Chapter 8 - Use of Purls or Bullion

MM157/159 show examples of purls made using various materials that have been wrapped round different cores:

• external telephone wire to house (thanks to Christmas storm of 2013) that was stripped down to reveal the seven wires inside.  Using one stand of the wire gave little memory when wrapped.  I tried wrapping it around the flat end of a 10" upholstery regulator and banging it with a hammer to try to 'help' it keep its shape but in the end I wrapped it round a pencil under pressure which gave me what you see. Three of the wires were plaited and then wrapped around a pencil.  The plaiting gave the wire more stability and inclination to keep its shape. Two samples were made of the wire twisted together - one with more twist - and these were again wrapped around a pencil under pressure.  More twists gave the wire more stability and inclination to retain the wrapping shape.
• crochet yarn was wrapped round a cocktail stick, coated with dilute PVA , left to dry and removed.
• paper-coated cake decorating wire was wrapped around a pencil.  This would give the option to colour the 'purl' as required.
• smoothed Ferrero Rocher and silver sweet papers
• kinked wire wrapped around pencil
• plaited wire wrapped around pencil
• other materials used were wires of various diameters and brown paper covered garden twine.

MM158 shows various tubular shapes made from looping around a mould.  The willow twig sampler was made at a wonderful weekend with Mary Crabb at West Dean and the additional shapes on returning home.  I include them here as they would give me the option of using a larger 'purl', made-to-measure tubular shape, diameter decided by the mould.   Paper yarn, wire and gold thread have been used to make the shapes. The paper yarn would again give the option to colour the shape.

Chapter 7 - Contemporary Shisha Ideas

Starting to collect items to be used for contemporary shisha, my first sample (MM146) was made using metal caps from the corks of champagne, prosecco, cava, etc bottles.  Though the metal caps have four ridges which would obviously assist with the anchoring stitches, I was more concerned in this sample in using different decorative stitches once the cap was in place.

The background gives continuity from the Opus Anglicanum samples, i.e. calico brushed roughly with dilute emulsion, gelli printed and waxed with paraffin wax to give the backing stability.  Once the caps were positioned/decoratively stitched, I couched down part of the muselets/wirehoods (the metal cages from around the corks) and blanket stitched over sections of their circular sections.  Finally holes were made in the waxed calico with an awl.

The decorative stitches/techniques used were:

• needleweaving
• spider's web, open worked and  ribbed spider's web
• needlelace buttonhole net
• screwcup washer covered closely with blanket stitch held in place over metal cap
• couronne ring made on ring stick covered with buttonhole stitch
• herringbone stitch.

MM147 shows the back.  In the bottom left you can see where I was overcautious in the number of anchoring stitches need.  I became more relaxed about this as the sample continued.

The second silver sample uses flat silver spangles, some of which have been cut into different shapes; aluminium shim; and traditional shisha mirrors. These have been held by:

• couronne rings covered with blanket and belle point de venise cinq point stitches
• square nut covered in symmetrical blanket stitch
• many-sided nut covered in symmetrical blanket stitch
• washers covered in blanket and belle point de venise cinq point stitch 
• plastic ring covered in blanket stitch
• needlelace buttonhole net
• screwcup washer covered closely with blanket stitch held in place with herringbone stitch.

In sample MM149 I returned to my gull theme and cut gulls from a tomato purée tube.  I tried heating the tube over a candle unsuccessfully as it just covered in soot from the flame.  I then tried over the gas on the hob and it had no effect - just producing a strange smell.  Too late I read in Stitch, Fibre, Metal and Mixed Media by Alysn Midgelow-Marsden that it is a good idea to know what you are dealing with when it comes to metal and that most metals used for food storage have a plastic covering that when heated will give off fumes that are potentially toxic.  So I should have been wearing a face mask and working in a well-ventilated space.  Heath and Safety note to self!  A second note she gives is that the melting point of pewter, aluminium and tin is much lower than that of copper or brass and when they are placed in a strong heat they will melt.  This probably accounts for the fact that when I heated a piece of aluminium shim it just made the surface texture cloudy.  Image 145 shows the before and after heating of the shim.  She notes it is also advisable to clean metal with detergent before working with it to remove grease from the production process or previous use, which would interfere with the colouring and sealing of the metal.  Altogether I didn't have much luck heating metals.

After cutting out gull shapes from the tomato purée tube I marked the soft metal using a fine embossing tool.  They were attached to the background using couronne rings covered in blanket and belle point de venise cinq point stitches made from Impex 28 gauge pure copper wire.

MM150 - zooming in on gull held in position by couronne ring covered in belle point de venise cinq point stitch.

MM151 - zooming in on gull held by couronne ring covered in blanket stitch.

For my next sample I used the stitched relief block MM84. Rubbings were taken on teabag paper fragments using a gold Markal Paintstik (MM152).  

