Lion

Had a fun day making this little lion. he does need some more deail on his face and I have forgotten to give him a tail and ears but apart from that I think it's not too bad. Bit of fur for the mane instead of Calico and there's a real life Simba :)

#lion #prototype #calico #simba #fabric

First final print!

And, I've done a print for my final collection! How organised am I :)  (I'm just not mentioning that some people have got loads more prints done that I think look better so shhhh) All the fabrics I dyed today came out really pale so I've decided that can be my theme and if we had to name our collections my print one would be 'Dream a Little Dream of Me' cos the colours are all blues/purples and they look all dream-like.

This one turned out so much paler that I thought it would and my camera - awesome though it is - couldn't focus on it cos everything was so pale! So I've just got a few close ups to give you the general impression. I dyed the fabric Bright Blue (but it came out pale purple...?) and printed with discharge, steamed it to fix, then printed with blue procion paste and steamed to fix. And somehow I was at college till 9pm doing this... Not entirely sure how it took about 8 hours but still, I quite like it :)

More prints, with exciting new bits!

 Oooooh! We've had some more fun printing and some of the stuff we've done has been so cool!

We've done foils - where you print this special glue through your screen, wait for it to dry then iron the foil over it (you have to remember to put it with the colour up or it wont work, I keep putting it the wrong way round...), wait for it to cool down and peel it off and you're left with a beautiful shimmery bit!

 Then we had heat transfer and expantex/minerfoam which was almost as fun as the foils - the heat transfer thing works best on manmade fabrics like the one I used here and you paint a special paint onto paper in blocks/a pattern, and put it face down onto the fabric - you can trap things between like lace/buttons/paperclips/wool etc that leave a white mark - and put it in the heat transfer press till its cooked and it does this!

The Expantex/minerfoam stuff is very exciting - you print a normal looking paste through your screen and nothing happens till you iron it on the back and then it all starts to expand and puff up so it's 3D and textured! (Thats what I did the Rose in on this piece)

This is heat transfer on silk - it doesn't take the colouring up as well as it's a natural fabric so you're left with a really pale image that I quite like. Although it has come through quite well on the bit that has masking tape behind it!

This one is a mix of all the other printing techniques here (apart from the heat transfer) The big branch is just pigment printed, the little one is expantex and the rose is foils.