• There is an important difference between the type of ink your printer uses. It is either dye-based or pigment-based. You need to know which.
• There are some solutions on the market that claim to permanently fix the dye-based inks to your fabric. The most well known of these is the Bubble Jet Set from C .Jenkins Company. I say claim as I have not tested these myself.
• The fading and the unevenness of the fading on my pigment inks seems to be due to crocking. Pigment inks cannot take abrasion very well so the colour rubs off.
• Pigment inks seems to have a better fade resistance when in strong light sources.

So the conclusion seems to be you need to consider where you will be using the printed fabric. If you are aiming to do a lot of washing then you are probably best with dye-based inks and using one of the fixatives. If you are not making something that will be washed then pigment-based inks appear to be the better option.

Gloria Hansen has a good article on her website about inkjet printing on fabrics.

These are some of the stockists of either pretreated fabrics or the chemicals to treat your own fabric for using with dye-based inks:

• C. Jenkins Company There are some good articles about the process and the difference between the types of inks on the site too.
• Color Textiles Inc
• Soft Fabric Photos The FAQ page is quite interesting too.

There is another interesting article on Gloria Hansen’s website about pre-coats for inkjet printing. The article mentions inkAID products. These products seem to be better suited to pigment-based inks.

The FAQ page on the inkAID site has the following information:

Q. Can inkAID be used to precoat fabric for printing?

A. Yes – inkAID can be used to precoat fabric for a variety of purposes, including collage, banners, or stretched art. Your best choice is to use inkAID White Matte precoat, which is water resistant and can be machine washed. For best results, you should use a pigment-based ink for this application. Don’t use any inkAID Clear precoats, as they are water soluble and cannot be washed.

I am still not clear as to whether this means the fabric is also washable with a degree of permanence after printing. This may be an avenue to pursue, but I’ve not done anything about it yet. It sounds like an interesting product though.

What is most annoying though is that the printer is “intelligent” and thinks it knows when the ink is used up. It then refuses point blank to print anything. Last week it forced me to replace and throw away all 4 ink cartridges that were still half full because they were “empty”. I don’t use the printer all that much, so sometimes months go by before I want to print something again. I don’t know if this contributes to the darned thing thinking the cartridges are empty or whether it is just another way of getting more money out of you. The printer itself wasn’t too expensive, but the ink cartridges are – when I only get to use half the ink they contain, which in my case was equivalent to about 20 pages. A set of 4 Epson cartridges costs €31.

We also have an HP Color Laserjet 2550L colour printer. It gets used almost as infrequently, as we don’t do a lot of colour printing. I did use that printer for any colour printing I did during my C&G course and we only had to replace the yellow toner cartridge once in about 3 years. It is still going strong now. It is also less prone to paper jams – I can’t actually remember if we have ever had one. The toner cartridges for the laser printer aren’t cheap either, but each cartridge is supposed to print 5000 pages. Colour cartridges cost €85 each, black is slightly cheaper.

So I am doing a little experiment. I have printed the same image onto 2 pieces of cotton using the laser printer and the inkjet printer. I am going to throw them in the washing machine each week when I do the washing and see how the colours hold up. Then based on these results one or other of the printers will go. We really don’t need 2 colour printers in the house – along with a B&W laser printer.

I have been looking at the works of Andy Warhol recently as part of some research for a new piece of textile art. As these are colourful and I had one to hand I used it for my experiment. The artwork is not mine.

Here are the two pieces straight from the printer. The laser printer piece I ironed as I thought it may help to fix the colour to the fabric. (Laser printing is based on heat being applied to fix the toner particles to the paper or in my case cloth.) The laser printer produces slightly darker images on cloth and they seem to be somewhat sharper too.

Left laser print, right inkjet

Watch this blog for the results of my experiment in the coming weeks.

Although it would be nice to find a short cut to this goal, all the reading I have been doing makes it clear that the only way forward is to keep producing art. Even if it is sometimes more of an onerous task than something that is always enjoyable. So once again all points towards getting into the studio and just working on something.

