Surface design group

I have been participating in a fabric swap group over on the Stitchin’ Fingers Ning site. This involves using different techniques to alter or decorate fabrics and then posting to the others on the list. At this stage there are now two of us from Australia and 7 from USA. It has been great fun to not only receive fabrics in the mail each month from all the other participants, but also to chat online on the site and share ideas and tips on each of the processes.

So far our swaps have involved an interesting range of processes with a free choice month every now and then. February and March were free choice so I did some hand dyeing, overprinting and gelliprinting. Unfortunately forgot to take photos of most of this process.

April was a directed swap-printing. For this one I took garlic as my inspiration (eaten afterwards so no wastage!) I cut the hand of garlic in half and made a few sketches, simplified the sketch and carved into lino for printing. I used some hand dyed fabric to print onto using black block printing ink.

May was Collagraph month. I used the covers of an old address book as a base, gluing rubber bands to one and spaghetti, All Bran and burnt matches to the other. Both were sealed with gesso so they would survive the printing and washing off process.

These are the prints drying on the porch:

My June (resists), July (sun print) and August (ice dye) fabrics are almost ready to post off. I will post photos in about two weeks when they have arrived at their destinations.