Sunday 7th March

Today I opened started preparing for some dyeing on Tuesday. I am pre-mordanting cotton, silk and wool in salt water, soy milk, soda ash, vinegar, lemon juice, egg, milk, liquid starch, diet coke (because I had some left over) and alum, rusty water.. I have a series of bottles, jars and pots with little bits of fabric sitting in them.

I opened the rolled up tubes, see above. They are cotton, wool and paj silk and have been rolled up with silver dollar gum leaves inside them. and left over the weekend in a rusty tray. I wanted to see if the Eucalyptus leaves would give their bright red colour without being boiled or steamed. The rusty tray is just to give some background colour.

This is on silk (above)

 

This is on cotton(above)

  

This is on wool. Turns out that the Eucalyptus colour doesn't really take without the heat from boiling or steaming. Although I admit that I could have left them longer than 3 days. They were kept in a hot car and then in the conservatory so were warm but not boiling. They are the same leaves as went bright orange when steamed or boiled (see friday 5th).

Saturday 6th March

Today I have been sorting out the garage to try and find all my different dyes and inks and material which has been dumped in there over the last year. Sometimes I teach a class and then just don't get round to putting everything away again afterwards. I have found all sorts of weird screenprinting experiments from the past , they are in the washing machine as they smelled mouldy.

This is a link to the website for an exhibition which I am involved with which is in Germany at the moment. It is called 'Southern Lands'. Unfortunately it has turned out to be quite an expensive exhibition for me as the postage was NZ$150 and then I got hit with 169 Euros customs duty for Germany which a friend has paid for at the moment but I will have to repay. The exhibition looks very nice from the photos though and it looks like my quilts fit in well with the others.

I have also got a quilt in this book '500 Art Quilts' officially launched today. The publisher is Lark Books. The quilt pictured in the book currently lives near Adelaide.

I'd rather see windmills...

Back to cooking dinner, tidying up the garage. and ironing all the fabric I washed today. Good job the weather is nice.

Artist Res Day 5- natural dyeing

On Thursday I showed the students the traditional (and not terribly eco friendly) way of dyeing with natural dyes. Use a stainless steel pot, put in about half a pot of boiling water and about a third of a pot of plant material. Boil for 30 mins and then add a mordant such as alum or Iron suphate. Put in different bits of fabric and simmer for several hours.
Here are some of the results. This is not a new technique for me so I haven't gone into it in much detail.

Fabric dyed with New Zealand flax seed pods with iron Sulphate as the mordant. from left to right is wool, tussah silk, paj silk, nylon, cotton.

NZ flax again with alum as the mordant.Wool, tussah silk, paj silk, nylon, cotton.

This time we used Ivy leaves and alum as the mordant. Wool, silk and the whitish bit is viscose. I think the students gave up on cotton as it didn't take the dye well (this is normal).

This is all stuff I have done before so no surprises but Deb Donnelly, the textile tutor then showed the class how to do Eco prints using Eucalyptus leaves. She learnt this from India Flint. 

Wool blanket wrapped around a plastic pipe with Eucalyptus leaves tucked between the layers. The leaves were from a silver dollar gum. I have always been told that the silver dollar gum gives red dye but I have never found that before. Turns out that is because I have always used a mordant such as alum which turns the colour yellow. Eucalyptus doesn't need a mordant at all.

 

When the pipe is unwrapped you can see the prints of the leaves. The above piece was wrapped around the pole then string was tied around it to keep the layers tightly together and then it was simmered in tap water for 5 hours.

This slightly quieter piece was steamed in the same pot of plain tap water.

There are more bits and pieces that are waiting to be unwrapped. This is a bit of a slow cloth process.

  

A sandwich of wool, leaves and silk then rolled around a pole and string tied around that. Simmered in a pot with eucalyptus leaves in the water for 5 hours. 

  

You can even see the midrib and some of the details of the leaf on the silk. 

I have three pieces of fabric (cotton, silk, wool) with eucalyptus leaves tucked inside them and wrapped around poles , steeping in a rather rusty old baking tray. They were left in my car  in the sun all day. The car gets very hot and they are now in the conservatory and will get hot tomorrow again. I'll leave them a few days to see how strong the colours get. See below.

The rusty baking tray is providing the mordant and making the print black.

Artist Res Day 4 - discharge paste and tie dye

The trouble with doing a daily experiment is that some items need to wait a little longer before they can be seen. So today I did some experiments with natural dyes with the students at Whitireia Polytech. The results won't be available till tomorrow but in the meantime here are more discharge paste results.

Yesterday I showed the results of discharge paste on different fabrics. I used the paste 'straight' with no additives and it discharged to different colours depending on the underlying fabric.

Then I tried mixing pigments (the pigments that are usually mixed with screenprinting medium) with the discharge paste. When the fabric is discharged, the pigments take the place of the colour that is removed.

I just painted or stamped the pigmented discharge paste onto the fabric and I had to wait till today for the paste to dry as it was quite thick.

The top piece of fabric is the black silk which discharged to white on day 3. The purple with a shocking pink circle is purple velour discharged with paste mixed with fluorescent pink pigment.

