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).