Decorating Fabrics

I decorated quite a few different fabric samples with three different stamps over a few days. My original kite-shaped 'cardboard' stamp disintegrated so I created two new ones, with different shapes, out of funky foam.



All stamps are with acrylic paint. I particularly like the yellow ochre stamping on the gold fabric - the effect is quite subtle. For a few of the samples I overstamped using bronze acrylic (see three examples below).

Selecting Fabrics

I had a good rummage through my fabric boxes and came up with a nice selection to work with....

Cut and Fold Shapes with Coloured Papers

Well this part I enjoyed doing on Christmas day - you might spot the gold Christmas wrapping paper that has sneaked into some of the squares! One piece of gold paper was a bit creased so I scrunched it up to give an interesting texture. It was quite fiddly cutting up tissue paper shapes but the card and paper was much more robust. The nice thing about tissue paper is that you can see the shape underneath so you get a third shape on display.

Cut and Fold Design Shapes in Black Paper

I really enjoyed this part of the chapter. I found it fascinating working out how best to cut the paper to get the desired shape. I particularly like the shapes shown on page 8 and would be curious to overlay this with the 'pin' image I commented on for Chapter One. In fact many of these would work well overlaid on each other. I used scissors for this activity but some of the cuts are not clean and so I will likely use a craft knife for the next part of the chapter.































Before I cut into the black paper I tried out a few shapes with plain white copier paper - three of these 'practice runs' have been mounted onto black card...

Design Sheets

For this chapter I used a scalpel, cutting board, scissors, ruler, set square, pencil, a gold pen and PVA glue. For many of the shapes I made a thin cardboard template to re-use as required.

DESIGN SHEET A:

DESIGN SHEET B:

DESIGN SHEET C:

Star/Cross Shapes from Coloured Papers

I chose the darkest blue paper and deep orange cartridge paper for this activity.

Stamp it out!

I had great fun stamping! I opted for a kite-shape from one of the original images and worked with that. I had to use concentrated acrylic ink as unfortunately my acrylic paints are in my flat in England and I'm in Northern Ireland this week! Also, I didn't have a rubber (not terribly well organised and left that in England too!) so I created a couple of stamps from layered cardboard - they work quite well I think.

It was quite difficult chosing a complementary colour-way because I don't seem to have any particular colour theme in my collection of images. In the end I chose blue/orange from one of the images and just went for it. And I made a complete mess! It was fantastic! I didn't adhere to my own health and safety guidelines, however, and have blue hands to prove it.... I've since obtained a box of gloves for any future colouring!!! The images here are just to give you an idea of what I was up to, they don't show you everything I produced (or, indeed, of the mess I made!) I dyed a range of paper types - from cartridge paper, newspaper, copier paper and tissue paper. Then I got carried away and started to dye the baby-wipes I'd been wiping my hands with! The colours on the wipes are super vibrant!

Some more stars!

I got carried away and drew some more stars from my source collection (see image, left). I particularly like the image on the top right of the page, they're like two different size pins lying on their side. The star below it, with the jagged points, has movement with it I think. This is also a favourite.

Acrylic Inks

I bought some acrylic ink on Saturday. I purchased 5 colours and tried them out in my Materials Workbook (see image).

Happy Accidental Purchase

When I went to purchase dye for Chapter 2 I bought Radiant Concentrated Watercolours! It was a happy error. To see what colours they really are I created some paper swatches with undiluted colour. What vibrant wonderful colours! Unfortunately they are not light-fast so any display images would need to be carefully protected behind UV absorbing glass, plexiglass or UVA acetate. Great for work in a sketchbook or images kept in a portfolio. It would be an interesting experiment to see how they fade... The concentrated watercolours can be made fast for use with textiles.

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Introduction

Well hallo. You've stumbled across my C&G blog for assessment for the Level 3 Certificate in Design and Craft (Embroidery) with Distant Stitch. This blog is purely here to show my work for assessment. For any non-course-related chat I generally ramble on my Windows Live Space http://smellymellyflipflop.spaces.live.com/.

Chapter 1 - Stars and Crosses

My collection of images is growing (see left). I've got definate groups of themes. There are beautiful crosses and stars in patterns in the tiles and stone forms at La Alhambra (from a book I bought from a charity shop), crosses in nets (fishing and tennis) and structures (the Eiffel Tower!), images of chainmail showing crosses, the criss-crossing of water fountains, and, my personal favourite - fractals (well I am a student of mathematics after all!). I've got a great book from the library on architecture and that has some wonderful structural images.

See image (right) for sketches of selected stars and crosses from my source images.



















See left for some wax crayon rubbings on thin paper. The top two are from a kitchen spatula rubbed in two different directions, the second perpendicular to the first. The left image has a tracing paper overlay with some cross shapes outlined in black pen.

The middle 'grid' image is from the grips on the handlebars on my bicycle. Again this has an overlay of tracing paper with a few shapes marked out in black ink.

The rubbings on the bottom left are from bathroom tiles.

The bottom right image is a double rubbing from the air vents on the back of my television, the second rubbing being perpendicular to the first.

Chapter 1 - Colour Wheels

The first task I tackled was the colour chart... I didn't have any gouache paint to hand so I had a bash using acrylics. I certainly learnt that they dry super quick... the outcome wasn't great so I obtained some gouache pretty pronto. The second attempt at the colour wheel was far more enjoyable and I think it was much more successful by far!