Using Golden Matt Medium, these fragments were laminated onto a calico background that has been lightly painted with emulsion and then brayered with acrylic paints.  This gave a faux chine collé effect (MM153).

Onto this background I placed traditional shisha mirrors which I held in place by free machine embroidery using Madeira variegated machine embroidery thread (MM154).

Additional stitching was added, again with free machine embroidery using Isacord machine embroidery thread (MM155).

The final sample, MM156, was worked on a print out of MM136.  The printer in its wisdom randomly coloured the printout but I went with the flow.  I ripped and recombined the printout using paraffin wax. Onto this I free-machine stitched cut pieces of metal foil from a prosecco muselet.  Additional free-machine stitching was then added.

Diploma Chapter 6 - Decorative Details from a Shisha Textile

For this chapter I used as my inspiration a textile from a beautiful book, Textiles of the Banjara: Cloth and Culture of a Wandering Tribe by Charllotte Kwon and Tim McLaughlin.  The textile appears on Pages 48 and 149 and is a cotton-thread embroidery on indigo and madder-dyed cotton c.1900 from the Maiwa collection.  I haven't reproduced it here for reasons of copyright.  It shows a popular motif south of Hyderabad, often found combined with circles and dots.

From this I made relief surfaces from which to produce rubbings and prints, often changing the scale to add more interest (MM118).  I used punch pockets, blue garden twine, string, cardboard and Japanese Washi yarn.

Stitching on punch pockets proved very successful.  After the block has been placed on a gelli plate and 'inked', if you then place tissue or thin paper on top of the block you can take interesting prints by just rubbing the tissue, particularly if you also take some of the ink deposited on the punch pocket.

Using multiple relief surfaces and Markal Paintstiks I carefully made rubbings on blue tissue paper. Initially I followed the design and then became freer in my development.

Developing Designs from Block Printing and Rubbings/Extended Designing Process

From design work already done in earlier chapters, as I developed the designs I tended to use the thinner papers to take rubbings - teabag, lens tissue, tissue.  When I used the gelli plate, which I continued to do for these designs, I could use thicker papers, though thinner papers did also give good results as before.  The gelli plate also enabled me to layer up design motifs on a single piece of paper without the necessity to cut and paste.  Using a limited palette - blue, ochre and red ensured that different prints would always complement one another. Once again I made use of the fact I could push the relief surface into the gelli plate, lift off the relief surface and then take a print from the plate - like a negative rubbing.  It also gave me the option of taking a ghost print from the gelli plate which was often more interesting than the first print.

All this gave me many prints.  I include a selection of my favourites, with notation where appropriate.

MM122/3 - acrylic base on tissue with Markal Paintstik rubbing ontop. Notice as the tissue pleats as it is placed on the gelli plate the wonderful marks you get almost by accident.

MM131 - acrylic on blue tissue paper.

MM134 - my favourite!

MM139 - acrylic on lining paper.

MM140 acrylic on 160gsm dark blue Tiziano paper.

MM141 - acrylic on 150gsm Khadi paper.

MM142 - pleated tissue paper and rubbings made. Pleats reversed and more rubbings made.

MM143 -  combining designs.

One concern I have is that all the prints are quite busy and when you start putting them together there is no peace/rest in the design.  I would probably go back and do some simpler prints to put alongside the prints I have made, perhaps using the motifs on a much larger scale so creating space.

MM144 - relief blocks after the action!

A Little Interlude

This section is an extension of Chapter 5 but using different techniques to produce a series of monoprints in a Seawhites 11cmWx15.5cmH sketchbook.

My daughter and I had a wonderful day recently at a workshop with  Jennifer Collier making Story Book Dresses.  During the day Jennifer used the belle point de venise cinq point stitch but I hadn't had time to try it. Cutting out different diameter circles from the sketchbook pages I used the stitch (only managing trois points due to the size of the circles).  From this I went on to try other edging stitches I hadn't used for some time including looped, braid, Antwerp, Armenian, blanket, chevron blanket and tailor's. Where pages had been split I used buttonhole and knotted insertion stitches to reunite them.

Using an 18x11cm home-made gelli plate and three colours, Inscribe pure gold/Daler Rowney acrylic gold, Golden Open Phthalo Blue and Reeves Yellow Ocre I made prints using portions of the print block from the Chapter 5 (MM84), the stitched pages/edges and the circles cut from the sketchbook.  Lens tissue, and book binding material were also printed and the tissue in particular used to layer over other prints.  The following are some of the pages from the sketchbook in no particular order.

G5 is the first layer.  G6 is G5 layered with lens tissue.

Some of these results are very promising.  I particularly like the way you can push the stitched pages into the gelli plate and produce such interesting prints and ghost prints (G10/11).