We also discovered today that this brand of discharge paste is no good 48 hours after it is mixed up. I showed some students how to use it and raved about how good it was and then it didn't work I'll mix them some more tomorrow or next Tuesday.

The results of a dye evening with the Venturers (older scouts) are also becoming available as people wash out their fabrics. The Venturers wanted to make real hippy tie dye spirals and circles. Here is my demonstration spiral to show the kids how to do it.

Here is the back of my son's shirt which he liked so much that he put on while it is still slightly damp! The rest of the Venturers will (hopefully) remember to bring in the results of their tie dye session on Monday next week. 

Artisit Residensi day 3 - discahrge paste

The spelling part of my brain has been affected by discharge paste fumes.. This is a seriously cool process but rather smelly and it was quite windy today so with all the doors and windows open for ventilation, every piece of paper I put down flew across the room.

The discharge paste I used is available from CCG in Auckland. I haven't tried the Jacquard version but I am sure it does something similar. You have to mix the paste with a catalyst to get it started and after about 24 hours it was starting to be a bit less effective.
You can screenprint, paint, stamp the stuff onto fabric. You let it dry then steam iron it and the colour change happens while you are ironing it.
I tried it on dark coloured silk, cotton and wool with varying results.

 

This is my favourite, it is a black tussore silk. The violet is even more screamingly violet than the photo shows. 

 This is some old Japanese silk from the lining of a kimono.

Some fine red silk, also from a kimono.

Another piece of textured kimono silk.

Some indigo kimono cotton. It has discharged to a lovely muted violet. I printed about 160cm of this. It is only about 30cm wide.

This piece of blue wool didn't work well at all. There is a slight colour change.

The top piece of velvet is cotton and looked good when it was discharged but when I washed it, the picture became very faint. The discharge must have only happened in the very top layer which washed off. The bottom piece of velvet is some sort of stretchy synthetic velvet and it turned out very nicely and has great possiblities for use in clothing except that I haven't got very much of it and doubt I can get more :-(

I was going to try exposing a silk screen in the sun as an experiment but the sun went in around then so I used the screen to expose a piece of a blueprint for a train. My father used to make models of East African railway train and this is a fraction of a Garrett. I have used the discharge paste through the silk screen, onto the indigo cotton. I wanted it to look like a blueprint. This is more of a 'purple print'.

I also tried mixing pigments into the discharge paste with the idea that when the underneath colour bleaches away the pigment colour will take it's place. Those pieces are still wet so will have to wait till tomorrow to make it onto the blog.

NB Special thanks to Lee-anne  who told me how to upgrade this blog so that the photos come where I want them!

Day 2 'Artist in Residence' experiments- Inktense, Litho-coal

This experiment was with 'Litho-coal'.
Lithocoal is a heat fixable charcoal. You can draw with it and then heat it in an oven to set it or on fabric just heat with an iron. I had never heard of it till Jenny Bowker sent me some of it to try last year.

The top photo shows Lithocoal on various different fabrics such as silk tussore and cotton. I also tried smudging it. The bottom photo shows Lithocoal used to draw the black noughts and crosses and Derwent Colour Inktense pencils used for the brown areas. The underlying fabric is a pale brown linen.

For the Lithocoal (I have been unable to find a supplier in New Zealand) draw onto the fabric, cover with baking paper and then iron on hot setting for 1-2 minutes.

For the Derwent Inktense pencils. Colour in, then use water to spread the pencil colour as a wash (like you would with Aquarelles when doing a pen and wash drawing) For more intense colours use fabric medium to spread as a wash.
I have tested whether the pencil colour washes out in water but it is pretty good. There is some loss of colour if you don't use fabric medium.

Day 1 "Artist in Residence' experiments! -screenprinting

Today was my first day as 'artist in res' at Whitireia Polytechnic in Porirua, New Zealand. I have the use of an office to store my stuff and to work on small bits and pieces as well as the use of the textile studio and darkroom when the students aren't using them, On Tuesdays and Thursdays I help out with the new Textile Mastercraft class.The Mastercraft class is 6 months long and is level 5. Many of the students will go on from there into the degree course.

The black and white pictures are my first experiments. I wanted to see what would work best as a photographic screenprint. I have always done designs with strong black lines but this time I wanted to find the thinnest line I can get away with, as well as which drawing/painting media are the best.

From left to right these are
Graphite pencil, permanent marker, B&W photograph, sharpie
Fern, doily, enamel pen, weed seed heads
10-24point text(bold), magazine photo, scraperboard, comic book

Light charcoal, lino print, indian ink splatter, gaphite pencil
Indian ink drawing, charcoal, monoprint, black paint
oil pastel, rotring pen, oil pastel, Indian ink (drawn with twig)

The purple print shows the results. Amazingly most of the media worked. The light charcoal, rotring pen, graphite and scraperboard pattern were the least successful as the lines were a bit too thin or the mark was too pale. The 10 point text worked better than I thought and the text didn't work at all on the comic picture (it says '...what the' ).

Best was Indian ink, lino block print, enamel pens, sharpie, laser printer text, objects like plants and doileys, oil pastel.

That's enough for today. I did do some more experiments but I'll save them for tomorrow as I don't know how to put the photos in the right order. At the moment they all end up at the beginning of the text.