lots of leaves

Today's ATC happened in a round about way.
I had been looking at Julie Fei Fan Balzer's Blog and this post caught my eye. I have this book Scraptastic by Ashley calder, but haven't spent much time on it, so I  thought, why not?

This was one of the ideas in chapter 1.  Stamped molding paste.  I used an ivy leaf stamp which I have three sizes of.  The colour was scrapings from chalk pastels, which I brushed on, and then wrote the text with a fine tipped brush and some watercolour.  What I found was that it was easier to actually stamp the stamp in the chalk powder, then onto the molding paste, as I got a better image.

This is my practice page in one of my altered books.
And while we are at it, here are a few other more recent additions to these books.

This one I don't think is quite finished, but it has some interesting ideas on it.  The black edge was liquid shoe polish spomged on, then when that was dry I sponged on some pale green watercolour.  The ferns, or leaves, were just done with markers, but I am still thinking over the next step.

This page, as you can see, is the one facing the leaf page.  Since I had my pastels out (which doesn't happen very often these days), I thought I would have a play.  soft pastels are very concentrated pigment.  what I did here was scrape them so that the powder was sitting on the page.  Then I sprayed the page with water and stood the book up to let it drip.  This reminds me of a wisteria arbour  and i might actually turn it into one, but it needs thinking.

This was an experiment with waxed paper.  I scrunched up a large piece of waxed paper, then opened it out and ironed it onto the paper.  Then I put some dilute watercolour over the page and you can see the pattern it made, sort of a parchment type look or a leather look.  (The splotches were on the page before I started).

These two are parts from a page that I used under my work on this and other occasions.  Usually, I dampen the page before I start, so that and drips will spread on it.

A very papery day today, with not much stitch in it.

Distressed nonwoven leaves

I have been working on some distressed leaf samples for a few days.
Basically, I gathered a range of non wovens and a few synthetics.
I painted the non woven fabrics.  The synthetics were all coloured.
I free machined two simple leaves on each fabric - a leaf with veins and a leaf without veins.

Then the fun began
I used the soldering iron to put holes in the leaves with veins
I used the heat gun to distress the leaves without veins

And here's what I got

This first sample was a synthetic, crisp, organza type fabric in an olive green.  The holes in the leaveswereeasy to cut, but when I used the heat gun, instead of bubbling or creating holes like most organzas, I got these wierd lines, like one of the warp or weft melted and the other way didn't.  This leads me to think that this is a type of shot organza with two different fibres going in the two directions.  Interesting.

The next sample was a crepe like chiffon fabric.  The hole burned very quickly, so care was needed and the veinless leaf shrank to half.  however there was some puckering in the unstitched fabric,so I cut a leaf from that, too.

This third synthetic was a chiffon, but crisper than the one above.  You can see it behaved in a very similar way.  I  varied the way I made the holes with the soldering iron to see what different effects I could get.

This is a beautiful,  gold  rainbow spun or light Lutradur.  It was easy to cut through with the soldering iron and reacted quickly to the heat gun, making holes inside the stitched area.  You can see on the right, that in unstitched areas, it bubbles.

The next sample was weed mat from the hardware.  This behaves in a very similar way to light lutradur (I suspect it is a form of lutradur sold as weed mat.  It even looks and feels like lutradur)

This sample is tyvek.  My treatment of this sample is slightly different to the others.  All went well with the soldering iron,  but my heat gun is extrememly hot and I know from experience that it will shrivel my tyvek up into nothing.  The unveined leaf was ironed rather than heat gunned.  There is a leaf cut from heat gunned tyvek at the right.  Very dense.

Although this face wipe looks woven, I suspect it is actually needle punched or bonded.  It looks and feels  like other non wovens, so I did a sample.  It burned with diffculty and you can just see some charring around the holes.  It did not melt but burned as you can see in the open leaf, so I suspect that it has some polyester, but also has cotton or other cellulose fibes in it.  It was worth a try.

Here is another type of face wipe, which behaves in exactly the same manner.

This very distressed sample is frost net.  I believe it is what the english call agricultural netting and also that it is very similar to nappy or diaper liner.  It distresses very very easily.  I would use the soldering iron, but not the heat gun - at least not when there are areas bounded by stitch.  You can see how the heat gun dissolved the fabric inside the stitching in the open leaf.  However in areas not bounded by stitch it shrank and frothed up as you can see at right.  I have used it this way to make froth for seaside pieces and it works well.

The final sample is heavy lutradur.  It distresses extremely well and the holes in the open leaf were really easy to make with the heat gun.

So, now I know how all these fabrics react to the soldering iron and the heat gun and I will most definitely be using some of these in my leaf project.

Don't get stressed - distress some synthetics

Through a Glass Darkly

Since I am away from home, I want to cover a few topics which mean a lot to me.
My original topic was to talk about samples.  My sample folio is a large art folio, where I keep my samples from experiments and preliminary work.

My DH asked me the other day when I was going to do some work, and when I showed the days samples, he said, "I mean art - real work".  I started thinking about this and tried to explain to him why this work was important and in doing so, realised that this was something I needed to talk about.

