The course outline sounds interesting and covers quite a variety of techniques:

Lesson One

• Preparing your materials and workspace
• The mechanics of printing
• Paper stencil screens

Lesson Two

• Found materials and other resists
• Finger blending
• Plastic stencil screens
• Bonus – discharge printing

Lesson Three

• Flour paste screens
• Preparing images for Thermofax screens
• Printing with Thermofax screens
• Printing yardage

Lesson Four

• Cheap and easy home-made frames
• Glue and paint screens
• Spray paint screens
• Bonus – drawing fluid and filler

The courses are also imho very good value for money. This one is costing me $37.

Just as well really when you see what the supplies are costing me and this is just part of the shopping list!

Luckily I don’t have to shop for everything on the supply list.

I have been playing around with it in Photoshop Elements. One of the things I often do is convert the image to black and white. Then I play around with the various filters until I find something I like. I’m by no means an expert user, but you can’t do much damage if you don’t save the changes you’ve made to the original photo. One of the filters I like is posterize. I first learnt about this at a course I took at Quilt University – Realistic Fabric Portraits. You can choose how much you want to simply the image by varying the number of levels. The lower the number the less detail you get and the more simplified the resulting image will be. This is the result of posterizing the original with 4 levels. I’m not sure now if it was black and white and then posterized or the other way round. I suspect that the posterized image was converted to black and white.

Another filter that is sometimes useful is to find the edges – either accented edges or poster edges. This image was created by applying the poster edges filter to the original and then just printing it in black and white. If you don’t want to be bothered converting to black and white, printing is the easy option.

These two images gave me a starting point to get into the studio and start playing with fabric.

• 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.

• International Quilt Market/Houston, October 30 – November 1, 2010 (not open to the public)
• International Quilt Festival/Houston, November 4 – 7, 2010 (open to the public)
• International Quilt Festival/Cincinnati, April 8 – 10, 2011 (open to the public)
• International Quilt Festival/Long Beach, July 29 – 31, 2011 (open to the public)

This has given me a nice boost to my confidence. Maybe I’ll be back in the studio soon too. I’ve started thinking about my next piece for our Use Your Eyes challenge on Shadows. Small steps taken!

So what has all this to do with textile art you ask yourselves? Well to be honest not a lot. I’m just trying to get you accustomed to the idea that this blog may not be updated as frequently as you are used to.

While we were in Valencia on one of the visits to the architect we went to the Plaza Redonda again. It is in the process of being renovated and we saw quite some improvement since our last visit. This time there were two groups of ladies: one doing drawn thread embroidery and the other making stitched lace (not sure of the correct term and no time to look it up now). There are women of all ages there and it seems quite a regular get together. Actually that is not completely accurate, there was one gentleman in the group of lace makers, who was busily stitching away on his piece of work. I guess I will need to learn Valenciano before I can join in. Maybe they’ll take pity on me and speak Castellano?

As we drove to Spain to avoid getting stuck in airports due to dust clouds or air traffic controller strikes, we only had the middle weekend to relax in. We stayed just outside Xàtiva at Genovés. There was a town fiesta going on that weekend and we were lucky enough to catch the end of some folk dancing by the local dance group. I really love the fact that the Spanish still wear their traditional costumes for the fiestas. Although not as elaborate as some of the dresses you see in Valencia these ones were attractive too.