Monday 11 July 2011

Belstead House CQ Summer School weekend

Not sure what's been happening with Blogger but this is the first time its allowed me to get onto my blog page.   So sorry for the delay in showing you some of our CQ activities last weekend but here they are as promised earlier.   

We started after dinner on Friday night with designwork to use over the weekend.   As a starting point Notan designs were used.  Notan as you know is a form of reverse patterning in black and white.  These are my efforts, a bit of an effort late Friday as I was quite tired from travelling.


The top one started with one 4" black square, as did the one below but I later used this second design to produce a piece of screen printed fabric.

 Some of the designs started as circles, this one I later used the cut out bits as a screen print design but never actually got round to using it.  I've brought it home to complete the process.   We drew the design onto freezer paper, ironed it onto non-fusible interface, covered the whole thing with emulsion paint.   Once it had dried peeled the freezer paper away to make a sort of faux thermofax screen. 



This is a dry print of the second design.   If you are CQ members you can see the resultant fabric in the Linda Maynard workshop folder on their website.  Unfortunately I didn't get round to take a photo.

My blue piece is just above the bottom one, not keen on it and will probably overdye and rescreen it.

This piece we 'blank' printed which basically means you use the screen without any design on it to cover the fabric with dye.  It's a great way to cover you fabric quickly with dye.  Once it had dried (and it was a lovely sunny weekend so drying wasn't a problem) it, along with the rest of the group's pieces were wrapped in polythene and snuggled up in an electric blanket to 'mature'.

Sunday morning we gave the pieces a wash to get rid of the excess dye, one or two had slight dye loss, all of mine went down the plughole!  Although I was under the impression I'd bought cotton sateen it was obviously not cotton as none of the dye stuff stuck to it.  Luckily it was the only piece of this fabric that I 'd used that weekend.

I made another piece, this time using cotton poplin but it will have to wait to be discharge printed.

After each printing session the screens had to be washed to get rid of the dye.  If its left on the screens to dry it renders them useless.

This is Rose with her lovely piece.

The soda dye buckets were in constant use over the weekend, you should have seen the floor when we finished on Sunday.

Belstead House from the front.

The path down to Belstead Meadows brook, lots of lovely works round here.

The view from our workshop windows, the flowers were beautiful and it was a great place to hang the fabric to dry.

3 comments:

Julie said...

I wish I'd done this course now :-) It looks so exciting and you have a lot to work with. I don't quite understand why the screens had to be washed out so promptly as I understood that dyes could be removed from screens with more print paste, as in de-constructed screen printing.

I've been having problems with Blogger too but I've been blaming Norton on my new laptop.

Hope you're not too worn out after the busy weekend. I think I'm still feeling the effects.

Sharne Gregory said...

Lucky you!! A weekend at Belstead having fun, no cooking or washing up either! Thanks for the info on the faux thermo screens, shall have to give this a try.

Digitalgran said...

What a lovely weekend you had Annette. I love your 2nd and 3rd Notan designs particularly and what a great way to cover your fabric with the plain screen print. I love screen printing, but never seem to have a chance of doing any at home.