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

More rings

Been a busy day! Embroidered what feels like a million leaves and still have some to finish. I'll show you the pics when it's all done but you'll just have to wait for now...
I do, however, have pics from my jewellery class where I was class swot and made 2 rings...

There's not actually a lot of difference in size but the smaller one will fit on my ring finger quite nicely whereas the bigger one is miles too big for even my thumb!

#sewing #leaves #rings #jewellery

Fingers crossed it works this time!

Been doing more pull throughs (I checked and turns out I did use the wrong fixative, oops) so have re-done my samples from the other day and, hopefully, they'll work this time...

I did some new samples too, they're not finished but you get a cookie if you can tell what they're going to be

#printing #sewing #embroidery #leaves #flowers #feathers

Azadi

I finished iiiiiit! My cage is all sewn together and Azadi doesn't look like he's walked into a wall anymore, I'm so happy.
Now, I'm not going to show you a photo of it - you can see it on opening night when everyone else can see it :) but you can look at this feather I'm sewing instead:

#feather #sewing #bird #cage

Wings...

I've spent the whole weekend locked away in my room in my own little nest trying to finish sewing my wings together:

 hours and hours and quite a few stabs to the fingers later my wings have been sewn together! I do still need to sew the wings to the body and the body together and give it legs and make the cage but I'm celebrating this step anyway. Celebration cake anyone :)

#sewing #wings #embroidery #celebration cake #myna bird

Hoorah!

I've finally sewn all my feathers!

Now all I need to do is do a little bit of seeding on his chest/back and sew him together! It's a bit exciting

 

#sewing #myna bird #feathers

The end is (sort of) in sight...

I've been sewing and sewing and sewing my feathers and dont really seem to be getting much further which is quite frustrating. I have to keep telling myself that it's the embroidery taking so long and once I've done the base colour there's all the highlight/shade to do which takes longer but after a few hours sewing (where you have started to smell something a bit funny which I can only assume is the machine overheating...) and you look no further on it's a bit disheartening. Oh well, I've gone 1 wing all done and am sort of, almost, nearly half way through the other one...

I have had to find ways of entertaining myself so the slowness this is progressing doesn't make me eat too much chocolate and I thought I'd share my smiles for today - this was as I looked out of my window when I was writing this and the 2 seagulls looked like they were stood on the edge of the window (I think the funny smell the sewing machine was giving off has gone to my brain a little bit...)

 And this was just a pretty sky - look how blue it is!

#feathers #myna bird #sewing #machine embroidery #seagulls #sunset

Dory fish!

Had a fun day finishing some prints and sewing a fish and look who I made....

Dory!

I know it's a bit funny looking but it was kinda fiddly and I think for a first attempt it's not too bad... Now she just needs to help me find Nemo :)
I blame the girls at college for distracting me though, first by talking about work experience placements then the New York trip in May for Surtex. Hi America! Anywhere I really should go visit?

Hi Lucy!

Got a request for a better explanation of how I made my cushions and printing in general for Lucy :)

First off you have to make a Koda Trace - this is a drawing on special Koda Trace paper and has to completely block the light out so usually takes ages checking that it's opaque and doesn't get smudged. If you want to print more than one colour you have to make a Koda Trace for each colour cos you can only print one colour per Koda Trace.

Then you take your screen and have to coat it with some special purple emulsion that's light sensitive and when it's dry you tape your Koda Trace to it - making sure it's the right way round for printing - and expose it to the light and where the light hits the paint it hardens and where your Koda Trace is the paint stays soft and washes off, leaving parts of the screen clear to print through!

To actually print, you pin your fabric to the backing cloth on the fancy print table we have so it doesn't move when you're printing on it, place your screen in the right place over the fabric with a line of paste at the top and pull your squeegee with the paste over the bit that you want to print. Depending on how thick/heavy the fabric is you need to pull the paste over it more - silk only needs one or 2 pulls but a heavy cotton would need 4/5.

There are different pastes too - this is getting a bit confusing - there are dye pastes that actually dye the fabric so the fabric still flows how it should, and pigment ones that just sit on top of the fabric so if it was on a light fabric like a silk it wouldn't flow the same. I like the dye pastes for that reason, cos I really like using silk :) The pigment ones are quite funky too cos there are loads of special ones that expand when you iron them and are all 3D!

On my cushions and tea towel I printed the black outlines in pigment (not the cool 3D stuff sadly) and when it had dried I painted the colour into it with the dye pastes.

Then it all needs fixing so the colour doesn't run when it's washed - pigment (my black stuff) just needs ironing on the back for a few mins which is really nice and quick but the dye paste (my colour) needs to go in this big scary steamer which everyone makes me open and close cos the think they're gonna fall in it! Anyway, the dye pastes need to be steamed for about half an hour then rinsed so the excess colour comes out - that scares me more than the steamer cos I always worry that ALL the colour will come out or it'll dye the rest of the fabric around it and turn it funny colours and other horrors but its usually fine.

When every thing's been fixed they just need to be sewn - the sewing's pretty easy but the measuring so every thing's in the right place is fiddly. The tea towel is easiest cos that's just had all the edges folded and sewn. The cushion has the edges sewn then is folded with the right sides together - this is the fiddly bit cos you need to measure everything so it's the right size - it's folded differently depending on where you want the back seam  -and then sewn down the edges to finish it. To FINISH finish it it needs ironing so it's all uncreased and beautiful and looks like the ones I made :)

Hope that was helpful, I know there's looooads of info there - we had about 2 weeks to learn all that and I've just chucked it at you in one lol. Its probably way more info than you needed but I wanted to explain everything properly. If I haven't explained something enough or have actually missed something out let me know and I'll add in.
xx

The end is in sight...

My third and nearly final embroidery sample! The little cup at the bottom took me forever to do cos it's all hand sewn and I wanted to cry after I bondawebbed the leaf on cos the iron made an awful mark on it but it's not that noticable any more so yey. Don't have much to do on my other one either so that can be on here soon...

Hand Embroidery

Friday was Hand Embroidery Day for us! We learnt loads of stitches (the bullion knots still confuse me) and had to create a masterpiece using them, here's mine...

There was more of it but it was just branch and I didn't think you'd want to see that cos it's pretty boring, so you have a close up of a section instead so you can admire my beautiful work :)

It was a weekends worth of work but I went back home and had a catch up with some friends (Hi Kiera, Rob and Bec!) so I did as much as I could on the train, so Hi to anyone who saw me on the Thornaby-Leeds train too!