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Thursday 28 February 2013

Bonding at Morley………

Not just with my fellow students, but trying  out a technique completely new to me of bonding synthetic cloth to paper with this result.

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Kim at Flextiles has blogged about this technique, and I've tried to show part of the process below.  I forgot to take photos of the initial paper collage, but it was made up of torn and cut paper images of flowers. Luckily enough someone had brought multiple copies of an Evening  Standard in to the studio this week, so I could get repeats of images.

Principal steps are:

  • compose a paper collage, slightly larger than the screen area
  • place the synthetic cloth over the collage, and pin it securely to the print table
  • screenprint over the cloth and through to the paper with Matte Medium, taking great care to wash the screen very quickly when finished printing
  • Leave to dry completely
  • Iron the whole caboodle under greaseproof paper for 10 mins
  • Soak in a bucket of water until the paper is very soft
  • Rub on the back of the cloth until most of the paper has been removed, leaving only the very top layer of inked paper, where the medium has been printed on to it
  • Dry and iron smooth
  • Seal the edges with a soldering iron
  • Stand back and say "wow", or "interesting", or " that's unusual"  or " hmmm, not sure about that" as is your wont.

I used my Voices screen, overlaid on itself three times.

Hanging up to dry after screen printing with the Matte Medium

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Ironing the first time - ignore the state of the soleplate of the iron in the background, if you can

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Scraping off the paper pulp after soaking

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First glimpse of the final effect

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After the second ironing

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Sealing the edges

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The demonstration pieces gave great food for thought, as the cloth can now  be over dyed, overprinted, stitched in to , burnt- out………….so many  possibilities.  Looking forward to next week.

4 comments:

  1. This looks like a really interesting technique. So the matt medium bonds the paper to the sheer fabric where the screen allows it through? What brand of matt medium did you use? presumably it has to be one that is waterproof after drying.

    The possibilities do seem rather interesting.

    H

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi there, that is exactly it. The paper has to be newspaper or photocopy to work well. We used Golden brand, and apparently the finished piece can be put through the washing machine on completion,as it is so stable and robust.

      Delete
  2. Truly fabulous! It looks like hard work (and I don't like the idea of 10 minutes ironing anything!) but a really lovely end product.

    ReplyDelete

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