Showing posts with label Bleaching Fabric. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bleaching Fabric. Show all posts

Monday, 5 November 2007

Inchies - Housies (& Some Bleach Experiments too)

The current challenge at Inching Artists is little "housies" (I mean to say, how can you call anything so small "houses"!) When I first started stamping I fell in love with a little set of house themed Inkum's but at that stage I bought images without really thinking about how I would use them, so of course they never got used beyond the first trial stamping. I also used to buy stamps that needed detailed colouring, and once again I have to admit that I hardly ever did or do detailed colouring... Anyway when I saw the "housies" theme, I immediately thought of my little pocket set of Inkum's and sure enough, there they were sitting (looking at me very reproachfully) at the back of one of my drawers of mounted stamps (these are sort of mounted in that they are foam backed).

These stamps were perfect for this theme and fitted nicely on one inch squares! I have stamped them on a collage paper background, added some small text (Collections) and a rub-on number, rubbed the edges with sepia ink and sprayed them with my favourite Gold Moon Shadow Mist. I love the idea that every house has a story to tell...

I had quite a productive weekend although nothing was actually finished! I also did some playing with bleach (using a barrel type waterbrush) on various types of cardstock - you can see a little of each of the results below. You can easily see I was having a swirly sort of day! For once all of the cardstock reacted to the bleach!

I also tried an eye dropper with concentrated bleach on black fabric and ended up with something that makes me think of Halloween (which I don't relate to at all being an Aussie) or glow in the dark effects. This is the same fabric that went quite brown using a spray bleach a couple of weeks ago...amazing really. This was a really small piece of fabric so it doesn't matter that it is so weird a result. I also worked on my jigsaw puzzle pieces (involved a lot of looking for small images of vintage women, nudes, bathing beauties etc), did some printing onto fabric in readiness for some ATCs, postcards and small art quilts, worked on some experiments with the embellisher etc etc. All in all it was a lovely weekend and it was quite hard to go back to work this morning with so many works in progress.

Sunday, 14 October 2007

My Weekend

Hmmm, I love weekends!
In amongst other normal life stuff (like making chocolate chip muffins for those in the family that still consume these evil things) I have just about finished all my "Oh, Baby" postcards, experimented with bleaching fabric (as a result of reading the wonderful Jacqueline's blog!), made good progress with some Lutradur ATCs and also some other fabric postcards. Didn't get very far with my metallic inchies but I have done some of the preparatory work (below is a photo of the painted and stamped vliesofix which will be ironed to felt tomorrow as a base for the inchies). Nearly everything I have been working on is unfinished but I like to have a variety of things to work on to suit my mood!

I have included some scans of the bleaching experiments - I tried it on two pieces of black homespun, one was brown black and didn't react at all and the second piece was blue/black and reacted very nicely - see below. The lines that look like folds are actually lines from where teh fabric was drying on the pool fence. Very organic I think! I also tried it on a piece of olive green line type fabric and that reacted very nicely too. In the scan at the top of the post you can see what it looked like originally as well as the bleached version (on which I have sprayed some Adirondack Color Washes to the accentuate the colour variations).

Annie and I went for a walk around the Spring Festival this morning. We had a lovely time although it was very hot (38 degrees so spring appears to be summer here already!). I had quite a glow by the time I got home. There wasn't a lot at the stalls that really attracted me although I was happy to buy some bunches of bright ribbons and some beautiful threads, plus a toffee apple for Zach. I think he will find it is the memory more than the taste that actually appeals!