This stage is pretty huge so I’ve cut it into sections and am posting work as I move through the various exercises.
Here I used a plastic embossing plate as my mould. The fabric is an extremely light-weight cotton, hand dyed. It has been applied wet over the plate, pressed into the design, painted with Paverpol and left to dry. Paverpol is brilliant as it slightly pools on the underside and when dry has a high gloss sheen on that side. Can be useful at times.
The piece was later rubbed lightly with Shiva stick and had a single coat of Paper Glaze applied to the surface.
I decided to keep to this theme but vary the products a little.
This example has been done using a polystyrene supermarket food tray as the mould. A heavy-weight hand dyed calico was placed, damp, on the mould and undiluted PVA glue was brushed heavily over the surface pushing the fabric into the mould.
It later had two colours of Shiva stick applied and two coats of Paper Glaze to give the sheen.
These have taken several days to complete due to the initial drying time, the Shiva stick curing time and the Paper Glaze drying time.
The durability of each piece is quite different and the PVA glue piece is much more robust than I expected. This would be a wonderful piece to incorporate into a textile art piece.
Aida cloth, tapestry canvas and mono canvases have a lot of stiffener in them to minimise distortion when filling with stitches on the slant so I knew that moulding one of these when wet would give a good dimensional shape.
I’ve used an 18ct single mesh and tied marbles into it. I untied and removed them whilst the fabric was slightly damp because (having done a similar thing in the past) the fabric re-sets like concrete and everything encased becomes difficult to extract. Once it was completely dry I stretched it out quite forcefully and the result is above. It has maintained the ‘bobble’ look but softened slightly.
This technique can be used for a lot of different fabrics and I’ve done it myself in felt but unfortunately I don’t have the piece any more. Time to do another perhaps?
TactualTextiles 