I discharged it with the same screen and I like the results, especially the blue coming out – that must have been some turquoise dye that didn’t discharge.

And a detail:

The first layer of the next two fabrics is on this page of my blog and the second layer is here.  I decided that I preferred this green fabric horizontally as I could see sort of leafy/flowery shapes.  So I added a lot of circles and a few swirls here and there and this is the result:

A detail:

The fabric in the photo below looked much better when I had activated the discharge paste but before I rinsed it.  For some reason, the discharged orange areas just looked like a paler gold but when I rinsed it, they turned a sort of greeny colour.  Maybe this was from the blue underneath that wasn’t showing when the thick discharge paste was on top of it.  Anyway, it’s just an example of the unpredictability of this process!  Or my lack of experience in it…  I quite like the results anyway, even though they aren’t as striking as I thought they would be.  It opens up some lighter areas on to the fabric.

And a detail.  I mostly printed discharge paste with the same screens as I used for the original layers but I also scraped some through a circular stencil in places.

When I did the soy wax resist printing in the autumn, I used some to make an interfacing stencil from the instructions in Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan’s book.  For this one, I just dribbed the soy wax on from a tjanting tool.  I didn’t get round to doing any printing with dyes from them so I used this one with the discharge paste.  I really like the effect.   Not sure where this fabric is going next (what’s new?) but it makes some great marks, doesn’t it?

For the next two, I had taken photos, the first of the sun shining on the river and the new bridge in Newport, and I decided to try transferring what was in my mind on to the fabric.  I made a rough sketch and then just played about with masking tape and a few stencils and this was the result:

The other photo was of street lamps shining on a night time street, so I did the same sort of thing.  This is a detail of it:

This is the whole thing; not sure where it’s going next…

Last week I spent several hours discharging some of the fabric that I printed in the autumn as well as some ugly fabric which was languishing on my shelves from previous screenprinting attempts.  I also discharged some black fabric.  I used formosol with print paste.   The smell is still hanging around my studio, even though I did the actual discharging outside wearing a respirator.

Here are a couple of them, showing the progression of colour on and off them.  (I just spent a good while searching for photos of the original fabric on Picasa too – at least this blog can now serve as documentation of their development!).

This  fabric started off as an unprepossessing dyed/printed piece from 2006. This was part of it originally:

It sat on my shelves because I didn’t know what on earth to do with it.  So I painted it red this autumn.

I wasn’t sure I liked it any more like this.  So I screened it with discharge paste and a thermofax screen I made from a home made rubber stamp design and now I like it a lot better!

You can see a little peek of the second fabric on that photo above, which has also been overprinted with the same screen.

Here is how it started:

This fabric was made from a breakdown printing screen and was one of the pieces made when the screen was breaking down quite a lot and much of the original detail had been lost.  This page shows the original screenprinting session results.

I wanted to unify it all and didn’t particularly like the original fabric so I overprinted it with the ‘squares’ screen in black.  Here it is on my table just after being printed.

As well as printing with black, I decided to give it some depth by discharging areas using the same screen.  So here it is now – I think it looks much better.  Not sure where both of these pieces are going next but I hope it doesn’t take another 5 years to decide!!

I love this screen.  Not sure if this is going to be horizontal or vertical yet.  I printed it a very pale grey first and this is the second layer.

This is the same screen using different colours. 

This fabric is the one I printed with the very dense diagonal lines in green (the more yellowy green sections).  I used soy wax as a resist and screened using a thermofax screen over the rest in turquoise. 

This is the reverse, which is quite good too!

This is the blue fabric I started and posted a few weeks ago.  Again I used soy wax as a resist to keep the blue and screened using the larger screen of the same design in a browny-orange colour. 

For the top part of this one I ran the linen yarn (from the previous post) between lines of pins across the fabric and then screened with a blank screen (I got this from Leslie Morgan and Claire Benn’s book, Screenprinting).  I’m referring to it a lot, as well as their Thermofax Printing book.  The two side pieces were prints taken from the middle one as it was a bit gloopy. 

I screened this one with a blank screen on to crumpled fabric, uncrumpled it and screened some more.  That was another from the Screenprinting book.

More later!

