The Idle Housewife

  I feel like I am complaining and whining all the time but this was a painful and stressful assignment, I actually thought about quitting the course. The beginning of the assignment was fine, I had fun and I fancied a lot some of the exercises, I am almost proud of some of the results of combining textures and colours. Thanks to this assignment, I came up with the softies idea and at this moment there is a very small  exhibition  of my softies in a book shop nearby. But projects 4 and 5 were hard, I felt a huge lack of motivation and totally uninspired, both are reflected on my work and the exercises result, it is a kind of a disaster. But it is finally done. The exercises I enjoyed the most were those of project 3 even if I got stuck in the begining. After doing some mood drawing and finding some colour inspiration, I finally arrived to the stitches part. After some experiences with some polyester thread , I finally reached the natural fib...

This is my larger sample, it has 30 cm x 120 cm, once again I used Markals with rubbing plates over linen. Do you feel you made a good selection from your drawings to use as source material for your design ideas? Which interpretations worked best? Why? No, I feel I didn't made a good selection from my drawings or the other drawings I used. This happened because at the beginning of Project 4 I got stuck and lost all motivation I had for doing this assignment. Which fabrics did you choose? What particular qualities appealed to you? I chose cotton and linen. Cotton and linen, linen on top, are my favourite fabrics. Both are easy to work with (to sew or to paint), very agreeable to touch and "fresh" as materials. How successful do you think your larger sample is? Do you like the design? Have you recreated or extended your ideas from the smaller samples so that there is a visible development between the two? Does your repeating design flow across the surface, without the obvio...

Mask made with regular tape to create a kind of a stencil :: Markals on cotton fabric Effect after taking out the tape Markals over rubbing plates on black cotton fabric Markals over rubbing plates on thick linen fabric Markals over offset printing blocks used as rubbing plates on cotton fabric Markals over offset printing blocks used as rubbing plates on very thin linen fabric The idea/objective was to see the text on the the "other side" of the fabric, the fabric is very thin and transparent. It didn't work out and the text is not visible. Small samples of Markals over rubbing plates on thin linen fabric I used only the rubbing plates I bought instead of my own drawings. The drawings I made that I liked were used on the first assignment and I didn't want to reuse them. So I chose the easy solution - otherwise this assignment wouldn't be over - and used already made rubbing plates.

Stage 1 :: preparation I prepared everything, ordered Markal paintstiks along with some rubbing plates, two Speedball screen printing kit and some block printing material. Stage 2 :: experimenting with techniques I used the Markals and the rubbing plates. And with those I used masks and stencils while I hand painted on fabric. I will use the block printing material later, when I feel more inspired because this is a technique that I really enjoy. I just lost all motivation for this assignment and I don't have the courage for trying the screen printing. I am not a big fan of fabric painting.