Flour Paste Resist Fabric Dyeing

 

This was a fun technique to try! I had never heard of it until our latest workshop leader on TextileArtist.org Stitch Club, Jette Clover, mentioned it. The effect gives a crackled pattern of colour which could inspire tree branches, maps, crumbling surfaces, blood and veins, delicate patterns of petals, lizard skin etc.

The basic technique is to make a simple flour and water paste and spread it on the fabric. When completely dry the paste is cracked and paint or dye added to seep into the cracks. Once the paste is washed out you are left with a unique piece of fabric.

First I chose my fabrics - a range of light and dark pieces of old sheets. They are about A4 size and laid out on a piece of plastic to protect my table.

Next mix up the flour paste - Jette's recipe is 300g of plain white flour to 250ml of cold water. This made a thicker paste than I was expecting but I went with it. I found the easiest way to apply it was to spoon a large blob into the middle of the fabric and then work it out gradually all the way round from the centre with an old credit card. 

I tried to get all the way to the edge but I found it didn't really work to go back over bits multiple times.

Then it needs to dry thoroughly - I pegged mine to the radiator as I was doing this in winter!

You know when they are completely dry because they go hard and crispy, with the edges curling up in an extraordinary way.

Then the fun bit - cracking the paste! You can create as many or as few cracks as you like. Initially I didn't do many because I feared the paste would all fall off in tiny bits but it is actually really well behaved and you can crack it quite a lot. I ran some pieces over the back of a wooden chair to get a lot of cracks all the way along. The tutor, Jette, said that if you put your pasted fabric in the freezer for an hour you can get crisper cracks - I didn't try this as I was too impatient. I painted mine with slightly watered down acrylics and applied with a wide flat brush. You can of course use liquid fabric dye or paint.

This photo is the back of the piece above straight after painting. You can see some big blobs where I added a bit more water to the paint and went back over it so don't do this if you don't want this effect. It's a good idea to check the back to see that some of the paint is getting through the cracked paste.

Once the paint is dry you can wash it out. I found that the acrylic paint put a sort of plasticky layer over the flour paste and made it quite easy to scrape off in big chunks. Make sure you so this in a washing up bowl and throw away the waste in the bin rather than down your sink.

Here are my results from this first experiment - really interesting I think. Jette also mentioned that you can use thick bleach on dark cotton to get a white crackle effect - do this outside with gloves and eye protection.

This was my favourite piece. I learned that thinner fabrics worked best, don't spread the paste too thinly and don't make the paint too watery.

Postage Stamp Collage - Frozen Lake

This piece is my response to a workshop in Stitch Club from Textileartist.org by Jette Clover. Her challenge was to find a postage stamp of a winter scene and make a 20cm square collage that evokes the mood or atmosphere of the image in a fairly abstract way. She wanted us to use mostly white and to stitch the stamp into the piece. Her video of her creating one looked so simple - sort out a few fabrics, assemble the piece on your background square, add some simple textural stitch,  sew on your stamp and you have something beautiful! In reality this was a real challenge as I shall explain. 

The first challenge was to find an image. I do not have a stamp collection so I looked through my photos. I chose this image from a park in South Korea. We visited in January so although there was no snow and the sky was clear, there was a bitterly cold wind and the lake surrounding the temple was frozen. I printed out a page of the photo plus some smaller 2x3cm versions to use as my 'stamps'. 

Using the photo as a guide I pulled out a load of fabric scraps that I might use - Jette called these 'maybes', which is a good description I think. I ended up with a pile of whites,  blues, browns,  blacks and a bag of sari ribbons. 

Then I cut a square of white cotton, 20cm x 20cm and began to assemble my collage. I soon realised that to evoke the mood of a cold frosty day with bleached out colours required you to make very specific choices about the colour of the fabric used. I only had one possible scrap for the sky - a piece of hand-dyed silk habotai that I bought in a craft pack so that was easy. After that the choices were far more complex. I suppose I fell into the trap of trying to recreate the landscape in the photo straight away,  rather than the atmosphere of it. 

I tried lots of different layouts for the fabric - a darker lake,  more textured foreground etc. Above is an idea of some of the permutations I went through - there were a lot. What is really useful is to take photos on your phone all the time to compare. This gives you some distance from the composition and allows you to critically evaluate what is working and what is not. 

In the end I went with pale icy blues for the lake and a very pale foreground in the spirit of a light natural palette. This photo shows my choices without the coloured bands of grasses. I actually really like it like this but decided to put the grasses in as the colour of these is what attracted me to use the image in the first place. Aside from the sky I used a ripped piece of interfacing daubed with Brusho from another project as the horizon on the left and a baby- wipe mop up cloth from the same project on the right. On the left below that is a strip of dark sari ribbon. On the right is a scrap of wool layered with painted silk organza. The lake is the reverse of a furnishing sample, layered with a piece of silk. The foreground is furnishing fabric samples. I sewed all these pieces down with machine thread using tiny stab stitches. 

Next I added the layers of sari silk ribbon for the top band. Some were taffeta and some chiffon - all were very crumpled so I ironed them and pulled at the edge to make them fray more before randomly ironing creases back in! Once I was happy with the placement I stitched them down with running stitch along the length. I could then go back over the whole hill section with straight stitches in black machine thread to give the look of winter grasses, shrubs and trees. I also added a length of sari cord, which is black and brown to provide some definition on the right hand side with a few white straight stitches beneath for frost.

