Thursday, August 12, 2010

First Pieces for Exhibition

Here is the first selection of pieces.
Camellias
The very first piece I made was this:
with the camera I zoomed into the camellia flower, then once downloaded I cropped the photo and enlarged. Printed it directly onto fabric and quilted it. The bullion stitches are the stamens. It's very much a safe and steady start!
This piece is the same camellia flower but 'pulled back' from the extreme close-up from before. It has been printed on to T-shirt transfer and the gloss removed (you iron some baking paper over the print after it has cooled). Then it has been stitched with what is known as Thread Play (although I did do this as part of the quilting).
The final piece, of this trio, is the camellia bud and leaves. I thought that the leaves looked just as beautiful as the flowers, as they have a definitive shape and great gloss. This has been printed on to fine silk fabric - the backing paper had almost as much ink as the fabric! Quilted and bound, and then the leaves were painted with acrylic gloss gel, to get that shiny look. I did test this on an off-cut piece to check that the ink from my inkjet printer didn't run or disappear.

The last piece I did just recently - that is to say I didn't do these 3 pieces one after the other. I had started getting more confident in working with different products by the time I figured out how to make the bud piece.

Each of these pieces I have managed to do something a little different. You will see that I have got more experimental as each idea has been processed.
Tomorrow: Liquidamber leaves.

4 comments:

Lynette (NZ) said...

So lovely to see these - can't wait to see them in person :-) And thanks for the reminder about the tip to remove glossiness from the tshirt transfer.

Erilyn said...

It will be exciting to see everyone's work together - there is such a mixed 'bag', so to speak.

Anonymous said...

Wow, it's beautiful.
The colours in nature are allways right.
It takes a lot of ink to print it,I suppose?
The quilting gives an extra dimension.
Joke W.

Erilyn said...

I don't think it uses too much more ink, especially if you don't have more than 300 dpi quality - anything more is just wasted on the cotton.