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.

Lake Hart Salt Mine

I loaded up the pictures for this about six weeks ago and have been sitting on them ever since, unable to write another blog post because I wanted to finish this one, but stuck.  I've got lots of other Central Australia stuff to blog about so I need to get on with it!

And I have just been to my first Geelong Fibre Forum and have lots of things to say about that too!

Lake Hart, South Australia, near Woomera.  It was the site of salt mining up until the 1930s and the salt was taken by rail on the Trans Continental Line to Sydney for domestic and industrial use.  It was supposed to be twice as 'salty' as other salt, and free of gypsum.

This pictures show a huge pile of bags of salt (7,00 tons originally, though I;m sure some of that has dissolved and disintegrated) that had just been left in situ since 1931 in the sun (and occasional rain). It is an astonishing sight, similar to an industrial ruin that had sunk into the landscape and taken on an organic form. The hessian bags have largely rotted away but have left their imprint on the salt, and are the reason for the odd drapey shapes in the pile.

The railway line is still there though the trains don't go there any more, obviously.

Amazing skies over a dead flat landscape - taken over the lake.

Salt.  It wasn't until I tasted it that I believed it was salt, it must have melted and resolidified countless times over the decades.

It was a haunting landscape and a poignant reminder of the death of a once lucrative industry.

Wingspan

I've been wanting to knit Wingspan for a while, and eventually got round to it.  Here is the result:

I used about 3/4 ball of Wisdom Yarns Poems Socks, 75% Superwash Wool and 25% Nylon, in (obviously) a pink/purple/grey colourway.  It's a Turkish yarn that appeared in Spotlight at some point, quite cheaply, and I bought four balls of it in different colours.  The colours are all gorgeous, with long, Noro-like colour changes, but the quality of the yarn itself is pretty ho-hum, being rough and splitty.  I wouldn't want to wear actual socks made from it.  But it made a pretty scarf/shawlette.  I've given this one to my daughter because they are her colours, and I enjoyed knitting it so much that I have decided to make another one for me, out of another colourway of the same yarn.  I might make mine a bit longer though, nine or ten 'wings' instead of eight.

Mooving Art

I know it's a terrible pun, but it is the official name of this delightful art installation in the Victorian country town of Shepparton. There are brightly painted cows all over the town, and I haven't photographed all of them, just the ones that were in a herd and a couple of other nearby ones.

See Mooving Art Shepparton for a full explanation and details of artists, etc.



This is not a sculpture.  This was parked in the street near where I was photographing the cows.  You can't tell the contents from the photo.  When I was taking the photos I started to think that they had very realistic sound effects, until I realised that the mooing I could hear was coming from this trailer!

I have given the name of each cow where I could find it.


Worker Cow

Vine Cow

Bat Cow

Two Tribes

Rainbow Bubbles

 Strawberries and Cream

Scarecrow Cow

Autumn Leaf

Zaidee's Cow

Willow Pattern Cow

Koorie Cow

Bluey

Dripping Clock

Armoured Cow

Cow Jumped Over the Moon

Wanted Dead or Alive

Blue Healer

Patches

Skater Cow

Football Cow

How Now Brown Cow

Mutonia

Words are not really equal to explaining Mutonia on the Oodnadatta Track, so I will say it with pictures - and a few words belonging to other people.

Mutonia is a sculpture park established by Robin Cooke, a former performance artist. It has a general Mad Max feel to it, as has the countryside in the area.

Ghan Hover Bus Service

Plane Henge

Plane Henge

Plane Henge

Wordless Wednesday

Stuff

I had a little epiphany while we were on holiday.  I decided that I would resume an 'artistic practice' of some sort when we returned home.  One with no pressure, no deadlines, no concerns about saleability.  Just for my own pleasure and mental health. George was delighted with the idea. (There is also a project coming up which I anticipate will take one or two days a week for about a year, not artistic in the same sense but sort of literary/historic, but more of that in another post).

Well, I've only done only thing from scratch in the three weeks since we returned, as I have had catching up to do with a variety of things. (Including taking Wombat to the movies twice a week, for three weeks, to catch up with the lost time while we were away.  I usually take him once a week, and it is a ritual we both have come to value greatly).

I had so much fun with my dot painting workshop in Uluru that I wanted to do more dot painting, but not in a traditional way.  I wanted to put my own stamp on the technique, and besides, it would be inappropriate in any way for a white British person to use the symbols sacred to another race.

This is my first pass through of the various ideas I have had.  I took a dark turquoise paint and gradually mixed it with white to do the various shapes on the small canvas, and then just used gold paint to do dots on the borders of the shapes.  It was sort of inspired by quilting in the ditch in patchwork, I suppose, if you imagine it done with beads.

It's far from brilliant, but it was fun, and it made me get my paints out and actually DO something without caring whether anyone else liked it or not.  I have other ideas which will be experimented with in due course.

This next piece is something I actually made during the summer and finished well before we went away, but left it in a crumpled heap until a couple of days ago.  When I decided to block it, I was annoyed to discover a nibbled hole in the exact centre.  I don't know what ate it - we don't seem to have mice and we pest bomb the house every few months because we have a slight cockroach problem (most people in our area with lush gardens seem to have one, so I don't think we are unusually grotty) - but I had to brush up my long-neglected darning skills to cure the problem.  It's far from invisible, sadly, but I will still wear it.

The pattern is Bigger on the Inside, modified to get rid of the lace body because I couldn't be bothered knitting lace and I really only wanted it for the Tardises.  I also added an iridescent blue bead for the light on top of the Tardis instead of the stitch pattern.  I did have a go at the lace pattern but it was irritating me, and I wanted it to be a fun knit.  I am not very fond of knitting lace.  I knitted it with Shepherd Baby Wool Merino, 4ply, which is quite soft and nice.  It's a short shawl, which I like, more like a deep scarf.

Films I have seen since coming back from holiday - 

Word War Z - better than I expected. It inspired me to buy the book after several people told me the book is far better than the film.

Despicable Me 2 - bottom!!!!

Man of Steel - disappointing.  OK but not great.

Monsters University - really funny and enjoyable, and I loved the huge, colourful diversity of monsters.  And it had one of the BEST librarian jokes ever.  (Mostly visual, so not really worth describing).

The Lone Ranger - a bit too long but entertaining.  Johhny Depp is to be admired for keeping such a straight face for the whole film.

Tomorrow is The Wolverine, not sure about that...

Edited to add : Roxie left me a lovely comment this morning but I wasn't wearing my glasses at the time and I managed to delete it.  So here it is, copied and pasted from the trash folder in my emails!

Love the painting. And yes, by all means, wear the scarf. It's beautiful and real! If you want something made with machine-like precision, get something machine made. I prefer things showing the touch of the maker's hand. 

Coat of Arms Pizza

I have so many photos to go through from my Central Australian holiday that I haven't got round to blogging a fraction of them.  Not that I will inflict the whole lot on the public, but we did visit some very interesting places that I would like to share.

After spending over a week unable to choose pictures because of brain fog every time I looked at them, here is just one to be going on with.  This is a Coat of Arms pizza that we ate for dinner in Coober Pedy.  It has cured kangaroo and emu on it and it was DELICIOUS.  We ate quite a bit of 'bush tucker' on our travels.

About my last post - they are all photos of Kata Tjuta, formerly known as The Olgas, taken during the hour leading up to sunset.  None of them are retouched.

There will be more posts with more pictures as I get myself more organised.