This week at college - textile printing

Apart from the briefing on the research paper that we'll all be writing, there wasn't much going on officially at college this week - though I gained a lot from several conversations. Apart from spending time in the library looking at this 'n' that, my week centred on another day of textile printing. I wanted to print the "roads" and some background, trying out various colours on various fabrics, some half printed already.

These "stencils", meant to keep the roads already printed on the fabric from being overprinted, turned out interestingly - don't they look like figures running, running - across a landscape of words - hmm ...
I was mainly using a grey colour that included a bit of purple; it turned out better on some colours than others - the mustard silk was particularly good, but it's hard to see here -
More of the combination of screens - on black linen and on white cotton (next week - bigger roads and smaller background lines; and I'll use fabric not paper for the stencil bits) -
My favourite of the day is on cotton with a bit of (rather nasty) machine embroidery, which the printing transforms -
Some of the fabrics I'm using are from reclaimed clothing, with a view to - what, exactly? Maybe it's about getting something out of my system, and eventually moving on. Meanwhile one of the highlights is seeing what other people who come to print are doing - sometimes it's t-shirts as presents for friends, sometimes it's huge bits of cloth; it can even be printing on resin that has metal particles in it. Like the printing ink sitting on fabric, these ideas are sitting on the outer layer of my consciousness ... it will take a process like heat-setting to get them coming out in my work (or is that too much of an analogy?).