I spend a lot of time experimenting and working on new techniques, and it is very important because it is what creates depth and meaning.  It is like a decorator's sample book or a painter's colour card, it is where I go to find colours and textures that I want to create in my work, or to find something I might tweak to make the right addition to a work.  If I had not personally done these samples, and had them under my belt, then my repertoire would be very limited.  Indeed, the reason I moved on from quilting is that my repertoire was becoming so wide that I needed a new canvas to work on - Fibre Art.  So, more than just a book to show off or as proof of qualifications, a folio is a working journal of sorts that provides a huge amount of resources in creative work.

On my Drive today, I was listening to Artistically speaking Radio, which FAMM radio have merged with.  The episode I have been listening to was the 13th Jan episode where Rebecca Parsons herself is interviewed.  This was really interesting and inspirational. After that interview, they interviewed another artist, called Deborah Dissman  who talked about something called Synesthesia, which she defined as the feelings and senses we associate with colours.  See articles here and here.  For example Blue feels light and cool, whilst red may feel dark and heavy.  It struck me that we need this information in creating, rather than simply the colour wheel.  We need to understand how colours and textures evoke senses in order to create meaningful pieces of art. 
Smell, taste, weight, touch, sound, volume, temp, all are associated with colours in our brain.  We actually use sayings such as  "loud" colours or hot, cool, heavy, yummy, sweet as adjectives to describe colour.

I want to mention an addition I am going to make to my sample folio.  In addition, to the notes I write on materials, and techniques and tools, I think a really useful addition would be some adjectives in the sense of synesthesia.
I will use one of my recent samples to illustrate this,

In this sample, for instance, I might come up with things like:

• Smell - fresh, light
• taste - crisp, crunchy, watery
• weight - light
• touch - rough
• sound - windy, rustling
• volume -airy, Density - light
• temperature - cool
• emotion - calm, creative

 It provides a lot of information about what we are putting into our piece of work.

Much of this information is already in our brains and as artists use it without knowing, when we critique our work and others'.  But I believe that making it more concrete instead of one of the mysteries of creativity  can only assist us in our work.  I have spent a lot of time thinking about aspects of art and creativity that we internalise and at times do not understand.  By bringing them out and making them concrete, we can understand our work and how it relates to others much more clearly.
This is just one more tool, to use and to learn to use.

I hope I haven't bored you too much and I hope I have inspired you to look at practice and sample work in a new light - as building blocks to a deeper creativity.

Water, Water, Everywhere

You know, the main reason I set up my blog was to keep myself on track.  So I have finally made myself up a routine to follow so I get things done in all the many areas of my interests.  My Friday Focus (forgive my alliterations as I am partial to them) is where I intend to post about new techniques and experiments, be they fabric manipulation, surface techniques, sewing, etc.
This week i am posting about manipulating fabric for texture and depth.  In my Quilt Uni course, this week we are looking at scrunching fabric and I got to thinking about folding and pleating techniques.  I got an idea for pleating a strip pieced fabric to get an impression of water.
In my first experiment, I used three values of  2.5in blue fabric

I strip pieced these and pressed the allowances to the dark, then cut them in half

I joined these together

And then sewed pleats in at the seams

I then tacked the pleats up and down to create waves

Although they do look like waves, they were a little too regular for me, so I untacked it and tacked it differently, alternating the ups and downs on each row

I like this one much better, the curves are more pleasing, but it was still a bit too regular, so I did it again...

This sample was a bit more to my liking, and with a bit of Free motion and some embellishment, would be OK.
However, I still wanted more wavy sort of Textures, so I started again with some thinner 1.25 in strips

This time, I did not strictly pleat, but used a piece of iron on stabiliser smaller than the fabric and ironed random pleats into place on it

I started free motion scribbling on it, but It was too uneven and thick in places, so I sandwiched it between tulle layers and put it in a hoop

It was still difficult to free motion, but I finally got something approaching what I wanted

With a bit more embellishment (and practice)  this would be great for a sea landscape.
The next thing I wanted to make was some water in a  river pool.  My idea was to create curved tucks around a central point, however I got something quite different.

As with my second sample, I used a piece of interfacing smaller than the fabric.  then I used a basting stitch to crumple the fabric into the smaller space.  This is a slight modification of one of the techniques in the Quilt uni Course, but is called furrowing in the art of manipulating fabric by Collette Wolf (Which is my bible for such things).  It is also similar to making twisted roses in Fantastic Fabric Folding by Rebecca Wat or chopkeys in Folded fabric elegance by Rami Kim  and
here is the final sample

I did like the texture better before pressing as it was softer and more fluid.  However after some stitching to stabilise, it could be pouffed up again
I still hadn't worked out how to get my curved pool tucks, but as i was writing this it came to me, so i went and did a quick sample

I cut a wedge shape and gathered along the edges, then rolled the gathers into curves by pushing the gathers to the to and the centre of the tucks to the bottom, and voila!   With a wider wedge and some stitching in between the tucks to define them, it will be just what I want.
I have designed a small quilt/hanging to use some of the techniques in the course and I will try and remember to post it on Sunday, 'cos Sunday is sketchbook day.
Tomorrow is Stitchin' Saturday and I will look at a Free motion stitch in detail.