Heath and Safety

At all times when in the print room or class room you must follow the health and safety guidelines, They are there to protect you and the people around you.

Puff binder- Be aware of hot surfaces when using the heat gun. wear protective gloves and an apron. Be aware of wet floors in the wash out area. Wash hands before leaving the print room.

Batik- Be aware of the hot wax. Take care when taking the Tjanting tools out of the wax. Do not leave the wax pots on in an unattended room. Take care when using the iron. Wear protective gloves and apron. Wash hands before leaving the print room.

Procion dyes- Wear protective rubber gloves and apron. Try to avoid spillage and splashing. Leave your area clean and tidy. Wash away unwanted inks and dyes. Wash hands before leaving the print room.

Devore printing- wear protective rubber gloves and apron. Be aware of wet floors in the wash out area. Leave area clean and tidy. Avoid inhalation of fumes and fibers. Wash hands before leaving the print room.

Screen printing- wear protective gloves and apron. Be aware of wet floors in the wash out area. wash away unwanted inks and dyes. wash hands before leaving the print room.

Pigment printing- Wear protective gloves and apron. wash hands before leaving the print room.

Sewing- Be aware of what you are doing at all times. Don't have your hands near the needle while sewing.

Final piece

 This is my final Piece, it is done on calico, this was chosen by others in a design meeting, they said they felt it fitted my artist the best and looked the best, I also got to sew into it once I had done my print. I used a sewing machine that had an embroidery setting on it, this allowed me to do a design that went around the circles. I did have a few issues with this such as the print didn't line up well on part of my fabric, however this can be resolved by shortening part of the fabric, it only has to be 1 meter so I can get away with copping some off. I had to paint into parts of my fabric where it didn't print too well or where it didn't completely line up, I'm really happy with how it turned out and cant wait to finish it off fully.

Samples

Here are a few of my samples and process I have done.
Most of my fabric samples were dyed using procion dye and then pressed and washed before I printed on them, this caused a few issues when I went to print on the calico, when I washed it and left it to dry it got quite wrinkled and it was hard to print on in places where it didn't lie flat, I did try to flatten it out on the heat press but it didn't do much.
I used mostly pigment inks when I did my screen printing however as I had some dyed backgrounds it made my colours look weak and they weren't the colours they should have been and it was a little disappointed so on a few of my pieces I used permaset, this sits on top of the fabric rather than sinking in like the pigment does.
I did try to do prints on paper but they just didn't work, they moved when I printed on them and the colours were too dark so my pigments didn't show very well, I also noticed that the pigment sort of bubbled on the top on the paper and it looked very messy, I really didn't like the outcome of the aper samples so I did more fabric samples.
I had two attempts at devore, the first i tried it on devore velvet and unfortunately the mixture we had in class wasn't made the right way and it didn't work, I got a chance to try it again and I only did one screen on it as I had such a small piece of fabric, I really liked how t turned out and even though it bled a little and ate away at fibres that it shouldn't have it still looked good, I used procion dye and it really improves the look, if you are printing on devore velvet you must print on the back so it can eat away the fibres.
I had a chance to use puff binder in this project and it worked well, I even coloured some of it and even though it was a lighter colour when I had used the heat gun it still looked really good and worked well.
As a little experiment I decided to use the tyvek I was given at the start of the year, from what i can remember it is a man made material and you can print on it, dye it with busho inks and manipulate it with heat, I did all of these on my piece and although I didn't use all three of my screens I think it looked very good, I think my favourite part was manipulating it with the heat gun, I only had to hold it over part of the material before it would scrunch up slightly.

Final Design

I will write about my final design soon once I have tried the screens to see if they work.

Weaving (loom)

I finally got to use the loom which I enjoyed quite a lot, at first I had a few problems as the wool was moving quite a lot and I had to use a fork to move it into the right place, but once I had done a little more it got easier and I like how it turned out. I think next time I want to use different materials. I tried lifting different parts of the loom to see how it looked and if I'm honest I preferred the normal way as it looked a little gappy but I think it would work well if using different materials such as plastic bags and fabric.

Colour separation

As I am doing a screen print for my final piece I had to look at colour separation, this makes screen printing much easier as it reduces the amount of screens needed and time when using a number of different colours. This is a quick sample I did to try and get my head around the process.
I will make another post about the process soon.