All at sea.....

..and surrounded by boxes but now we have finally moved in and have started unpacking I am beginning to think about getting back to making things. Sadly most of my books, fabric, threads etc are all still in boxes and my cabin is not yet ready for me to inhabit, so things are getting a bit untidy.

Our local craft group meets on Wednesday mornings in the WI hall in Mullion and I'm going along hoping to get to know a few people. Everyone is so friendly and at long last I think I'm beginning to settle here, but it's still a long way to go anywhere and I think that most of my purchases for textile things will have to be made online.

On the upside, I have been invited to join a textile art group and went to my first meeting recently. They were all very nice and said lots of nice things about the work I took along to show them. They decided that I was good enough to join them and I feel much happier about joining them rather than a traditional patchwork group. As a consequence, I went along to a recent meeting of the Embroiderer's Guild and have rejoined.

So now that I have started plying with my toys in earnest, I thought I would try out some new techniques. I read somewhere that it was possible to transfer images  to fabric using transparency film. This is normally used in making slides for computer presentations. Here are my attempts.

 These photos were played about with in Paint Shop Pro and printed out for reference before printing onto the transfer film. Getting the printer to print on the film proved to be difficult and in the end I had to tape each sheet to a backing piece of paper to get it to go through.  I decided to transfer the images onto paper rather than fabric at this stage.

This transfer was made using Mod Podge acrylic medium and it has sort of worked, but I used a large paintbrush to apply the medium and you can clearly see the brush strokes. Not really what I wanted.

This transfer was made using another acrylic texture medium which has only picked up bits of the ink. So not really a success, but perhaps it might be a technique that I can use with a bit more practice.

So the next venture into image transfer came from reading Julie's blog in which she describes how to use a screen printing technique with Inktense sticks and acrylic medium to get an image onto fabric. See her post for details of the process.

My results are disappointing to say the least and even worse, the screen is now permanently stained and is not usable because Inktense sticks are permanent on both paper and fabric if they get wet! HO HUM!!!!

So here is the first print made by spraying the powder that dropped through the screen as I was drawing.. Unfortunately I overdid the water which formed large puddles and I didn't use enough of the inktense sticks so not much of it came through the screen.

 Here is the print onto cotton sateen using Mod Podge acrylic medium to push the dye through the screen .A very stiff surface and very blotchy result.

 This is the piece of silk organza in which you can see that only part of the image actually transferred,
and here is my poor screen, now permanently dyed  so I will need to replace the fabric and redo the tape before I can do anymore printing with it.

Still, I may be able to use the fabric with the other pieces and make a collage to practice on.

In the meantime, we have had a weekend away, caring for the aged relative, now 98 and still going strong and as it was a lovely sunny afternoon on Saturday we went to the beach.

And from this lovely jumble we collected.....

these which will be so useful for my beach course which is only a fortnight away!

Now I'm off to get mt sketch book to do some drawings. Image transfer with a pencil is something I can do. The rest will have to wait until I'm in the mood!