Sublimation Printing - TAFTA Geelong Fibre Forum

Last week I spent a fantastic week at Geelong Grammar attending my first ever TAFTA Fibre Forum, and I'll post pictures of what I have been making over two or three blog posts.

I did a workshop with Melbourne jeweller Anna Davern studying sublimation printing onto metal.  It also involved quite a lot of basic metalwork techniques for those who needed it, i.e. especially me!

Sublimation printing = 'Design your graphics in your computer and or scan the image into your computer. When you get ready to print the image be sure to "flip or mirror image" the image so it will be a transfer. If you will design a hairline rectangular border 1/8 inch larger than your metal plate you wish to print and center all your graphics inside that border; it will help you center the graphics on the plate when you are ready to print. You will be printing the "border" with your graphics centered in the border.

It will take approximately 15 minutes for your heat press to get to printing temperature so turn it on ahead of time. Set the temperature to 350° to 360°F. This temperature is important. Any setting under 340° may cause the toner to stick too tightly to the metal and may cause gray printing. Any setting over 370° may cause the toner to "bleed" and the edges of your characters may be slightly distorted.

Remove the plastic protective covering from the metal plate. Preheat the bottom pad of your heat press for 5 or 6 seconds by closing the heat press without anything in it. Now lay your transfer "ink side up" on the warm pad of the heat press. This will pre-shrink the paper prior to printing. This will keep the image from blurring during the printing process. Center your cut metal plate inside the hairline rectangle you designed on your computer. Pull the handle of your heat press down until it locks in place. This process does not require heavy pressure. Set the timer for 20-25 seconds.

When the timer goes off, open the heat press. Immediately, while the metal is still in the heat press, separate the paper from the metal plate. The best way to do this is to pick up one edge of the paper and quickly turn the paper and the metal plate upside down. You will find the metal and the paper are stuck together. With your other hand (with a clean glove on or a clean heavy cloth wrapped around your finger) hold the metal plate down and pull the paper away from the metal. Do this quickly; you have a window of only a few seconds to separate the metal and the paper. Do not move your finger around on the metal as you may pick up some toner on your glove and double print the metal where the glove touches the metal the second time.

Now remove the metal from the heat press and lay in down on some object (that is heat resistant) to cool down.'  It's too complicated for me to explain in my own words, so I borrowed some from here, an American site called Sublimation TOG LLC - there are also Australian firms which sell the stuff.  

Will talk more about the process in other posts but now I want to put some piccies in:

The square pieces have been printed with an image or images, and sometimes overprinted with other images,, and then have had another printed piece/s glued directly to them (with superglue).  They are going into the mixed media stash and will be used in various ways.  If I ever use them, I'll post photos of the finished works!

The smaller blanks have all been printed with one image on each and mostly turned into brooches, except of course for the obvious pair of earrings that I made to match one of the brooches.

Completely Random Installation

I should say that this is a carefully planned mixed media installation.  It is, in fact, a random pile of stuff I picked up to sort out while we were emptying George's mum's house.  I realised that I could not have come up with anything as surreal as this if I tried!

A  quilt; a piece of brown paper; a handmade vintage doily; a vintage hankie; a vintage nappy pin; and a rubber crocodile.

There's clearly no point in my trying to do clever dioramas or installations - nothing could beat the randomness of this!

One Skein Wonder

A few months ago I had reason to want to create a gift for someone I have never met in person, but know online, who had suffered a tremendous loss in her life.  I decided to knit her a small shoulder shawl using a merino/possum wool sock yarn that I had in my stash, which was pretty colours and soft and snuggly.

It's a very easy pattern, but annoyingly I can't find it now.  It ought to be on Ravelry but I can't find it.  It took 100g of the sock wool, anyway.

As the intended recipient is also a mixed media artist I included two (non-matching) arms from discarded acupuncture baby dolls, tied together with a strip of sari silk.

Apparently it went down well and the waitress in the restaurant who witnessed the opening of the parcel with the dead baby arms was horrified!

There's quite a lot you can do with 100g of sock wool.

Edited to add : Thanks, Jill, you were quite right, it is the Bit of a Frill pattern, many thanks!

Fragments of Me

Rather than explaining this picture all over again, this is the artist statement I wrote to go with it:

FRAGMENTS OF ME

The original collage for this work consists of childhood photos, photos of my own daughter and niece and nephews, street maps of two of the most significant places I have lived, and the (present day) board outside the hospital where I was born.

Although I was reasonably happy with this collage and played around with some stitching ideas to use with it, I then decided that the composition was too static. While playing around with photo-editing software I attempted distorting the picture several times, and chose these three distortions to place side-by-side in a triptych.

It shows how our perceptions of ourselves as children are distorted in the real world, and those perceptions distort further as we get older and become parents ourselves. Different aspects of our lives take precedence at different times.

For me, family is a constant theme that informs how I live my life. The stitched border represents the gardens of all the places I have lived in and the domesticity that forms the bedrock of my life and relationships with others.

My grandmother’s charm bracelet completes the picture. Two of the charms (the sheep which she hung the wrong way round, and the flat iron) were makeweights that she put on to balance it out. The other charms are a St Christopher medal that belonged to one of her sons whose plane was shot down during WW2; a silver threepenny piece; and the navy badge worn by the other of her sons who was killed during the war, in the Battle of Crete.

P is for Pear 3

The pear is made from Tyvek. I painted a sheet of it with bronze acrylic paint, then ironed the whole sheet and cut out a pear shape from it. This was stuck down and hand stitched around onto the background. The background was prepared from crumbpled up brown paper, roughly smoothed out again, and Vliesofix that i had painted with acrylics and, when it was dry, ironed onto the brown paper. I then machined lines onto it to give (I hope!) an impression of a table and a wall behind. 

P is for Pear 2

The pear is made of air drying clay, painted with acrylics and then with gold wax rubbed on it. It is on a lightly quilted background using echo quilting done by hand. The pear is glued onto the fabric ground and then surrounded with peyote stitched seed beads. 

Frog Rain and Toad Soup

This mixed media collage would have been perfect for Project Spectrum last month! It's what we did in class last Friday. I don't actually like it much, I felt too rushed while making it as we were pressured to get it done in the two hour class. I mounted it on the green felt and did the stitching at home, though. I would like to try mixed media again with some careful planning and thought. The couple I have done this semester have not worked out very well because I have felt presured to complete them in a certain time or with certain materials, and I would like to practice with some greater freedon of materials and with no time pressure. I have seen some fabulous mixed media stuff that I would like to be inspired by.