Ink and Silk

It is amazing what pinning all your work up can do towards helping you see where you're going wrong. In the past couple of weeks I had been feeling that I had too many ideas running along side each other and with no refined colour palette. However, they are all linked by the same initial idea I had at the beginning of this unit; irregular shape and pattern. During the pin-up session I was able to hang all my drawings and samples up and see how they work well together.

Although I have been unsure about refining my colour palette, it was suggested that I don't necessarily need an obvious one. For example, I've been working using ink and water where the colour in the ink splits into various tones. This was something I had been interested in at the beginning of the last unit and is something that I am now beginning to look back into, and experiment with more, in the last few weeks.

I found that my ideas incorporating set stitch into my work was quite successful, however the material and colour threads I am using need to be refined more to link with my drawings. Using lightweight fabric would enhance the stitch and give the material a different weight to it once processed. Therefore I have spent part of this week researching and experimenting with different lightweight fabrics, dyeing them using ink and water, to give the same affect as is seen in my drawings at the beginning of the unit. I found this process to be quite time consuming and unpredictable due to the ink and water combined with the absorbency of the material; however I embraced this quality as the unpredictability gave exactly the effect that I was looking for.

After drying the dyed fabrics, I used one of the set stitch designs to embellish them and add relief to the thin fabric. I am aware that I have only used one colour of thread which doesn't fit well with my idea of having a tonal colour palette. However I wanted to experiment first working with the dyed light weighted material, as well as looking at placement, before incorporating my tonal colour palette. Photographed below are a selection of the end results. I found that working with backing helped stablise the material, however to get the quality of the material back after processing it, I needed to use the cold water dissolvable material. This I found worked well but when washing my samples, sometimes meant some of the colour ran out of them. This is something I want to work on over the next week.

I found myself concentrating much more on these sample designs than the other ideas I had been working on in previous weeks. I still wanted to bring my other ideas forward though, as from the last pin-up session I had discovered that combining my samples worked well. I have experimented with mounting two of my different samples together which is photographed below. I think it is a successful piece and possesses some qualities that I would like to bring out further if time.