I didn’t find a vast amount of literature out there on the subject of achieving your personal style. It seems to be a subject that doesn’t attract a lot of comment or advice. I found one excellent article though, that really resonated with me as to what is meant by personal style. It is written by the photographer Alain Briot and published on the site The Luminous Landscape. It is actually the final article in a series of four. All of them are worth reading. (I found them a bit tiring to read online as the site chooses to use white text on a black background. Can’t understand why this is so popular.) If you like the South West of the USA then you will also love his photos of the area, which can be seen on his personal website.

Before I found the article by Alain Briot I came across these eight articles on the Helium website. They may be of interest too, although much as I would like to think that by doing a few exercises, as suggested in some of these articles, you can short cut a route to your own style, I can’t help thinking this is just wishful thinking. A bit like all the How to Get Rich Quick books – more of a scam and a way to for the authors to get rich fast than a reality.

There is an interesting article in the ArtMag from the Deutsche Bank. You can also see some of her artwork on the same page. You can listen to a short video of her talking about her work here.

More of her work is shown on the Saatchi Gallery website. Included are some quite provoking collages on found medical illustration paper.

And finally if that hasn’t been enough here is her homepage on ArtNet.

Mrs Henderson last saw the 6ft by 3ft patchwork coverlet more than 65 years ago. But yesterday, now aged 78 and a widow, she was reunited with it at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where it takes pride of place at the heart of a new exhibition.

Today, when we have access to so many products to use for quilting and quilting has become a huge industry pandering to our wishes for more, more, more, it is sobering to read such stories. We should probably all think twice before we spend ever more money on ever more stuff. Many times I have found the same thing cheaper at a non-quilting supplier. I also try to use what I have before buying new. With a bit of imagination things can be transformed and utilised.

If, like me, you are probably not going to make it to the exhibition the catalogue would seem to be the next best thing. This review on Whipup makes a convincing case for buying it, should you need one:

Every now again a book comes past my desk that just makes me want to sing its praises to the world

I was interested to read on her blog that she is teaching a class called Cartographic Constructions like her blog. In it the students are first taught the basics of traditional quilting. And 12 of the 14 are men. I was quite surprised at that as it was an elective class. Maybe some of them will catch the bug and there will be a few more male textile artists out there.

The tour was well organised with everyone being given a headset and the tour guide using a microphone. So despite it still being quite crowded we could still hear everything well. The tour lasted about an hour and took in 6 or 7 of the paintings, which was quite enough. The choice of paintings was also very good to cover a wide range of the works. The tour guide was obviously knowledgeable and told us lots of interesting background information, including some about how the exhibition was organized and how the paintings were transported.

Idealized Female Portrait, Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Venus, Botticelli Workshop, Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

This painting is a copy probably made to order for a particular client of the famous Birth of Venus, which appears to have been a big hit from the beginning, with many wealthy clients wanting their own example. The copies were produced in the workshop of Botticelli, but most likely by his students rather than Botticelli himself. Again the figure is idealized showing the extremely sloping shoulders and the second toe being longer than the big toe – a hallmark of Botticelli apparently. The hair in this painting is styled differently to the Birth of Venus, but the pose in instantly recognisable.

Adoration of the Christ Child (“Wemyss Madonna”), National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

The detail on this painting was amazing. There was quite an amount of gold paint, some as embroidery around the edges of the cloak. It was as if you could see every stitch! Apparently as it was a fairly recent acquisition to the National Gallery of Scotland from a private collection it had not be subjected to any “unfortunate” restorations. It was restored at the National Gallery and benefited from modern techniques that allowed it to be returned to what is believed to be the original condition. Certainly you can see lots of detail such as very fine lines around the finger nails and defining the individual fingers.

Having recently been to another tour of the most important works of the Städel where some of the mediaeval paintings were explained, it was interesting to hear how the style had changed and been developed in the Renaissance. Botticelli still used quite a lot of gold paint in his works, but to add detail, whereas in the mediaeval works it is often used as the background.

When we left the museum after noon there were long queues of people waiting to get in – right out onto the street. It was miserable weather – raining and near freezing temperatures. I felt sorry for the people standing out in that weather and probably getting very cold feet standing in the slush of melting snow and glad that I had forsaken my Sunday lie in to beat the rush.

All images are press images from the Städel Museum, Frankfurt