Textiles in Art. Final Evaluation

Textiles in Art has been a very enjoyable course involving many different techniques and materials. Below is a step by step list of the different methods we practiced during the course followed by the reasons behind the idea of the final piece and the making of it.

Lino and Transfer printing. This involved creating prints that could be used several times. Transfer printing involved making a design on a piece of newsprint and using the iron to transfer the design. Lino printing (or a form that is similar to Lino printing) involved imprinting a design onto a foam board, then painting the board and pressing onto fabric.

    

Making Art through Adhesive fabrics, paints and prints. This session was very enjoyable as we were able to create our own design and I chose to make an abstract piece of work reflecting a mood rather than an object.

Suffolk Puffs. A very relaxing session where we made our own little Suffolk puffs by cutting fabric into a circle and then stitching around it and pulling in the thread creating a puffed ball-like effect.

Fabric distressing by methods such as bleaching and burning. This project was given to us as homework. The aim was to cause distress to several different pieces of fabric and this proved harder than I had imagined.

Batik. This involved trickling hot wax over fabric and then covering with fabric ink, allowing some time to dry a little and then ironing. This was very enjoyable and I used some of these pieces towards my final piece.

Photo to fabric transferring. At college we were taught to transfer images from photo to fabric by using a product called Image Maker but before this I had researched this method and found out about using a Gel or Gloss Medium. Basically covering the newly printed out image in medium and then pressing onto cotton fabric. I was very pleased with this method and used this method in my final piece.

Making a 3D model. This was achieved both at home as homework and in the classroom in groups. The cube was my homework and made from rough firm fabric. Basically I cut the fabric into two pieces and sewed them together making a cube. The sphere was created in class with Hazel and Cara and proved extremely tricky to achieve.We had to choose a building to copy to some extent and we chose a sphere like building.  It had crossed my mind that perhaps we should have chosen a more simple building to copy.

Fabric designs using paint and a roller. This was one of my favourite sessions as I was able to let myself go and keep creating. I used some of these designs in my final pieces.

Some Textile artist research involved meeting Susan Sydall who proved to be a very inspirational artist. Her work was quirky and beautifully made. I also researched artists on the Internet and found many inspirational textile artists including Joan Schulze, Jennifer Solon, Cindy Kearney, Louise Baldwin and Sarah Welsby. I had come to realise that I leaned towards the more abstract style of art and I preferred the gritty distressed look to clean and pretty.

My 3D piece of art was made using a soldering iron and copper wire. I created a frame and stand which I soldered together and placed a piece of crochet that I had made around it in an attempt to create an abstract piece of art. I may experiment more with 3D art and wire but I didn't want to choose this as my final piece as I feel I need to improve in this area.

Making the final Piece.
I decided that I wanted to create a collage for my final piece involving many little pieces, some of which had been created in college sessions. I wanted my theme to be centred around the social and economical landscape involving the mood of the people as regards the ongoing Austerity and the cuts to public services, NHS and Welfare State. Through use of my sketchbook which I used for jotting down my ideas, I began to have ideas involving bar codes to represent consumerism, tally charts to represent statistics, graffiti to represent a dissatisfied mood of the people, the game of noughts and crosses to represent winners and losers and the haves and the have-nots.  £20 notes and Euros to represent the current problems faced in these times as money is always most usually the root of most problems other than health, love and relationships but even money affects those things too. Also Newspaper headlines as the landscape is covered in the Media bombarding us with news, sometimes truthful, sometimes manipulating and cunning. I also wanted to use abstract patterns in my collage that reflected the type of mood I wanted to project. One of those pieces came from a project we did at college that came from mixing rusted screws and old rusty door hinges with tea. The result was gorgeous. I wished that I had made more of these pieces, but I only had one. As my ideas evolved I decided that I wanted to create more than one collage so I could present my work as a group of ideas instead of one big piece. I bought three canvases and placed my fabric pieces on to them which involved batik deigns, photo to fabric transfers, and painted fabric, some machine stitch over the batik and some hand stitch also. When placed in the desired positions I then filled in the gaps with plaster moulding roll which works by placing in water and then fitting onto the canvas. When dry paint may be applied. I used acrylic paint over the plaster mould. Basically I wanted my collages to speak but without coming across as 'in yer face'. If my artwork appears to be a collection of fabrics and nothing else than that is fine but I also want a meaning to my work, if the observer is looking for one.

Final Pieces for Marks in The Landscape

Below are my final pieces for Textiles in Art. Basically they are collages made from different fabric and designs including batik, image maker designs, handmade designs on fabric with paint using a roller, rusted fabric, and some machine and hand stitch. I also included acrylic paints and the use of a plaster moulding roll which works by wetting the plaster mould and then placing it onto the canvas. After drying paint may be applied.
Below are photographs of my collages which are meant to represent the social and economic mood of the landscape.

Jennifer Solon: Mixed Media And Textile Artist

Searching for inspiration, I have come across Jennifer Solon who I believe is a very talented mixed media artist. Originally working with fabrics Jennifer has transformed her work to that of mixed media incorporating paints, pigments and waxes into layers.
Her work involves the use of hand dyed textiles, digital imagery, papers and paint. She has been described as an improvisational artist who works on her own intuition and thrives on play and experimentation.
Jennifer's uses the relationship between colour, shape and texture in her art.

