Messy printing day

This year in our GeeTAG group we decided to take advantage of the months which had 5 Saturdays and designate them as messy offsite days. Earlier in the year Kerrie mentored a group in a wonderful eco dyeing and printing day and on the 5th Saturday in October we offered a messy printing day at the Shearer’s Arms Gallery studio. This is a fabulous space to ‘get down and dirty’ with paints, something we cannot do in the pristine room we normally use for our monthly meetings.

Many of our group lugged numerous items along for a day of experimenting and playing with prints. It was great to have a day to print uninterrupted by the normal duties of family life and be inspired by my fellow printers, who shared and discussed all ideas freely. There is a write up and photos of many of our results n the GeeTAG blog.

I experimented with the Gelli plate and hot glue gun stencils, creating paper and fabric prints, experimented with circles of all types to create a ‘doodle cloth’ on a cotton cloth from the Op Shop (I may use this for embroidering TAST stitches), and trying out a few of the blocks from other participants.

Glue gun prints, a borrowed block print-printed twice to give the layered image, stencilled image using part of a plastic doily over a mop up cloth:

Backgrounds created from the gelli plate, various objects printed and stencilled, glue gun stencils used as resist with spray paints:

Overall a fun and successful day of printing.

Guess who we ran into at an exhibition

Yesterday I made the train trek to Melbourne, ran into a fellow traveller Rhonda at Flinders St station, then continued onward along the Sandringham line to Middle Brighton. After a sustaining coffee and raw brownie/banana bread we continued on to the gallery at Brighton Town Hall for the Annemeike Mein exhibition, where we encountered Stella, who joined us to marvel at the amazing textile artworks. Like most textile art, you really do have to see these artworks ‘up close and personal’ to appreciate their texture, colour, artistry and skill.

Although there are a limited number of her artworks exhibited, it was interesting to see the development of Annemeike’s work over the years, both in theme and materials. It was also quite wonderful to see the trialling and the stages of development of the work also displayed.

We were just standing discussing the differences in the free machine embroidery of Annemeike in comparison to the intensive work of Alison Holt (who Stella and I both have worked with in workshops) when guess who we spied, Alison herself! We had a chat to the wonderful, artistic and very friendly Alison about the where, what and why of her latest trip to Australia and then, of course, couldn’t miss the photo opportunity!

Alison Holt in Melbourne

After a lovely lunch in the beautiful sunshine, Stella left for the city and Rhonda and I went for a walk and a little op shopping in Church St, followed by a walk to the beach and the famous Brighton bath houses.

There were many locals and tourists taking advantage of the beautiful spring weather.

A beautiful day out, thank you for your wonderful company ladies!