Back at college.....

My textile course started four weeks ago and we are all well into screen printing designs for the project this term called "The Enchanted Garden". I'm not completely sure which direction I'm going in but think it will pretty much be lots of leaf shapes with maybe beautiful bursts of flower colour coming through. We will see but I have been working on a design in my sketch book using soft pastels and home made stencils - amazing what you can do with a few leaves from the local park.

Then I had a go in class at screen printing using similar stencils. In this example it is on cotton:

And this one onto linen which was originally dyed with procion yellow dye - impossible to see in this photo.

Having spent one of our days dyeing lots of different types of fabric we then screen printed directly onto these to create a variety of samples. We will return to these samples in future weeks for further printing, stitching.

This sample was made from linen dyed light pink and screen printed over in layers with leaf stencils, sequin waste and strips of thin paper as resists. I was aiming for a more abstract design rather than a literal reproduction of a leaf.

Here i used a commercial stencil of a flower design - was surprised that a stencil worked with a silk screen as I've always read that they don't. Well suck that!

And finally, Rosemary in our group is making an enormous banner for her Church in memory of WW1 so I've made the 12" base she gave us and tried to fit in Wilfred Owen's title to his famous poem - I made the text out of painted bondaweb, which is a sheet of fabric glue backed onto release paper. You paint the glue side, allow it to dry and then draw/ cut out designs, in this case, text. Stencils were used for the poppies with inktense crayons.

I'm off to Rome next week so miss the session on mono printing but back for photo transfer and sun prints. Will keep you posted.
Bye for now!