Handpainted Barcodes

I have recently been playing around with a few ideas for the final project for Textile Art and have sketched examples in my sketchbook. The latest idea for Marks in the Landscape involve the bar code as I'm using the economy and social attitude and mood of the country and landscape for my final piece.
I have painted these barcodes using heat sensitive fabric paint which I bought from HobbyCraft. Firstly I attempted to create a semi decayed/rusty/mouldy background and then painted the bar code over the top. These pieces will now need to be ironed so as to bond together the paint with the fabric.

Textile Art: Ideas For The Final Piece

Just the phrase 'final piece' is now starting to cause a slight shiver down my spine. However fun textile Art sessions have been, it is now getting serious and I'm still not 100% sure how I am going to do what I think I'm going to attempt. Never the less in the class I decided to use some of the batik pieces I made during an earlier Textile session. Firstly I chose a couple of photo's of close up walls revealing a pattern of some kind. I then machine stitched over the fabric using the darning foot so as to resemble the pattern in some way.
I realise that I may need to create several small pieces so I can choose the best ones to add to one larger collage or mixed-media piece of art.

Textile Art 3D Session

For our last Textile Art session we were shown a number of pictures of unusually shaped buildings and told to replicate one of them into a 3D piece of art. 
This proved particularly difficult as the project we were working on involved sphere like objects and our first attempt to create a 3D sphere by intertwining wire and covering with fabric failed.
However after realising that we would need to create several circles first and then stitch them together things started to progress.
Here's how we did it: Firstly we bent wire into a circle and then both machine stitched and hand stitched fabric around the wire. After this and to save time we used paper and stuck the paper around the wire. When we had at least twelve circles we started to stitch the circles together forming one larger sphere.

Textile Art Homework: 3D

For our Textile Art homework we were given some rather rough and stringy pieces of fabric to go home with and told to try to manipulate those pieces into something resembling 3D.
After some contemplation as to what to do I decided I would try to make a cube. This proved quite tricky as the fabric kept straying and falling apart the more I played about with it but in the end I did manage to form some sort of a cube looking object. Firstly I cut the fabric into two and then dabbed some gloss medium adhesive onto the pieces to make them a little firmer. When dry I roughly hand stitched the pieces together forming a cube.

                                         

 

Photo To Fabric Transferring

Just a small blog on the success of photo to fabric transferring that I've recently discovered. Actually the process is quite simple although there are various ways of doing it. The articles I read suggested buying a gel medium however I spent too long searching for this stuff in HobbyCraft and in the end decided to buy Gloss Medium by Winsor and Newton. Gloss Medium is used for acrylics to increase depth of colour. It also has a binder and adhesive properties. I hoped that this would work seeing as it cost £7.99. Luckily I was very happy with the results which are shown in the photograph below.
So how did I do it? Firstly I printed out my chosen picture after flipping the pic back to front. I then covered the pic in the gloss medium and pressed it onto a piece of fabric. I then took a heavy book. The one I chose happened to have a plastic cover and this is where I made a mistake which worked out very well. As according to the instructions I read it is advised to leave the fabric and gel medium covered pic overnight until they are firmly glued together and without leaving anything (like my book) on top of them. After drying scrape away the paper (which is tedious) revealing the image on the cloth. However my impatience got the better of me and after about an hour and half I lifted the book to see how my experiment was doing but the paper got stuck to the laminated book and came away from the fabric. The image though was fine. Note: give the book cover a good clean before the medium has a chance to dry.

The Sketch Book

This week in Textile Art our tutor Tom very helpfully gave us some examples of the sketchbook that a lot of us have been fearful of.  At the start of the session I couldn't understand why the textbooks he showed us didn't mark particularly well as they were very artistically done and some extremely lovely looking. Take for example the book with stitches around every single page. How time consuming, I thought. Never the less, I think what I have to remember when it comes to the dreaded sketch book is that it is there as a tool to log my ideas, no matter how scruffy they are and even if I don't use any of them. It is not necessarily a piece of art in itself although some decoration doesn't hurt. One important thing to remember I think is that the sketchbook is meant to be a visual thing, with maybe some notes or lists. The blog is for words and the sketch book for pictures. Does that sound right?

Bolton Museum Textiles

Whilst on  a brief visit to Bolton's main library a few days ago, I stumbled across this rather nice textile exhibition in the museum upstairs. The exhibition consists of some of the oldest textiles in the world including a coarsely woven Egyptian linen and also a linen that dates back to around 1610 which was found in Lancashire in 1927 although was possibly imported. Below are photographs of these pieces which I requested permission to take.  However putting the historical celebration of these pieces aside, I must admit that I enjoyed the roughness and agedness of the fabrics regardless of the 'actual' age of the linen. I appreciated the appearance of their imperfect and decaying state.
Also included in the exhibition are some fine examples to the printing industry in days gone, which included information on printing rollers which were used to be impressed onto fabric resulting in many different colours and patterns. Also a display of some very interesting and appealing Bolt Stamps.
What's more there is also a piece of art by Julian Trevelyan on display which possibly came about through a visit he took to Bolton in the 1930s as part of the 'Mass Observation Worktown' project.
The exhibition is not a very large one but is worth a quick look and is free of charge.

