Back To The Books...

...at least for a moment.  I had cut a few 'pages' from an accordion book, made from Lutradur XL, and because they were lying around, and a bit battered, decided to experiment on them.  So I started by giving them a coat of acrylic paint, and then stitched into them to suggest a landscape.

Not the most exciting thing you'll ever see, but a good basis for continuing.  It had been a long time since I'd machine stitched on paint, so wanted to check that this wash wasn't going to give me any problems (and it didn't).  I had intended to add more acrylic paint in each section, a mixture of colours and marks progressing down the page, with a slightly different set of colours on each page, to suggest changing weather and/or times of day.  When I got round to actually doing something with it, though, there happened to be some watercolour crayons on the table.  I wonder....I thought... and this is what happened...

I like these strong blocks of colour, though I suspect they suggest different seasons, rather than times of day.  I was quite surprised by how well the watercolour sat on the fabric, though I suspect the acrylic underpainting was the cause of that.  I was even more surprised when I turned over to work on the other side...

The colour had bled through two layers of underpainting (one on either side), and  I think they work really well.  This side has a completely different feel to the reverse, and I'm pleased.  There were a couple of sections where the paint hadn't migrated, but a bit more water on the reverse side sorted that out.  I'd like to add some text, but the words haven't suggested themselves, so we'll just have to wait until they do. 

It's Amazing...

...how much more energy I have if I don't fiddle about with a computer...  Someone cut a BT cable during some work, plunging Bo'ness and Linlithgow into internet darkness for a day and a bit.  So...I started to develop some new work (of which more anon) and existing work, namely the watercolour landscape I spoke of last time . 

I started by folding the book, so that I could see how each 'page' worked.  As it turned out, it also made the piece easier to handle with the sewing machine, as I could fold and unfold as I went along.  I'm happy enough with the colour and structure ... now, it needed stitch.

I started with some variegated cotton, in purples: it doesn't show up all that well in the main image, but you can see it nicely in the detail.

I wanted some sort of contrast, some heavier thread, so raked out some Madeira Decora, which I put in the bobbin.  I haven't used it in a very long time, and  struggled with it, somewhat...but decided to leave some of the catches in the stitching as they were, added texture ( she said firmly)...

Not necessarily a good decision...but I don't want to run the risk of redoing the stitch, and missing the original holes... so it's going to stay as it is.  So, as I say, not necessarily a good decision, but the best I can make in the circumstances.  I've kept it very, very simple.  I don't feel the need to add more stitch.  I had contemplated adding some applique...but I think that would be overkill.  A poem, perhaps, but no more visual imagery, I think there's enough going on as it is.  It's interesting to swap between the individual landscapes, as designated by the folds that make up the pages, and the entire landscape, across them all.  Anything else would be distracting.

Being a book, of course, this isn't the only side that's important.  The reverse needs to have treatment, too...  Some of the watercolour has leaked through, so the choice of colour is already made for me.

Why?  Because whatever I add, the watercolour would mix with it.  And, on reflection, I don't want the colour on the other side to shift at all...so I need to add dry colour, rather than wet. That rules out conventional paint of any kind.  I could fuse on fabric, but then I would lose the stitch, and I want to retain that.  So... I painted up a piece of paper with transfer dyes in these colours.  That monoprint I showed you was on a large piece of paper, and there was enough room on it to colour a piece for dye transfer, so that I was sure that it was both deep and wide enough to cover the entire strip. 

So far so good... now all I have to do is iron on the colour...

This wasn't the only piece I worked on yesterday... I went on and painted more paper, as I had the paints out anyway... printed with some bubblewrap...  and I designed and stitched another piece... and then had to lie down... but hey, I had fun.  More anon.

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 Cara...

...as I did on Monday (school holiday), resulted in Granny's Magic Crayons.  She likes drawing...here's my favourite of what she produced. 

So, when she got fed up, and moved on to something else, I had a turn.  'Oh, that's beautiful, Gran', she said, 'It's awfully big, though'.  Err...it's A4... everyone's a critic...

It's really just a doodle....so, when I wanted to refresh my memory as to how to make a slightly different folded book, this was what I used.  First, though, I had to draw on the reverse...

You can see the difference adding water makes; it softens the lines, and spreads the colour over the piece.  So... folded once down the vertical centre line, and three times, equally, across the horizontal, then flattened out, plus a single cut down three quarters of the central line...and hey presto!  a folded book.

I find it intriguing, how the pattern, already abstract, becomes even more so, once folded.  It's unpredictable.  I have to say, I prefer the blue side, rather than the yellow, but they sit well together.  Shall I add words?  Probably not...not convinced I have anything to say about this piece, just a bit of frivolity, really, to remind me how this particular book sits. 

Playing About...

...with the watercolour crayons again.  For quite a while, I've been wondering why my paintings are so unlike my textiles, notably, these garden paintings such as 'Summer Garden', which hangs in my living room.  I have made several garden quilts; a series called 'Dawn In The Healer's Garden', which, astonishingly to me, don't appear on this blog, except in this little glimpse... from which you can see that the quilts appear to be significantly more structured than this painting, although, interestingly, the intention behind both approaches was the same.  I wanted to suggest a series of random glimpses of colour and movement that is possible in a garden, particularly a cottage garden, where flowers are grown en masse, and wave in the wind. 

I went out for half an hour yesterday, which has left me too damn tired to do anything with textiles, but the crayons and a sketchbook were to hand, so I thought I'd play with them, to replicate this sort of look.  Only to discover that it wasn't really possible...or not in the way I was working...

I think the problem is the type of mark it's possible to make with crayons.  They're not as easy to manipulate as paint, or maybe I'm just too lazy, or too tired, to make the kind of small mark that I was aiming for.  This drawing makes me think, not of a garden, but of a distant forest in autumn... or it did, until I applied water, and then it all went to hell in a handcart.  I had expected a bit of muddying of the clear colours that the crayons give, but what I wasn't expecting was the brush to moult.  Substantially. Which you can't see in the image below, but trust me, there's lots of the little blighters.  Growl.  I suspect I would have got the result I wanted, had I been able to spray the paint with water, rather than using a brush....but we'll never know.

You've heard me say that 'nothings succeeds as planned' frequently throughout the life of this blog.  I can actually see some potential for further work, though... not done in this way, though.  It's possible to make monoprints using watercolour crayons; in truth, that's why I bought them in the first place, it's just that I never actually tried it.  I can see that blocks of colour would be really interesting... possibly combined with a bit of collage.  So it's not all lost.  Play is never a waste of time; there's always something to learn.  Hurrah.