I’ve got a bit behind with talking about my screenprinting here – I’ve taken photos but just been getting on with it instead of documenting it!  These are a few different shaped pieces drying on the line.  I used these as test pieces, play pieces really.  I bought several bundles of small pieces of fabric from Empress Mills at the Knitting and Stitching Show a week ago (well, actually 4 kilos of Egyptian cotton fabric pieces for £5 which I thought was pretty good until I had been carrying it around for a couple of hours!  I didn’t really register that 4 kilos weighs a lot.. well, 4 kilos!).  I wanted to check that I had scoured them enough because it is sheeting fabric.  The black dye here had also been made about 5 weeks ago and I wanted to check it was still viable.

I have been making a lot of thin lines with my parallel pens and I like the effect they make.

I painted this first of all with very dilute yellow-brown dye and then ‘wrote’ with it, an actual sort of diary entry  whatever came into my head.  It is purposely blurry and illegible.  I just wanted to get the effect of writing, of the marks made by writing.

These long thin strips were some of the fabric bits from Empress Mills.   They took the dye well too, and as you can see, the black dye doesn’t seem to have lost much, if any, of its potency yet.  I’m glad about that because I hate throwing anything out! 

This is what I did today.  It’s a thermofax screen made from one of the pages of mark making with my parallel pens.  I really like the effect.  I printed the yellow dye first, then waited until it was dry enough not to bleed when the red-brown dye was screened, did the same with that and then with the darker brown.  Now it is batching.

This is some fabric I painted with the same screen, but with this one I deliberately kept printing while the dye was wet so it all blurred into each other.  I think this will be a very useful screen.  I’ve also printed one piece with just very light grey which I’m going to overprint.  I think I’ll discharge this one next.

And this is a detail of the fabric printed with the ‘leaf’ screen (the one I photographed with its shadow a few posts back).  I really like this and can see me using it a lot too.  Not sure yet where this fabric is going next.  I printed it in a few different colours and values between red and black and then I painted in some of the white areas with a very pale grey-blue colour.

I printed this piece using a screen which had thin masking tape stuck to it in parallel lines.  I heavily overprinted it in yellows, blues and greens and I like the effect.  It might just turn into a reeds piece eventually.  I’m definitely going to do more to these pieces of fabric.

This is a detail of a bit of it.

The sun was shining when I took the next piece so there’s a shadow across it!  I used two thermofax screens.  The first, with the smaller prints, was originally a rubber (eraser) which I carved into a grid design.  I then used the stamp repeatedly on a piece of paper, scanned it into the computer and made a screen from it.  Then I enlarged a section  of the single stamped design (actually enlarged several), made another screen from my favourite, and the larger overprint is that one.  Now it’s hanging up on my design wall while I decide what to do with it next.

This piece of fabric hasn’t been rinsed out yet and has been batching for about 5 days now just because I haven’t got round to it!  Slow fabric…  I ‘wrote’ a random design on a blank screen with thickened black dye and let it dry (this is breakdown printing) and then printed the screen with blue dye paint and clear print paste in a variety of values.  It broke down to the dotty design and then broke down completely and I filled up the remaining white areas with the empty screen using blue dye paint to which I gradually added black.  It’ll be interesting to see what it is like when it is rinsed.

This is another piece that hasn’t been rinsed yet.  I was trying to make a design which would reflect the diagonals of the reeds in the last couple of months’ reeds photos but our laser printer had broken so I had to do it using charcoal and gocco pens.  But for some reason the screen only partly imaged so the lines were very fine.  Maybe I need to run it through at a lower speed.  Anyway, I overprinted and overprinted this in a variety of shades of yellow and green and almost to brown so I’ll see how it turns out when it is rinsed.  It looks as though it’ll make a great background design anyway.  We’ve now bought a new laser printer so I will try again and photograph my drawings and print them out.  The fabric is very stiff at the moment with the print paste as you can see from the photo but this will wash out.

I painted this reeds design (which is vaguely what the above screen was meant to look like but without the dots) using screen filler and screen drawing fluid and haven’t tried it yet but I thought the shadow cast when it was standing upright looked very effective.  I may use it to overprint the above fabric or discharge it.

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