blockprinting

The project I’m working on now in my OCA Textiles 1 course is all about printing and fabric painting techniques. I’ve been carving print blocks from erasers and corks, cutting them from compressed sponge, and impressing them into thermoplastic foam. The paint is acrylic mixed with textile medium.

block prints

I’ve also been experimenting with stencils/masks and silk painting. Just playing and learning. I wish I could spend a bit longer on this but I’ve already extended my deadline once! By next weekend I need to have spent 10 hours designing and printing a short length of fabric for an assignment. It’s a little paradoxical – I’m doing the course to motivate myself, and I know if I weren’t doing it I probably wouldn’t have spent any time this weekend working with fabric and paint. Yet I’m getting frustrated because the time pressure is stopping me from really exploring the techniques.

This was Markal paintsticks brushed over the edges of a heart shaped mask.

masked shapes with Markal

For this sample I sponged colour over hole reinforcement stickers stuck to the fabric, left it to dry, then peeled them off – I’m not sure if I like this effect but I do like the resulting coloured stickers!

sponging over stickers

seeing shapes

OCA Textiles 1 is (obviously) a textile course, but a significant proportion of the exercises involve design work on paper – I’m still not sure what I think about this or whether I’ll continue to work that way – it’s a big change for me since my previous method was basically to get out the materials and see what happened. It feels good, though, to be challenged so fundamentally. I did enjoy this exercise very much – to isolate interesting parts of an image using a frame and represent them, focusing on the shapes.

framed shapes

framed shapes

Draw Something Every Day

doodling

The Draw Something Every Day challenge. This started off with me thinking about pastel colours for an assignment. I saw a big heap of candy coated chocolate eggs on a market stall and started doodling shapes and arrangements for a potential design.

The assignment was to do colour mixing with pastel colours using a pointillist stitch technique in a design derived from an image. I tried to do some painting and drawing in pastel colours using shells and stones and flowers, but there was nothing I wanted to take further. I found it came more naturally to work the colours directly in the stitching in a more abstract way. It is inspired by the candy eggs and the doodles but has taken on a life of its own.

pastel French knots

more French knots and other dots

I hoped I would get a bit more done last week, art-wise, than I did, but there was more work (day job) than I expected (which is good, really) and so in the end I was squeezing the art in around it. I did the machine quilting on the second of three panels for the appliqué assessment in my quilting course, and started on the hand stitching. It’s crazy, really, to be doing large amounts of hand stitching on a project like this when time is short, but I am, because when I decided to do that, it turned from an assessment piece I ‘had to get done’ into something that I feel engaged with and might even want to look at again afterwards.

For OCA Textiles 1, I’m still working on the pointillist stitching exercises. I tried some different stitches…

pointillist stitching

… and then French knots at a different scale, though not (yet) with rope as envisioned by Jude in her comment! This was just tapestry wool on canvas.

pointillist stitching

I enjoyed this exercise, which was to blend pastel colours across a sample. Though I had to scrape the barrel a little to find any pastel colours at all in my thread collection – just a few silks left over from something I made for my niece when she was a baby (she’s practically a teenager now and I don’t seem to have bought any thread you could call pastel since then – a few knitting yarns, that’s all).

blending stitches

The next exercise is to interpret something from my sketchbooks, also in pastel shades, in a pointillist style. Well, a quick glance through them reveals that even when I paint something that looks pastel-ish, I make it stronger or brighter or even a different colour! So I think the next exercise is actually to sit down with my sketchbook and some paint that includes liberal amounts of white, and see how pale and interesting I can be…

painting crockery