Watercolour...

...isn't something I've worked with in a long time, but playing with Cara using Granny's Magic Crayons at the weekend inspired me to try them out on Lutradur XL.  I'm not a huge fan of acrylic on lutradur, because, unless it is thinned down to the nth degree, it blocks the little holes, which give it its transparency, in my view, its greatest asset.  Besides, it does unpleasant things to the hand of fabric, and I'm not overly keen on stitching through it.  By and large, I stick with transfer dyes for lutradur, because they do none of these things, and were designed specifically for colouring polyester.  But hey, a girl can try other things... and it's tiring, by my standards, to work with transfer dyes, because they have to be painted onto fabric, then ironed on.  Great results, and fixed, to boot...but needs must when the devil drives. 

So...I wetted out the lutradur with clear water, and started adding colour direct, mixing it on the cloth.  I chose red because there was some red dye already at the corner of the lutradur, so I wanted to work with that; watercolour wouldn't have covered it up, of course, being transparent.  The risk of doing that is that you don't like what you get... and I didn't... so I took a monoprint of sorts from the wet paint. 

I didn't bother to unscrunch the paper, hence the white tree shape to the left hand side, and the crackle texture of the print in general, which I rather like.  It got rid of a fair amount of the paint, and I was able to continue...and finally made this...

This was taken while it was still wet; it will dry slightly paler, but hopefully not too much.  I'm planning to add another wash to the reverse side, so that this can become a book after stitching.  No, you're right, it's not particularly interesting at this point...but it has lots of room for stitch...and possibly some applique... we'll see.  I then went on and played a bit more with a block of lino and some paint, to make a selection of monoprints.  I don't have enough energy for lino cutting, so that seemed to be the best way of using the block...

I did some prints on paper, some on lutradur, the last image is the one I like best, but, like the painting, it has plenty of room for stitch.  Should keep me out of mischief for a while...

Playing With Paint

If you remember, I made a couple of monoprints on paper, recently; I talked about it here.  What I don't seem to have shown you, though, is a couple of prints on small sheets of paper, ready to make a book.  Or if I did, I can't find the post....sigh.  Here they are

Basically, a print, and a ghost.  I wanted to make a few more this size, and to print on the back of these, as a base for stitch.  I thought it would be interesting to see what happened if I had random prints on front and back, and stitched in response to one side.  It could be chaos...it could not...  So today, I made a few more pages...

There's no particular rhyme nor reason to any of these.  They're based on curves, and use the same colours of paint, and that's really all they have in common, other than that all of them are printed on both pages.  I'll be machine sewing, and that will need to wait until I get my machine back from its service.  The problem with using a really well recommended local engineer is that everyone else uses him too, so I've had to wait three weeks for him to do the work, such was the length of the queue.

Here's a few in close up.

The last image is a cheat, to use up the last of the paint; it's a piece of lutradur, too small to go in a book.  It may end up in the bin...but you never know... Looking at them, perhaps hand stitch is the way to go... depends on how difficult the paint is to sew.