Fibre arts

Today's session was a good extension on what we had been doing previously. We looked largely at transferring, and I spent a good deal of time working on using transferable wax crayons on paper and using a press to transfer the wax colours from paper onto the fabric. The results were surprisingly good, at least on the artificial fabrics, where the colour transferred very cleanly and smoothly, almost loosing no detail in the texture.

Above are the wax on paper originals, with lettering done in reverse on the first example so that lettering comes out in the right direction on the print. With these pieces, there wasn't much attachment in my mind to the notion of using sewing objects as inspiration, and I decided I would rather pursue a different direction. I decided to use a stencil and reproduce my date of birth, tying the work at least superficially to myself in a direct manner. I then used other elements of the stencil to create solid lines and blocks, and using the underside of buttons to create reproductions of the four holes, in turn creating a pattern of these. I tried to keep the colour usage minimal, so as to be high contrast and to work blue shapes around red numbers, and vice versa. This was actually the second plate I produced, the first one being the second image above - which is mostly freehand drawing with button relief, and where I started experimenting with the pattern of the four dots from the underside of buttons.

Not the best quality image but good enough to show that the colour and detail has not been lost in transferring from  paper to fabric, and the reversal of the image has produced the numbers in the correct orientation. Further prints from the plate became weaker as the wax was transferred repeatedly.

The first plate as transferred onto organic fibres, resulting in a more washed out, less distinct transferring.  Other attempts at transferring onto organic fibres were less successful than this one.

Further work still needs to be done with transferring, as I did not have time to use ink transferring.

We were also shown how to use bondaweb to bind fabrics together, and continuing on with the motif I used earlier with my date of birth, I created a sort of collage piece using bondaweb and a selection of different fabrics, and using the sewing machine to link fabrics together solidly. I also rolled up a piece of gauze tightly and sewed through it on the machine straight onto the fabric, an then chopped at it with scissors to created a rough effect but with the material still tightly bound to the backing fabric. Lastly, I folded and sewed together another piece of material, and then sewed this onto a corner of the collage to create a hook, as I thought it would look interesting if the piece were able to hang freely.

Fibre Arts

The first session of our fibre arts block was a little confusing, as it actually involved virtually no work with fibre arts, and our brief wasn't supplied on the day. We began by working on a similar exercise to what we did in the Fine Art block, early on, with drawing items in boxes, however despite my initial apprehension, this turned out to be a much more relaxed process than before. The items included a variety of shapes and textures, and the emphasis this time was not on detail and accuracy, but simply reproducing the shapes quickly. This ended up being quite liberating and I was able to be quite gestural and loose with the representation. We repeated this exercise several times, rotating the materials we were drawing as well as the materials we were drawing with. We began with graphite, and moved onto some less conventional means, including taping two pencils together in an effort to reduce control, which provided some interesting results. We also used Berol markers, with added water applied by brush to disperse the ink in a manner similar to watercolour paints, and this is a technique I want to try out more as the effects were interesting and very easy and fast to implement. We used indian ink, applied with skewers and also brushes, which is also something I would like to use more, perhaps in other ways.

After a while we had produced several different drawings, on a variety of types of paper, and we then were asked to create a collage of sorts out of the drawings, with the option of cutting and re-aligning the pieces. I decided to do this with all my drawings, feeling that the direction the work was heading in at the time was not overly engaging me, and that I would perhaps find more interesting results if I went further into abstraction. I arranged the pieces in such a way as to try to follow some some curves and lines throughout. I used sticky labels to hold pieces together temporarily, as I threaded through the outlines of the pieces straight onto an A2 sized piece of paper, rather than piece the work together first and then apply to paper later. At first, the needle I was using was too broad and it proved extremely difficult (and painful at times) to penetrate two or three layers of paper at once, and after a while I switched to a smaller, sharper needle which was easier to manipulate, however I managed to scratch and poke my fingers multiple times in the process. This has been the most physically painful unit so far.