Drop Cloth

 

Looking for a background fabric for a new piece I came across this drop cloth. It's the cotton I use underneath when painting and to clean up my stencils and stamps. Usually they end up better than the fabric I paint with intent.

 

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Gelli Plate Printing

I've recently done a gelli plate printing class online, run by Carla Sonheim, and have already blipped at least one sample of this class previously. But today I thought I would write a bit more about it here on this blog. What is a gelli plate, you may ask (although I know that some of you are quite familiar with it already). Well in the past people used gelatine to make a smooth surface from which to take monoprints. But the gelli (think of pudding) always was a bit fragile and easily damaged and also you had to make it before you could do anything, which took time, and after use it had to been thrown out and couldn't be preserved. So some smart cookie conceived the idea of making a commercial gelli plate which is for long term use and is ready for action whenever you want. Specially this last aspect made it very attractive to me as I like to follow up on my bright ideas as soon as they pop up in my head.

I've done several online gelli classes already. There are many free on YouTube, and Julie Fei-Fan Balzer ran a monthly one not long ago which you can still buy. I've also done lots of experimentation on my own. But there is always more to learn and so I signed up for the gelli plate printing class by Carla Sonheim. Like her I did my first batch on watercolour paper and you can see some of the results here.

Sometimes I'm showing you the entire watercolour sheet and other pictures show just a detail of one of the papers that I particularly liked. Of course fabric is never far from my mind and I'm always looking at my painted papers with the eye of a textile artist and considering how to get it onto fabric. One of the easiest ways is to either photograph the paper or scan it, transfer it to the computer and print it out onto fabric sheets using my own inkjet printer. And that works very well.

However for the best results I upload my pictures to Spoonflower and let them print it out. Yes, it's not exactly cheap (specially as they are located in the US) but the results are superb. I've used them for quite some time and have never been disappointed. In fact I'm sometimes amazed by how impressive the resulting fabrics look. There are also more and more places here in the UK who aim to provide the same sort of service such as Design Matters run by Laura and Linda Kemshall. I haven't used them yet but watch this space!

But of course there is also another alternative and that is to use your gelli plate to print directly onto fabric. I was recently asked what paint I use and I use a mixture of acrylics and fabric paint. I'm not really bothered about wash-ability as my quilts are all meant to go on the wall so that isn't an issue for me. I'm also not disturbed that ordinary acrylics change the handle of the fabric somewhat. Again this might be an issue if you're going to use the item but not for wall hangings. If you want to wash your pieces you really should use dedicated fabric paints only and make sure to heat set them properly. As for me I concentrate on the colour of my paints and I mix all the different paints to my heart's content. What you see just above and below are all prints made using the gelli plate on cotton, with sequin waste in different sizes as a stencil.

I've printed these sheets, all around the A4 size, this morning and have now left them to dry. I might add more to each of them but it's always a good idea to let them dry and come back to them in a few days time with a fresh eye to see if they need any further work. In the meantime I've photographed my favourite bits so that I can reprint them at this exact stage.

I also try to keep in mind that these fabrics are not meant to be finished pieces like the paper sheets but are instead intended to be used in my quilts so that they will cut up into the required sizes. Therefore there is no need to be over fussy about each individual sheet. I can select the exact bits I want when I need them.

Finally I've had a question about the colours I used on the fabrics. I only used 5 different tubes of paint, one turquoise, one magenta and one lemon yellow, all to be mixed with white or black. If you stick to a limited colour palette the chances of getting good results are much higher. In fabric painting as well as dying less truly is more. It's all too easy to end up with mucky brown or slushy grey although of course you might like that. I don't!

Mixed Media Mayhem Journal

Last night was a very cold one with a touch of ground frost already and it reminded me that it's about time to remove the paints and inks from my painting shed so that they don't suffer frost damage. Last year I was a bit late doing this and as a result lost an entire large pot of gesso that turned solid after freezing and never returned to a liquid state. I'm trying to finish all the projects from my online classes before it turns cold properly and so today I can show you the end product of the Mixed Media Mayhem online class taught by Roben Marie Smith. She is a very enthousiastic and excellent teacher with beautifully made videos. Really you can't go wrong in her class and I just love all those different journals that are the result.

This one has canvas as the cover and the inside journal pages started life as file folders. They got treated with gesso, inks and acrylics and lots of stencils. I'm getting stencil obsessed! The inside pages aren't finished yet as they are only the beginning. There will be lots more to do when art journalling on them which I hope to do this coming winter. That will be up to me. I also painted both sides of the cover, both inside and out, just so I could make a choice which one I like best.

The other item I added was the closure which is from another of Roben Marie's classes that I will share with you in the near future. This journal in the class has no closure but I wanted one.

This is the back of the journal and you can see that the canvas cover has been edged with fabric. This is in fact cotton that I used to wipe up the inks etc. while working on the cover and the pages.

This is a detail from one of the inside pages. I used it as my blip a few days ago.

As you can see after that cold night we are having a lovely sunny day so that I could take some pictures outside. The journal toned in beautifully with the marigolds!

Am Free Journal Quilt

The September theme for the Sketchbook Challenge is Houses and Hide-Aways. I had already made a house themed journal quilt when the theme was Urban Sketching back in 2012, which on the face of it is a very cheerful piece though I couldn't help noticing I gave it the title Uphill Struggle. I didn't want to repeat myself so started to think about why houses should be equated with being hide-aways. From there I ventured into ideas of how hide-aways can so easily turn into prisons, both literally and figuratively. We can be imprisoned by our own thoughts, conditioned by our upbringing and/or education, and thus become restricted by the cage of our mind. This brought me to cages in the more literal meaning of the word.

And the vague notion of a poem about cages floated into my head. I eventually pinned it down as lines in the poem To Althea, from Prison, by Richard Lovelace (1618-1657). And by the way, don't you just love that last name?! Mr. Lovelace was a courtier, soldier and gentleman poet who in 1642 presented the Kentish petition to Parliament. This was a Royalist document calling for the restoration of the rights of King Charles I. He was promptly imprisoned for this action.

Although he was eventually released he suffered another period of imprisonment and died in very reduced circumstances as a hopeless drunkard. His poem reads:

Stone walls do not a prison make

Nor iron bars a cage;

Minds innocent and quiet take

that for a hermitage

If I have freedom in my love

And in my soul am free

There are two more lines which I haven't used on the piece. They read:

Angels alone that soar above 

enjoy such liberty.

While still thinking about this and how amazing it is that someone living almost 4 centuries ago thought along the same lines as I did, I bought some artistic packing tape at the Crossing Borders exhibition in Peebles (from GraceInk Design) that featured bird cages and I then remembered I also have a cird cage stencil. 

After that my decisions about the piece were made. I used a piece of untreated canvas, primed it with gesso and used multiple inks and stencils to make the background, finishing with that bird stencil and black ink. The surface was sealed with clear gesso. After layering with wadding and a backing fabric I machine quilted the black cage lines, appliqued the large bird and the 3 small bird transparencies (stamp from Birds and Nests stamp set by Cavallini) and glued and sewed on the texts by hand.

I further embellished the journal quilt (sized 10" square) with hand stitching and beading as shown. The binding is part of a piece of cotton I used to mop up the inks and paints while producing the background.