Taking BIG risks.

I enjoyed another busy, mind blowing day on Friday at the Wet n Wild workshop with Claire benn and Leslie Morgan. Now, as far as I'm concerned, a workshop like this is all about experimenting, exploring new ideas, stretching  strengths, learning from mistakes and if needs be, taking risks! I decided to take along my recent piece I've called Lamination Blues. (see a few posts back), because I still had a niggle about a few areas, and needed some guidance and hopefully a few ideas as to how these niggles could be resolved. Some of the appliqued areas on the backing fabric were creating lines through the lamination, and I was finding them irritating. It was suggested that it may be better to make a feature of these, rather than to keep trying to camouflage them. Monoprinting was an idea that came up, in two contrasting colours, using the lines as the defining edge of the change in colour. Although I've spent hours already on this piece, I decided to go for it, and take the risk of making a very big mistake! I quite enjoy the challenge of putting things right when they go wrong, and so this was definitely a challenge I couldn't refuse!! I decided to use a dark sea green on the largest area, and a turquoise blue on the smaller section.. With a sense of trepidation, the printing ink was mixed, swirled onto the plastic printing block, and gently but firmly pressed onto the surface of my textile piece. Some interesting results were an added bonus from printing the image left on the plastic onto some silk/cotton fabric, but more on that later. I'm not sure yet what I feel about t the results, they are quite radical for me, and the sea green colour has dried darker than I'd planned for. However, I have absolutely no regrets about going ahead with this, I really do feel that it is what will eventually give me the confidence to fully explore my potential, and it's what workshops like this are all about.....don't you think?