Final Pin-up

Nearing the end of my final week of the locating unit, I am feeling confident that I will be able to develop my work as far as I had envisaged. Our final pin-up session on Monday helped me finalise my ideas. As expected, I was told that I needed to go back to my first drawings and pick out the tonal palette that I want to be working with, as just choosing one colour thread didn't have any correspondence with my drawings. I had mentioned this in one of my previous posts.

In the last couple of days I have experimented with mixing different colours and different brands of inks together, and using water with them, to find  the best combination to use in my final samples. Over the course of this unit I have found different brands of the same colour of ink, disperse in different ways, which I found quite interesting and is something I would have never expected. I also found that some materials will hold the colour from the ink better than others, and don't wash away when dissolvable fabric is being washed away.

              (mixing black Winsor & Newton ink with blue-black Parker ink worked best)

With the Bradford Textiles competition brief in mind, I set about refining my ideas for a final fabric. I developed a selection of smaller samples, as well as a couple of final samples for my self initiated brief, that displayed an understanding of a refined tonal colour palette. 

I've completed a selection of small scale samples varying stitch width, stitch length, thread colour, placement and the way in which I dyed the fabric. I found some of these samples to be more successful than others. This is what I was experimenting with and I have been able to use this knowledge in my final samples. A variety of these are photographed below.