'If you make happiness your goal, then you're not going to get to it… The goal should be an interesting life."

Dorothy Rowe

Saturday 4 April 2009

I felt as if I hadn't done very much today ...

until, with some difficulty, I persuaded Picasa to let me upload this lot.

I said that in the workshop yesterday we had made a squiggle and used it for a couple of different exercises - but that I didn't like my squiggle.

So I did another one - top right in the photo. Top left is a little Fiskars craft knife I bought recently, and love - it is so easy to use. You put your finger through the ring and press on the back of the grey section and you have lots of control.

But I digress. After making our squiggles we were told to cut the shape out of another piece of lining paper. This time I cheated and drew the squiggle straight on to the second piece before cutting it out.

That piece was folded and we doodled all over the top, giving this rather cool result underneath.


And then we did it again.


Below is my piece of blindfold embroidery.

Picasso said "As a child I drew like Raphael, it took the rest of my life to draw like a child." Well, I never embroidered that well but I remember bits of sewing that looked like this ...


These are before and after pictures of a piece of fabric I daubed with batik wax in the workshop and then discharged with bleach today. I hope the black will still be visible when I remove the wax.





And these are before and after pictures of another piece of fabric painted with wax and dunked in much stronger bleach.



See the difference? No. neither do I - apart from the fact that the sun had gone in.

I managed to find some discharge paste so I will try that tomorrow. I have no idea if fabric which isn't affected by bleach will respond to discharge paste - and I have had the paste for a couple of years so I have no idea if it is any good anyway.

If neither of those works I thought I would try white fabric paint, - remove the wax and set the paint in one go. Creative opportunity or wonderful mess?

Plan D is the bin ...

The last green image is a bit of computer manipulation I made when I was doing C&G. My design research theme was 20th century art - and I discovered a wonderful series of paintings of an apple tree by Mondrian. A couple of the images are
here.



This is [a long way] after Mondrian.


1 comment:

lisette said...

i'll be interested to see what happens with the discharge paste. i have had very mixed results with it - it doesn't seem to work at all on japanese fabric and i don't know why.