MISSA Day 3

The 3rd day was spent mostly on silk screening on our 4 meters of cloth.

I wanted a wall paper effect so combined an alternating band made with a stamp and my silk screen pattern rotated 180 degrees each time. 

I didn't quite get the motifs in the right place to make the pattern interlocking but it worked well enough.

At this stage the 3 layers were looking a bit jumbled up in parts.
But there was lots more work to be done to pull it all together.

MISSA Day 2

We began day 2 by making different stamps and playing around with them.

The next step with our cloth was to establish territories on it. 

I used my stamps to define the different areas of an abstracted face. 

In the afternoon i sun-printed with ferns down the side.

At the end of the day i hung the cloth from a balcony so i could see all of it when i returned to the classroom the next morning.

MISSA

I attended the 1st week of this years Metchosin Summer School of the Arts out at the beautiful Lester Pearson College campus in Eleanor Hannan's "Compositional Cloth: The Face" workshop.

She showed us a number of ways to make stamps and patterns after a few warm up exercises to get us thinking about the face.

Eleanor showed us how to make a silk screen.

And how to make all the right sounds when using screen and paint.

The first marks we made on our 3 to 5 metres of cloth where to be bold and free.
I was not impressed when, with my first stroke, the too runny paint fell out of the brush to make a red puddle, a heavy-handed start  for my cloth. 

Disperse Dyes at SDA

The 1st exercise with the disperse dyes Marie-Therese had us do was a sample of the different dyes. 

This proved to be a most useful reference through out the week.

I have ordered a set of dyes from ProChem and will repeat this exercise with them.

Dyeing with a resist

An exercise to see how many prints one could make from one piece of painted paper.

I made 16 and could have made more.

It is a most economical technique.

An exercise using cheap copy paper to make a stencil.
Marie-Therese showed us there are so many possibilities with disperse dyes

Marie-Therese Wisniowski

The 2nd week, after the SDA conference, I attended a 5-day workshop run by Marie-Therese Wisniowski, from Australia.

Marie-Therese is an excellent teacher. She opened up the whole world of diverse dyes and transfer for her students.

I had worked through the Double Trouble book 'Transfer to Transform' but wasn't able to take the technique into more developed work. 

Marie-Therese explained the chemistry of the process then took us through a series of carefully planned exercises that allowed us to build on our knowledge as the course progressed.

The poor images are of Marie-Therese's signature work. She has also curated textile exhibitions. This Artcloth one featured a number of the instructors and speakers at the SDA conference. Check out her blog to see more of what she gets up to www.artquill.blogspot.com