Fabric Printing/New Creations

I have been playing with a new toy recently - a heat transfer press, which allows me to transfer marks, shapes and illustrations on to different fabrics with immediate results. Carrying on with the cacti theme of late (I am working on other things too!) I have been experimenting with layers, building up subtle textures. I think it's a really interesting tool that can be used alongside more blocky screen-prints. It's super fun to just play and build up marks without having a long prep process that screen-printing can have. When I screen-print, I want every print to be perfect because of the time invested in making the artwork, prepping the screen and work-space. I know that imperfections and 'mistakes' take you on an unpredictable creative journey where magic happens, but I still get a bit uptight when screen-printing. I want every piece of fabric to be utilised, and the print to come out as it in my head. With heat transfer, you can simply play and not be so precious. Well, that's how I feel!

 

I think that heat presses are a great investment anyway if you are planning on printing fabric, because you can do away with spending hours and hours ironing your freshly printed fabric to make sure that the print is cured. You can pop them under the heat press and your brand new pattern is fixed in one min or less! Which, brings me on to me latest creations, which should end my cacti creations (for now!) Using binder ff and disperse dye, I recently printed lots of meters of fabric using the separates of the mono-prints which I printed a couple of weeks' ago.

I was really happy with how they came out. I photocopied the coloured monoprints so that they were black and white and I could expose them onto the screen but still keep some of that delicious texture which I really liked from the originals. The final print was slightly textured which I think looks good, I just hope that people don't misinterpret it as a miss-print ! I'm a sucker for texture in printing techniques, and I like playing with exposing my screens to create textures. 

With the fabric, I decided to make a few different shaped cushions to go into my etsy shop.  I made long, rectangle, square and triangle cushions:

I also printed some fabric with a smaller print on, which I have made into detachable, reversible collars, available here. They have beaded embellishments on the tips:

 My etsy shop is filling out quite nicely now. I will stop banging on about life post-pgdipe, but it is good to go a making bender! I return to my lecturing job in one months' time so I have a glorious month now to build up my portfolio again. I'm currently working on a few illustration jobs right now, so will blog about these as soon as I can !