Taking Textiles Further Feb 12

My City & Guilds courses were tutored by Janet Edmonds and I completed the Diploma in the summer of 2011. In order to continue developing my design skills, I signed up for Janet's 'Taking Textiles Further' course at Missenden Abbey.

In the February class we created grids by wrapping threads around frames and dipping these into paper pulp. Once the paper pulp was dry, we sprayed ink through these and other grids.

I must admit that I wasn't looking forward to the spraying as I'd tried it before and hadn't enjoyed it but this time I liked the results. All my spraying was done using only 2 colours, black brusho and a copper acrylic spray and I was really pleased at how many colour variants this produced and using only two spray bottles certainly made it a simpler process

As well as the sprayed paper, I also liked some of the paper grids I had created and I think that these could offer possibilities for inspiring a piece of textile work but more more thought required about that.

These were my favourite pieces of sprayed paper and I like the inclusion of the 'tube'. Perhaps this could be included in a piece of work?

We also combined papers together and drew sections of them in charcoal. Here's a partial view of my charcoal drawing:

I wanted to create a simple thermofax that I could use for printing on cloth, so I used black ink to spray through the grid (no over spraying). I selected a portion of the image to create my thermofax which looked something like this:

I think that this thermofax is going to be one of the most useful that I have created so far and because I am  still trying to get my blog posts to catch-up with my work - I can tell that I have already used it on a number of pieces of cloth but more on that in other posts....