For the lake I cut a piece of synthetic lace to represent icy patterns and covered it with a piece of pale blue organza. I secured this with random white stitches to give the impression of the light falling on the ice in a diagonal line to the foreground. I also added some thin strips of a darker blue organza at the edge below the hills to give depth. 

I repeated the same process with the sari ribbon for the lower grasses except this time I added a piece of purple scrim behind to give some more depth and texture. To be honest after stitching you can't really see all the effort I went to to get creases into the ribbons so I wouldn't bother with that step again where there was going to be a lot of stitching. In these grasses I used 2 strands of embroidery floss for the stitches, quite a few colours and tried to build up the depth with lots of random crossing lines, finishing with the single strands of pale grey to give frosty highlights. On a few of the grasses at the back I added extra straight stitches at the top to mimic seed heads. 

Finally right at the bottom I decided to add a bit more blue organza to lead the eye down from the lake and a squiggle of orange/purple sari cord to represent the edge of the paving around the lake. 

To finish I had to add the stamp element. I experimented with giving it a deckle edge with special scissors but in the end decided that was too much so just ripped an edge. I coloured the ripped edge with a tiny bit of blue Inktense to take away the stark white paper before sewing it down with running stitch. The final element was the Korea script, which says 'frozen lake'. I copied this off a translation site using a brush marker onto a piece of paper that I had made in Korea at the paper museum in Jonjhu. This was made in the traditional way using mulberry bark pulp. I used an old card-makers trick to tear out the strip by 'drawing' a line where you want the paper to tear using a damp paint brush. I stitched this on using 2 vertical lines of back stitch in black thread to look like a banner in the corner. 

Overall I am very happy with the piece and have got good feedback from other Stitch Club members. The only challenge to myself is how could I have made it more abstract and less representational? This is something I am still pondering - I am not really drawn to the abstract but I am intrigued by distilling out the atmosphere of a place in a piece so I will have to continue working on this.  

Bead embellishment of natural objects

 Here is my piece called 'Nature Table' in response to a fantastically inspiring workshop delivered by Kate Tume.

We were encouraged to experiment with beads and sequins to pile them up randomly to create new textures and given the themes of 'rocks' and 'biodiversity' to explore. I found a great piece of eucalyptus bark hanging off a local tree on one of my walks and that inspired the idea for the piece based on the Biodiversity theme.

I went off with my rucksack and found lots of other interesting natural finds in the hedgerows and also in my back garden. I also inadvertently bought home a few beetles and spiders!

I then prepared a background. Because the tutor had stressed the importance of having fabric stretched in a hoop to make it easier to handle for beading, the size of my finished piece was limited by the size of my hoop. I used heavy calico for the background fabric and cut out a piece of my eco-printed silk organza to A5 size to define the stitching area. I stitched this down with small stab stitches all the way round before adding a scrap of painted silk organza from a previous project and some purple/orange coloured scrim.

I started with the bark. Some of the silver birch bark could be peeled apart so that is was thin enough to stitch through and some had to be secured with long straight stitches. I also managed to stitch through the eucalyptus bark to hold that in place. The whole point of this challenge was to experiment with beads so I wanted to find ways to add beads in ways which were sympathetic to the natural objects or enhance their beauty. I wanted to use beads to make the viewer look more closely at the piece and therefore more closely at nature.

In and around the bark I used various different sized wooden beads and these small disc beads, possibly coral or bone - both were from broken necklaces that I had inherited. I also used a line of orange bugle beads, couched down at intervals, just because I liked the colour. In the bottom right hand corner I have arranged ash keys held down with gold bugle beads. The beech leaves at bottom left are simply stitched with small straight stitches over the central rib of the leaf, where it is the strongest. 

I carried on adding bits to my composition until it was covered. In the close up above I have piled up large seed beads randomly to create this effect - usually threading 5 or 7 on the thread before stitching back down and twisting the loop of beads before pulling the thread tight. This loop can then be secured by coming back up through the fabric through one of the beads before adding another group of beads to make another clump. I love the effect of this - it looks a bit like insect eggs or dried sap.

To secure the beads in the acorn cups and in the centre of the dried sedum flowers I used PVA glue. It was the only practical way to do it. I stitched the stems of both items down in the normal way and added clumps of beads as above to fill in any gaps. The photo above also shows a skeltonised Nigella seed pod, which was so fragile that it had broken into 2 parts already. I gently rubbed on some gold wax to highlight its structure and glued it down - I thought it would disintegrate if I tried to stitch it.

The hardest items to secure were the pieces of bracken in the centre and the dried catkins in the top right corner. If I pulled the thread too tight or let it get caught around something then the tension would guillotine off the end of the item I was stitching. The sticky burrs in the photo above were a different challenge! They are so effective at gripping everything that they stuck to my bare finger tips and of course wouldn't let go of the thread if it got caught. Inside each burr are 3 teardrop shaped beads which I threaded onto my thread in a loop and then stitched right through from the top to get the beads to sink into the burr.

The most fiddly beads to attach were these tiny black ones to the dried agapanthus seed heads. I threaded a string of 4 beads, looped back down the bottom 3 leaving long tails of thread from both ends. I used the tails to tie the beads onto the seed head and then stitch it down to the calico. On a couple of occasions I got the thread caught and it broke off a 'wing' so I repaired it with a dab of PVA. The pheasant feathers were simply stitched with tiny stitches over the central rib.

I am very pleased with the overall outcome of this piece. I plan to mount it on a shop-bought artist canvas over a layer of wadding to cushion all the knots on the back or possibly in a shadow box frame. I would be possible to scale this up to make a larger piece and I am interesting in doing this at some point in the future.