Washers and Clingfilm

A few weeks ago Anna offered to send out some washers and/or buttons to anyone who asked for some. Her only request was that she be sent an ATC in return which incorporated a few of the washers and/or buttons.

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I decided to join in with this challenge and my washers and buttons duly arrived. I thought initially I would use the washers as a resist on some fabric and used silk paints to colour some voile and cotton fabrics.

I made a mistake on some of the fabric and painted the whole fabric before placing the washers down, but on the piece above I put the washers down and applied the silk paint to the fabric around them. I also sprayed the piece with water to help the silk paints flow.

You can see in the photo above what happened when I painted the piece before placing the washers. I also used salt in the paint and I really liked the effect it gave me.

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For Anna's ATC (which she should have received by now) I decided to use the middle piece of voile in the photo above.

This is the resulting ATC. I painted the washers with Alcohol inks (I found some of these rubbed off while I worked on the hand sewing). The base for the ATC was a piece of this Lutradur which I had worked previously. I used a soldering iron to distress the surface of the voile after I had tried to melt it with the heat gun to no effect.

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You may remember I mentioned last week a technique for working with cling film and inks and promised to show the results of my experiments here.

I started by damping the paper all over and applying two or three different yellows to provide a base for what I hoped would eventually resemble hedgerow/foliage and the pic above shows the paint manipulated with the clingfilm. I sprayed water onto the inks and added more drops of ink until I was satisfied with the effect and then placed heavy books on top of the clingfilmed paper overnight and peeled the film off the next day.

Here the clingfilm has been removed.

I applied some darker inks and repeated the process with clingfilm and weights overnight. Once this layer was dry I repeated the whole procedure again.

This is the final result. It is a little darker than I had hoped but I think there would be several ways of using this in collage or as a background. It is as well open to a change of orientation. The photographs do not show it very well but there is a sheen to the finished piece.

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I've been out playing at a workshop today but I'll save that for later as I need to cook dinner now. Hope you're all having a good Saturday and haven't got too much snow in the UK yet.