Black and White Sketchbook for Textiles

So I have not written anything here since October last year. It’s not that I haven’t done anything to write about - in fact the opposite, I have been doing lots on my Textiles Practice course, and writing about it in my sketch books, but not here.

Must try harder.

Between November and January we translated our black and white sketchbook work relating to our Found Objects into textile samples. This included using printing and dyeing techniques as well as stitching.

A paper collage of a snail shell was the inspiration for a piece of raw edge appliqué which provided an opportunity to demonstrate free-motion machine stitching as well as hand stitching.

I have begun to explore image processing, the first image here is a magnified image of a seed from an umbellifer (cow parsley family), the second is an observational drawing. I then took a detail from that drawing and interpreted it in stitch. And finally I dyed some cotton fabric using wax beads as a resist to create a similar pattern; black due notoriously doesn’t produce black fabric!

Amongst my found objects was a button collection. Many buttons have a marbled appearance, and i experimented with marbling by dragging black and white ink across a page and then using that as a printing plate. The papers produced were cut into circles to take the idea back to buttons.

One of the dyeing techniques we tried in college was using a flour resist. this produced a lovely crackle effect on the fabric, reminiscent of my marbled buttons. So I stitched into the fabric, in a fine grid leaving circles of negative space.

Another surface treatment we used was sublimation printing. This is a printing technique used to transfer ink to synthetic fabrics, which do not take up the ink well. I used a flour crackle resist to achieve the pattern seen here. The circles were appliquéd on to the black fabric and then the contour stitching was hand stitched. The combination of the patterns on the circles and the stitched lines makes me think of gravitational field lines ( once a physicist ….).