BATIK

I was pleased at getting the opportunity of having a go at the art of batik in our textile art class last Thursday. It's a relatively simple exercise although getting it quite right is something that needs works. Never the less I really enjoyed trickling the hot wax in mindless patterns over my piece of fabric, then painting over the piece with fabric ink and repeating the process some two or three times more before ironing the wax away revealing the finished design. I realised that I was working with no plan when it came to creating the patterns. Instead I almost thoughtlessly just let the wax loose over the fabric. I think I had decided that I wouldn't really know if I'd made a mistake till the exercise was over anyway and it's true that I am more fond of the outcome of some of my pieces over the others but I'm not sure if I could say what I did right or wrong just yet.
Here are my designs.

 

HOMEWORK: Fabric Distressing/Aging

For our Textiles in Art homework we were instructed to go and try out different methods in order to decay/distress/age five different pieces of fabric. I found this quite fun but a lot more difficult than I expected. Material is a lot tougher than I imagined. However I did enjoy some of the results and have been inspired for future projects. The bleach and denim made me consider the idea of bleaching words or patterns into fabric and I liked the pretty candle wax effect on the netted fabric, even though it doesn't appear to resemble decay or age.
Below are photos of the results.

Cotton: Scratched and torn with stanley knife.

Denim: Soaked in bleach for about half n hour.
 

Leather: Rubbed with cheese grater.
 



Netted Fabric: Candle was spilt and dripped over the fabric.

                               Satin: Burnt in sections by hovering over flame on candle.

4th Textile Art Session

During the session with Tom we were introduced to hand applique which was quite a fiddly process but quietly enjoyable all the same. Basically what we had to do was to draw a circle on a piece of material and then 'up and down' stitch all the way around leaving a few inches of cotton at either end. Once stitched pull the two pieces of cotton creating a little pouch and then straighten and knot. Must admit, I found it quite difficult to keep the stitches straight but oh how cute the little fellows turned out even though mine were quite scruffy.
The second half of the evening included a mixture of different scraps of fabrics, some card (optional) and adhesive paper. Basically what I tried to do was to create a sort of abstract (that word again) collage. The fabric scraps were made to stick to a square piece of materiel by ironing the adhesive paper with the scraps of fabric.  This transferred the stickiness. Then once the scraps were placed in the desired position on the base materiel I used the iron again over the piece to secure further. When I realised there was no more adhesive paper left I decided to use red fabric paint on my piece. I took a netted piece of fabric and used it as a print for my paint. I then took my piece home and ironed the heat sensitive paint when dry and then put the piece under the sewing machine to add further effects. However I did break my needle so it all became a little frustrating.

 

 

Joan Schulze; Acclaimed mixed media, collage and Fibre artist

Whilst browsing through textile art collages on the internet I came across a piece of work by Joan Schulze that I felt stood out. My attention was captured by her ability to give her art that scratchy distressed appearance that I really admire.
So through a little more research on Joan Schulze I found that she has been exploring the art of the quilt medium for well over 35 years. She has experimented and mastered various ways of manipulating and altering fabric and she includes the uses of dye, paint, Xerox transfer, photography, photocopy, glue transfer and digital imagery. Interestingly though she regards her main theme in her art as poetry and touches on the surreal and strange.
Joan Schulze connects quilting with it's layering and collage effect to the likes of illuminated manuscript and urban walls.

'I am enamoured with surfaces and how they disintegrate over time. I layer and scratch away to reveal what is beneath the surface.'  Joan Schulze

Joan Schulze. Dress Code.



Joan Schulze. The Dark Side Of Domesticity.

 

 

Lino And Transfer Printing

The third session with Tom in Textiles was all about Lino and Transfer printing. It was a lovely messy very involved evening and the four hours just flew by. However personally I wasn't as taken with the transfer printing as I was with the lino printing style.
Transfer printing involves the layering technique. Simply paint a pattern/picture/text etc onto a sheet of newsprint paper using transfer print paint, then dry it with the hairdryer. Next take a piece of material and place the paper over the material, ironing over the top. This transfers the image from the paper onto the material. The newsprint design may be used again although will not be so strong in colour after a few attempts.
However many images and prints may be used over the same piece of material. Simply paint a new design on a separate piece of newsprint paper, then repeat the drying and ironing method.
Lino printing was extremely enjoyable and involved a foam printing board, fabric paint, a roller, newsprint paper and iron. First make your design by etching shapes, pictures etc into the foam board. Then roll the fabric paint onto the foam board. Next take some material (I used various colours and fabrics including silk and cotton) and place over the foam board using the roller to press the fabric onto the board thus transferring the image. After this let the fabric dry and then take a sheet of newsprint paper, place over the top and iron. This will bind the paint with the fabric.
Here are a few of my designs.

Lino Printing