Dreaming Spirals

The River Usk, that is, this time, the one in Newport where I live.  I took some more mud photos and some of the new pedestrian bridge.  They are doing lots of building there at the moment to prepare for the Ryder cup which is happening at a local golf complex in 2010, and I wanted to take photos of the progress.  And develop my Mud imagery, of course!

This is the bridge with one of the road bridges in the distance.

Halfway across… look up and you see…

I love these old rotten, wooden structures …

And that mud…

I HAVE been doing lots of arty stuff this week too - preparing an altered book (my first!), playing with Lazertran Silk, as well as adding my Etsy details to my business cards and Moo cards but haven’t taken any photos yet.  More on that later.  And putting some ATCs in my Etsy shop.  Where does time go?

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I’ve been spending Saturdays in Pontypridd in the Welsh Valleys for the last few weeks, because DS2 is attending a Maths Masterclass at the University of Glamorgan in Trefforest.  Walking along the river Taff from Trefforest to Pontypridd today (fortified by cups of tea at every cafe I reached!) I found some colourful graffiti on the dual carriageway bridge supports.

I also saw a heron sitting on a rock but it was too far away for the photo to come out properly.  It was sitting on the same rock a few weeks ago and if it hadn’t moved its head, I would have suspected that it was a statue….

Here is Pontypridd across the park, with the low lying clouds over the hills behind.

Thank you to Joan at Sixsisters, who has featured my Etsy shop in her blog and said some very flattering things about me! 

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One of my wallhangings is on a Treasury on Etsy.  Treasuries are groups of people’s favourite items - thank you, Marion, for including me!

Here is a screenshot of the relevant treasury page.  You can find the actual page here.  Tulip is on the bottom right of the photo.  (Hint, hint: the more clicks and comments a treasury gets, the higher it gets in the lists and the more publicity the pieces get!  So get clicking!!!!).

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I had some fun with my Print Gocco machine yesterday. 

I forgot to take pictures of the process, I got so into it but here is the machine with the lid open as if it was all ready to go (cheating here, I took this one today!).

I drew a picture of a bird (inspired by a medieval picture I saw) with a Staedtler pigment liner.

I flashed a screen (using one of the masters for printing on paper in the machine, rather than on the thermofax film for printing on fabric) and inked it up, first with browns and greens, then when they were spent I added more funky colours, mixing Pearl-ex powders with some of them to give a bit of a sheen. 

Some of these are on card, some on mulberry paper and other papers.  I also printed a couple on Moleskine journals and, while the ink was damp I added some embossing powder and, after finishing printing, heated this with a heat gun.

These are on some handmade paper made with cotton rag which I bought from the papermill at Wookey Hole Caves which we visited a couple of years ago.

After that I went wild and printed on anything which stood still long enough!

Today I added some watercolour wash to one of them - the ink is oil based so it acted as a resist.

I expect some of these things will find their way into my Etsy shop sooner or later!  And definitely stitched into some of my work…

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On Tuesday I took the kids to Birmingham on the train.  I grew up in Stoke-on-Trent and visited the city quite a few times when I was growing up, but I hadn’t been there since the early 80s.  I was pleasantly surprised at how the 60s concrete Bullring I remembered had been replaced by an upmarket shopping centre.

I found a walking trail on the BBC website - it was actually a natural history one but I downplayed this aspect of it to the kids!  It took us round mostly pedestrian areas and along some canals.

This is the facade of the new Selfridges building.

This is down towards St Martin’s church - it is looking towards the sun and I like the spooky effect of all the shadows.

I like the way this skyscraper has the reflection of another in it.  This is near the International Convention Centre where we had lunch.

I think I must like reflections.  Like this one of one of the buildings alongside the canal.

However, what interested the kids most (to my surprise… I thought they had outgrown such things) was where they were digging out the foundations for a new office block.

More reflections, canal boats, and BBC Birmingham.

Birmingham seems to like skyscrapers.  Note the person cleaning the walls on the right - DS3 thought he was abseiling!

Of course, the kids couldn’t wait till we got back to the beginning of the walk and hit the shops…. Game, Borders and HMV of course!

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After those days of screen printing I decided to do some stamping, painting on fabric and then, to finish up all the leftover dye, some low water immersion dyeing in a cat litter tray.

I used a Speedball brayer to print this fabric.

For this one, I rubber stamped the navy blue dye then overprinted in places, then when it was dry I painted over it with thin dye paste - I left some of it with a white background because I thought it might be useful to have some that wasn’t overprinted, to cut up and use for something else.

For this one, I printed with two different stamps (which I made by cutting fun foam and sticking it on to thick card.  I then painted over it in the same way as the previous picture after the printed bit was dry.  It ran a bit but I think I quite like the effect, to use possibly as part of a mud collage/quilt.

This is a silk charmeuse scarf (which I’m going to use as fabric rather than a scarf as it is nearly a metre wide) which I painted with thickened dyes.  I tried to replicate the mud patterns from one of my photos  but using rather brighter colours!  Here is a detail:

Here are a selection of some of the immersion dyed fabrics:

Phew!  That’s about it for my 3 day printing and dyeing fest!  Hope you enjoyed looking at all the fabrics over the last couple of weeks. 

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As well as the other types of screen printing I did some with straightforward newspaper stencils. 

When we were in France in the summer, I took some photos of people walking by, and I used a couple of these as the basis for my designs. 

I had manipulated these with a view to using them as Gocco images and these are the resulting photos.

I cut the outlines out of a sheet of newspaper and used that as a stencil.  After I had printed that, I laid the dyed-covered stencil face down on the fabric and screened with another colour.  I did this until the newspaper tore and I couldn’t use it again.  I love the way the newspaper wrinkled and gave such atmospheric texture.  Here are the results:

These are on calico, which takes the prints really well.

This is on scrim or similar fabric - the images are a lot clearer than you can tell in the photograph.

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