Dyeing Fabric & Paper

I've decided to experiment with fabric & paper using food dye, tea & coffee. Next class we're supposed to create some sort of piece using fabrics so I thought I'll have a go playing with the dyes as well.

I used simple food dyes as well as a tea dye and got some really bright colours.
While drying some muslin got bumped off the drying rack with some of the
wadding, tea got spilled on it and the image above is the result.
The dyes, non colour fast, ran. A happy accident

They should be quite bright, I expect. The following are some sketches I made in the first class of some ideas that popped into my head for this particular class.

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Paper Textiles & Surrealism

We continued on today with similar work to last week as well as venturing into some Magritte style paper collage. Not really my thing and I couldn't seem to get my head into in.

This image (above) is some paper weaving.
I used some scraps of paper from printing making when we made books a year ago.
Never throw out scraps as they always come in handy.

And this is my Magritte style piece, but as I said, not really my thing.

Ah well, I'll look for some inspiration for next week as were doing fabric collage & sewing. I might do some dyeing of muslin using tea & coffee for golds and browns and perhaps some cochineal and raspberry tea for crimsons & reds.

2008 and a new subject in art - Textiles

Well yesterday I attended the first class of textiles. I've decided to only do one unit of art this semester as I'm already doing three units for my uni degree.

The first half of the semester we will be concentrating on paper-based textiles. With fabric-based textiles, probably 3-D fabric sculpture being studied in the second half.