Photo of the Day

The photography weekend showed up the inadequacy of my tripod and camera lens (the original kit lenses) , so I splurged on a new tripod and a new18-270mm zoom lens and today I filled in 15 minutes while waiting for friends to arrive on the ferry from Picton, by trying out my new camera gear. Wellington seems to have been invaded by fluorescent (alien) codes, why?

This week I have been screen printing fabric for vests for the chorus of an opera, making white dresses for a photoshoot, designing a new workshop called 'Design Your own Modern Quilt', and sewing prayer flags onto tape for a schools project run by Pataka, Whitireia and artist Tiffany Singh.

I love the variety, costume/textile/quilt...

Screenprinting

I am not very good at this blogging, I forget to update it for weeks at a time.

Over the last few weeks I have taught 2 screenprinting classes. One was for the public and one for digital design students who had the designs all ready to go and just needed to get them onto a t-shirt. One was very low-tech, the kind of process I use at home where I don't have access to all the fancy equipment. One was high-tech in that we used the vacuum table and special exposure unit.
Both classes were great fun but I was shattered at the end! I didn't even take any photos.
 Over the 8 days I managed to coat about 20 screens with the photo emulsion and help students coat about 20 more, and help about 15 students with their designs which required at least 3 colours per print. Pretty full on.

I have also been making scarves for a shibori exhibition at Barometer Gallery ,13 Gurner St., Paddington, NSW. The exhibition will be opened by Yoshiko Wada who wrote the bible for shibori artists 'Shibori: The art of Shaped resist"

SCARF
- contemporary shaped resist dyed scarves/shawls

Barometer Gallery will open on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday each week from the 8th September to the 3rd October, 10am to 6pm.

Here is a detail of one of my scarves that will be on the sale table. We each have one major piece and up to 5 for sale. This is the first time I have entered a shibori exhibition. It feels funny not entering a quilt which needs a hanging sleeve etc. I don't even know how they display them.

This scarf is made of 100% merino wool jersey and has been clamped and bound and dyed about 6 times in acid dyes. Dyeing wool is also something new for me and I have been experimenting with both acid and fibreactive wool dyes. They react differently to Procion dyes on cotton and I am just learning how they work.

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.