Monoprint and handstitch

It's been an exciting three days in room 305 at City Lit, as we printed and bonded and stitched. Where to start? With Amarjeet's samples -

and the aims of the course -

The first day was all about printing, using binder and pigment, mixed and spread on acrylic plates ... and making marks additively, subtractively, or with drawing on the back of the paper/fabric ... not to forget stencils and ghost prints - 

My theme started out as Labyrinths ... and was modified by whim and "found marks"

Monoprints on paper

... and on fabric

A collection - I was trying to be adventurous, starting with the light yellow, and found
 it needed a lot of "layering" to knock it back

Layered favourites

At home that evening I tried out my idea of glueing paper to linen to make a concertina book, and did some digital prints of "feet" from the V&A series to make a small maze-book. I also found some local maps to be cut and used as stencils. So by lunchtime on day two a lot of yesterday's results were overprinted, with greys and some black (I was getting back into my comfort zone) -

The drawn marks are a loose adaptation of the maps

They worked really well on some deconstructed linen trousers

Technical stuff -

After the stencils have been laid on the rolled-out ink and printed on paper, they are lifted off and the fabric printed

The brayer helps transfer all the remaining ink to the fabric

On other prints, using my hand to smooth the fabric onto the ink resulted in some
mysterious dark marks - which turned out to be caused by my ring

Following on from a maps-grids-hatching sub-theme,  the "lazy Sunday afternoon" drawing was scanned, front and back, and printed out at various scales -

Nice heavy paper will make this useful for endpages of the floppy books

Other favourite prints -

A roomful of people getting on with some stitching -

On the final day, a group session looking at works in progress - some  of my favourites -

Wolfgang started a scroll

Michelle combined forest-inspired prints into a book

Lisa printed onto sleeves ...

... and bravely grappled with insertion stitches

Jeannie's delicate piece is based on poppy stems with their tiny, glowing bristles
- it brought to mind a print by Gego in the RA's "Geometries" show

Planning two books to use every scrap of the grey-on-yellow print -

The papers are bondawebbed onto fabric

At the end of the course, this collection of books - some are ready for a bit more stitching -

The sequel

Next day I got out all the papers and planned more little books for "the feet suite" -

Lots of pages ready to add to fabric, or to both sides of "mazes"

The newest book includes mazy stitching on the supporting fabric, and awaits more stitch -

The "adventurous" yellow, so disastrous at first, is working out ok!