Back to Vines!

This week has been so exciting! And hectic and so busy but it's been great. I've finally started on my vine piece! I dyed so many pieces of fabric that I did some maths and figured out it added up to 300+ bits of dyeing which I was quite impressed with. They were then cut down, sewn together and turned the right way around so the seams were beautiful and neat and that's the main stems finished!

When I was dyeing all the strips of fabric I did sort of take over the dye lab for a change.

The finished stems! To give some perspective on size some are about 2 meters long and all are this thickness

All that's left to do now is make millions of leaves to cover them. This is something leafy I was working on the other week but I might use some beads for these leaves...

#vines #leaves #dipdye #beads #sewing #silk

Flowers!

In between bits of dye sampling for my vines (still excited about that piece) I managed to make a few sample flowers that might go into a headpiece. I used about half a can of spray starch on them to make them a bit more sturdy but they still need something else. I also got a bit too excited and sewed them together without a stem!

Cotton

Silk



 #flower #silk #cotton #petals #vines

Fuchsia-Jay

Had a busy morning printing the rest of my petals to turn into flowers, hopefully I should have enough cos I'm looking forward to a rest from printing and having normal coloured hands!

I did have a bit of time free at the end of the day to play with some very nice silks I'd dyed and made some Fuchsia's but they were coloured like a blue jay...

The big one is for my neckpiece and I got so excited after I'd made it I had to make some little ones for earrings!

#fuchsia #jay #flower #silk #earrings

Flower Power!

Had a fun day making flowers. I dont want to jinx anything but it all actually worked, my pull throughs didn't run everywhere, my dyes all turned out nice colours and making the flowers didn't make me want to cry!

This is my blue jay flower, just made from cotton, I was supposed to embroider the black on but I  got too excited and was half way through sewing it together when I remembered!

Silk Fuchsia, it needs its stamens etc cos it does look like it's missing something

 Organza butterfly flower, possibly my favourite! (yes that is a roll of double sided sticky tape holding it in place, it kept falling over haha)

 Silk peacock flower, this just needs shaping a bit better

#silk #organza #cotton #butterfly #flower #fuchsia #dyeing #printing

Look who I found :)

It's Nemo!

And he was with a pretend Flounder...

I've been bouncing round all day cos I was so excited about them lol. They're gonna be hanging from fish hooks on wire from a piece of driftwood, I want to go make it noooooow!

They'll fulfil our dreams and we'll be free...

I'm back on Mumford again :) (This time it's the song Not With Haste)
 
After I eventually stop listening to them in the mornings and get to college I have been doing a fair bit of work, we've started actually printing now which is quite exciting. I'e spent the last few days dyeing fabric to find which to use (I decided on silk for a change) and experimenting...

 (the fabrics are cotton, silk, devore satin, polyester voile for each colour)

The fishes aren't finished yet, Dory needs some yellow and they both need sewing together but it's all getting quite exciting. I've ordered some fish hooks to hang them from cos I think I might make them into a mobile...

Samples (that have gone right)

Well, I've finally sorted the sample fiasco - spent all yesterday in college printing and painting and what not and this is the result...

This one is various colours on cotton sateen

...on cotton sateen again

Same but on silk

and calico

I was so scared when I washed them incase they bled everywhere again but I had remembered to mix the colours into a paste this time so it wasn't going to. Phew!

While I was waiting for them to finish in the steamer I had a bit of a play with some other prints I'd done on calico...

They're to put your wigs in :p

Flowers

I've finally started some samples and I'm very excited about them!

I'd had this idea for a Carnation for ages and couldn't wait to try it, it's silk (of course) and the first one was just folded with the raw edge hand sewn to the fabric so it wont fray. I thought this looked too much like a Rose and tried to make it more Carnation-y by using bondaweb on the back to stop it fraying and so I could get twice the amount of fabric as I didn't have to fold it. I think this one works better as it looks like it has petals where I cut the fabric (I daren't on the first one cos I thought it'd fray everywhere and look rubbish)

This one was just a simple daisy but I love how the reverse applique turned out! I quite liked the idea of the hand embroidered one and it can turn out really well - I've done it before but smaller and with 2 colours and I think it works better that way. I still kinda like it, it looks like a dandelion clock..



Bags and Butterflies

That kinda sounds like the sequel to Bedknobs and Broomsticks...

Yesterday was sketchbook work, lots and lots of pages like this:

And today has been quite productive too, I managed to get 3 bag designs designed and coloured this afternoon if you'd like to see:

(front then back)

Then, when I was painting them, I decided that the butterflies needed to be done in silk and they'd be sad if I didn't use silk so I ran to College and back so the butterflies would be happy and spent the rest of the evening making them. I love them, I've been bouncing around so excited about them. Want to see?

They look so much more beautiful in real life, the top 2 are just guttering and silk paints painted normally but the bottom left is orange and yellow dripped onto the silk and the bottom right is yellow paint with table salt sprinkled on.
SO cant wait to start making my bag! Any preferences on my designs or things you'd want me to include? (This doesn't count as cheating, it's market research)

Dun dun duuuuuunnnn.....

Final collections are all complete! WOOH! I've spent most of the day in the print room, freezing, gluing stuff to foil so I can finish them...

Anyways, here are my Embroidery ones:

These were done on cotton sateen (apart from the first one, that was some kind of wool that wasn't very nice to use) and have been done using various hand and machine stitches as well as some applique and dyeing.

And my printed ones:

These were done on habotai silk and cotton sateen using various procion and acid pastes, discharge pastes, pigments and some foiling. (The first 4 are silk and just look so nice, I think I have a slight obsession with silk - I did loads of work in AS Level with it too)

 

 I know they're a bit small but I think if you click them they get bigger and you can have a proper look. If they dont and you really want to see some more detail then just say and I can put them up big!

Bzzzzzz Bzzz Bzzzz

^^Thats cos I've been a busy little bee :) I did another 2 prints - one on silk and one on cotton! One... well, one went quite wrong cos I didn't make the dye paste dark enough so it hasn't printed but I'm gonna go over it tomorrow and the other one is this! I quite like it...

The fabric dyed with this gorgeous texture where the dye had gone a bit weird (not sure why) but it needed leaves on it to go with the effect. I used procions and acids in blues and purples printed onto silk. I'm also going to pick out some areas in irridescent and blue foils so I'm quite excited about that!

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.

Applique and whatnots :)

We've been doing some applique which was quite fun but also quite stressful when we were doing reverse and shadow applique and I had to cut stuff away, aaah! I was so worried that I was going to cut through my stitching when I was doing that.

The first pic is normal applique and reverse applique, and the second pic is shadow applique. I really liked that one cos I used a sparkly silver thread and it looks all Christmassy! It doesn't really look it in the pic but it makes me smile :)

We also had a play with dyes. The top row are calico samples that I dyed and the bottom are silks that I dyed. Believe it or not but the corresponding samples have actually been dyed the same colours...

And, I found a nice new stitch - the cloud stitch, oooh...