Fabric Postcards
A brief detour from the Arizona trip…..
I’ve been a part of Postmark’d Art’s last two swaps. This time, I used one of the exercises from my Lino-Cutting class (blogged about in January and February). I rooted through about (no kidding) 20 years of old photos to find this one of a farm in southern England, which I snapped in about 1984. It was funny, I thought I used to be a good photographer, taking good and artsy shots. Hmmm. Not so much. Some were good, but most were….ummm…boring! It appears I have trained my eye for composition somewhat in the intervening decades! Anyway, this one was good, so I used it to cut a lino-block.
Here are the assorted prints drying on the floor:
Some blurred a bit, and will be cut up, tossed, or printed over. Others turned out great! I used three fabrics: a pale baby blue fossil fern (the one that looks grayish), a commercial sky print (the bright one), and a blue fabric I painted and fiddled with (and used some for the mermaid I blogged about recently). There are also two guardian Owls for a friend whose husband passed away recently. Owl’s are a favorite of hers (I carved the block during the class with her in mind!), and decided that she and Lou needed a guardian Angel Owl.
One difficulty I have had with the class, is that the teacher–Dijanne–is from Europe and Australia, and not so familiar with US brands. The Speedball water-based printing ink that I find makes the best prints is, shriek!, not wash-fast!!!!! So I have begun doing some testing. Here I took prints (heat set with the iron and not) of a sun, then treated each with various things like soft gel medium, a varnish for textiles, GAC 900 (a compound for using paints on textiles), and nothing. I also want to run another test where I treat the fabric FIRST, then apply the Speedball ink. I don’t like how on a couple of these the color of the fabric changes so much (not to mention how stiff it got)! I also have tried using Krylon Spray Fixative, an archivally safe spray fixative; it is often used on top of pastels so they don’t smudge. Anyway…here’s a picture of the test, in progress. I next need to soak these and see what happens. Stay tuned!!
And here’s a shot of all the postcards in the swap:
June 24th, 2010 at 5:09 am
Oh, I wish I was in this swap! Lovely cards.
Marjolijn