Tea, Coffee, Red Wine and Rust!

  Along with 14 other very enthusiastic ladies, I have just spent a very happy Saturday and Sunday enjoying a workshop led by Alice Fox. We were mark making on paper and fabrics with tea, coffee, red wine and a selection of old rusty nails, screws, hinges, nuts, bolts and plenty more weird and wonderful objects scrounged from sheds and garages! Great fun!

Above are some of my efforts, gently (and hopefully), transferring a magical selection of  marks in a variety of oranges, yellow, greys and pinks!

We also wrapped rusty objects in calico, cotton or silk, dunked them in the above potions, and left them overnight, or longer to 'do' their thing! You can see some of the marks this process created above.

You've guessed it, the above  was soaked in red wine! It smelled rather more tempting than the tea I have to say!

Today, I arranged lots of the samples into my sketchbook, with notes, (my memory seems to fade rather fast these days), and then played around with some of the others which you can see below.

Finally, I started a printing class a few weeks ago, and the first couple of sessions were concerned with the techniques of mono printing. I thought my result below was reasonable for a first attempt, so will be having a bit more practise with that.

Finally, an example of my first attempt at 'etching'. My fish was etched into a thin sheet of acrylic, inked up, wiped off and put through the printing press. I will be able to show further photos of some Chine Colle techniques that I used with the same printing plate after half term. They needed to be left to dry under a weight at the college,

Oh how I love a new technique, and the possibilities if offers to combine with stitch!

Thanks for reading.