing with fabric dyeing and discharging colour

not keen but its all about experimenting..