'On the Shelf' Three

My three day course at City Lit last month was ‘Monoprint on Paper and Fabric’ non-traditional applique and hand stitch. The course tutor was Amarjeet Nandhra   who now runs the Windsor Textile School; we had a laugh when I took in some photos of her some sixteen years ago when we were completing City and Guilds Embroidery part two together at Great Missenden Abbey.

We used binder and pigments to work with on a base of acetate sheet; I have not used pigments and binder before and am still wondering about the outlay for these new materials compared to acrylic paint and textile medium. Any opinions on this would be welcome. We worked on a mixture of papers including brown and tracing paper, and fine and medium weight cotton poplin.

The left hand side of this piece is fabric and the right is tracing paper.The middle folded section is paper. You can get a better  idea if you click to enlarge the image.

 Paper,tracing paper and fabric.

It was good to use hand stitch, but of course always tempting to go in with the sewing machine. One of the best parts of the course was seeing other peoples’ work and having show and tell sessions built in. It is always nice to be in the company of people who have similar interests, and to see how different and individual results can be. The worst part was definitely travelling into London three days in a row, especially as trains were horrendously delayed on the first day. One person used insertion stitch, which I have not used since my final piece for C&G’s, and it really appealed, I have stored the idea away.

 Monoprint on fine fabric.

 Monoprint on drawing paper and brown paper.

Monoprint on fine fabric.

For my sample pieces I worked on adding texture, and layering paper and fabric.The sample below was much too busy and I learned a good deal from inserting the blue bottle shape.

Monoprint

I am not currently signed up for Design Matters TV  but no doubt I will join again in the future as I enjoy the stimulation of their weekly videos. I wanted to let you know that at the moment they have just added two extra free videos to advertise what they offer. The two new ones happen to be two of my favourites from past weeks, one is about monoprinting on fabric and the other is showing an easy way to wax papers. You may enjoy them. I was reminded of a technique for monoprinting designs onto fabric and had a go with my rabbit sketch.

I used a piece of fabric which had been dyed and one which I had rusted.

I then added some handwriting.

Playing around I added an extra rabbit to the photograph;this could now be transferred to fabric using TAP. 

Endless possibilities.

Just messing.

Just messing about with this drawing from my bones and fancying doing some stitching, I decided to colour one of the monoprints using Ink Tense crayons.

I can’t say it was altogether successful, but fun to do and interesting to see what resulted.

Here is a link which my son gave me to an artist who does amazing paintings, you can see his fascinating process here.

Life Drawing and Monoprints

Over the next academic year I am going to attend two workshops a term at a local college, a ‘Creative Textile’ workshop. I think the idea is mainly to concentrate on design work and it will be good to work with other people. It is a local education college so, at the moment, relatively cheap compared to some of the London courses. I have also signed up for a short course on’ getting to know your DSLR’ camera, which hopefully will leave me less confused.

Back to the course, we are asked to produce a summer sketchbook with a hundred ‘sketches’ which has a wide definition including photos and stitch. So it’s likely that you will be seeing some of the pages here.

At my last life drawing class we did some contour drawing and some monoprinting, both of which were really enjoyable. These are some of the monprints I made at home using water based printing inks. Some on magazine pages.

I have just organized a morning workshop on Transfer Paints for a mother and two daughters. They were v. enthusiastic, which was nice, but I must say that I feel tired out now. I think it may be time for a cup of tea!