Wednesday 2 August 2006

Fabric Postcard Experiments

I used my rust dyed/silk painted pieces of silk for these postcards. Having experimented with PVA/foil I thought I would try bondaweb/foil on the silk. I cut various geometric shapes from the bondaweb, applied it to the silk and then laid the foil on top. Using baking parchment I ironed the foil to the bondaweb. I quite like this technique. I did this many years ago and forgot all about it.
This is the same background silk as the previous postcard but this time I cut pieces of copper and brass shim and stitched it to the postcard with a zigzag stitch. A topstitch needle is good for this as it is strong and has a big eye (I used a size 14). As the thread is stitched through the metal shim it is inclined to fray but it does so less using a topstitch needle.
I bought some Lazertran for Inket printers a while back and thought I would try it using letters from Dover's Decorative letters CD-rom. I bought this when I was on Holy Island. I have never used the inket variety of lazertran (I have used the photocopy one with great success). I just printed the images as they came on the CD.

One of the drawbacks of the inket Lazertran is that it dries white as you can see from the picture. You can fix that with a solution that I don't have but will get (forgotten what it's called). I just inserted enough images into a Word document and printed onto a sheet - needless to say they were all black/white. I have taken some new images into PSP and added colour to them. The next ones should be coloured which will fix the problem with the white areas! I am thinking I will do a postcard for my swap with each person's initial, makes them more personal.

I put the decal onto a piece of copper shim and stitched it to the background. I used bondaweb and foil for the Celtic designs. I knew the photographs I took on Holy Island would find their way into my work somehow!

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