A new RUST! Workshop added.

I have just added a new date to my workshop schedule at Workaid in Chesham. 10am till 3.30. 10th March 2018. £65.

RUST! is such an exciting day of creating pattern and colour onto vintage fabrics and lace and then piecing it all together to make beautiful vintage stitcheries.

We will be making our own dye bundles to take home, learning and experimenting with the techniques along the way. 

We will then be using my precious pre dyed fabrics to make little stitched books which will showcase the beauty of rust.

I will have a fantastic array of rusty things for you to use and keep for future rusting adventures.

Come and Play and Learn! 

Amazing Rust!

Just a quickie look at today's rust. I am so pleased with these. They are so clearly printed that it looks like the rusty washers are still on the surface.

On thick cartridge paper. 

On thick cartridge paper. It looks so like the metal.

On cartridge paper with organza and modern cotton lace.

Cartridge paper again.

On a vintage hankie with a lace edging.

On fine linen scrim and vintage lace. So fabulously crunchy!

On cotton in the background.

More Rust! Textures!

Doesn't rust look lovely on textured fabric. These are on damaged vintage Broderie Anglais and a variety of other gorgeous embroidered fabrics and although it seems so sad, in  some ways, to distress them, they have been rescued from a charity shop and will become glorious again in a new artwork. 

I am so thrilled at the variegated greys in the dyeing, and hardly any orangey rust colours. I think the tannin in the tea was responsible for this happening because I dyed them with just tea and no vinegar at all. I love too that the circles from the washers have printed so well. 

Fab Rust!

Today I was supposed to be doing a bit of Spring cleaning but instead I have been playing with rust. 

4 days ago I started some rust printing in the garden and today it is ready. So fast! and always such a lovely surprise.

This is the fabric when I had rinsed and dried it. I used pieces of cotton. Most were recycled. One was a piece of lovely tightly woven shirting and it feels almost silky. 

Another was part of a torn blouse with lace inserts.

This one is a piece of some lovely linen scrim that I got in France.

What always amazes me is that the prints are almost photographic. You can see so clearly the shapes of the rusty square and circle washers.

Want to know how I did it? It is so simple and quick!

I placed half a piece of fabric in the bottom of a tray, covered it with lots of rusty washers and folded it over. Then I added more layers of fabric and more rusty stuff. I poured tea over it and put the whole thing in a plastic bag and left it in the garden for 4 days.

Below is the piece that I folded over at the bottom of the pile. It has printed with a mirror image of the rusty bits. Magic!

Alice Fox final day

On the last day of the course Alice left us to develop our own ideas from the techniques we had learned. I loved this because it gave us the chance to make the work our own and each person came up with such interesting ideas.

I loved the waxing of papers and fabrics. I'd wanted time to play with encaustic techniques for ages but could never find the time to cover a surface and find an iron to use with wax and to just play with a new technique so this was such a great chance to do just that.

I'd loved the way that the beeswax made the papers translucent and that we could make the layers bind together as one. This technique also enhances the textures and colours of the papers and fabrics and makes them glow!

I used some of my favourite papers and fabrics from the past few days to make a tiny book 3" tall. I love this range of fantastic marks that have been made on these surfaces. 

I waxed the pieces by laying them onto parchment paper on the ironing board, sprinkling them with beeswax pellets, placing another piece of parchment paper over the top and smoothing over the layers with the hot iron. 

Easy! Why didn't I try this before? Definitely doing it again!

In the photo above, the top piece is eco dyed cartridge paper on the left and rusted embroidered fabric on the right.

In the photo below you can see printed tissue paper which has been bonded with wax to some rust dyed habotai silk.

I used buttonhole hole stitch to edge some of the pages. 

You can see some of the reverse sides and other pages in the photo above. Look at the print that was made by a rusty old nail! and the rusty lace.

I added vintage bone and MOP buttons and a bone fish counter with needle woven details. I also stitched across some of the pages. The stitch really complimented the waxed pages and matched the binding stitches which bind the little book together. I'm going to make more of these little books!

Thank you Alice for such a fab course! I loved every minute.

Alice Fox Summer School part 2

I'm having such a lovely time at Alice's workshops. She has introduced us to the most wonderful techniques for Eco printing and mark making with natural materials. 

Alice makes the most beautiful little concertina books and bound books with delicate marks which Mother Nature supplies and Alice coaxes onto their pages. She has shown us how to make these little books. These are some of Alice's books.

We have used rust and plant materials to colour fabric and paper. We made little parcels of paper and fabric and wrapped them around metal and leaves and onion skins.
We then submerged them for a couple of days in one of Alice's cocktails to let the rust bring out the colours and marks. She kept us so busy doing other things but we really just couldn't wait to see how they were going to turn out!

It rained hard for two whole days! We happily stayed indoors and played with new techniques with plants and rust.
We printed with leaves onto fabric and paper. We did weaving and stitching with grass and lavender, we stitched around found objects. 

On this sample, the seed heads and feather were 'stitched' into the scrim using the object to make the stitch. I added a just few real stitches to hold them there. I have made a sketchbook to store all my samples. I love the shadows that are made on the paper.

This is a close up of the feather and the wood curl.

The seed heads were woven through the scrim and then over woven with stitch. Look at the shadows!

This is one of the leaf prints on silk organza. I decided to layer it onto rusted fabric and then stitched around the leaves with some seed stitches.

This is another leaf print with lavender. I have started stitching it to some rusted fabric and have collaged it with some other fabrics and some of my found objects.

These are some more of my objects that have been partly hidden beneath net and sheer fabrics and enhanced with stitch. The limpet shell has been stitched on and the threads have been needle woven.

Day 3! We finally opened the book parcels today! It was so lovely to sit in the sunshine after days of rain and open our little surprise parcels.
Look at how time has transformed them!

Tomorrow is the last day. I will show you the little books finished, waxed and stitched and some of the other pages in my sketch book in the next blog post. Bye for now! x

Alice Fox Lost and Found

Today was the first day of the Summer School at Art Van Go.

This year Alice Fox will be leading 4 wonderful days of Eco Printing, Dyeing and Stitch and I am one of the lucky ones who managed to get a place on this great workshop.

I love dyeing with rust and natural materials and Alice's work in this field has a delicacy and depth of feeling that is breathtaking. When one of my bestest friends told me she had put my name on the list for 'Lost and Found' with Alice I was so thrilled.

We had to take along a collection of found objects to add to our work. I took some beautiful sea washed shells which have the most subtle variations of greys, blues, pinks and creamy white. They are so matte with little hints of pearly shell showing through. Others are really pitted and textured. So very beautiful.

We also had to take rusty things with us. These were for  making  prints and marks onto paper and fabric. There is a kind of magic that happens when time and chemistry combine to make Art! 

I took these huge rusty nails!

They are about 6 inches long and came from a proper old fashioned hardware shop. They were found in the back of the store room where they had been for 3 generations of the family owners. They were so amused that I wanted rusty nails and were quite happy to see them go I think. I was so happy to have them.

I will show you tomorrow what we did today. It was so lovely, so exciting and a little bit magic.