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Fabric Postcards

A brief detour from the Arizona trip…..

I’ve been a  part of Postmark’d Art’s last two swaps.  This time, I used one of the exercises from my Lino-Cutting class (blogged about in January and February).   I rooted through about (no kidding) 20 years of old photos to find this one of a farm in southern England, which I snapped in about 1984.   It was funny, I thought I used to be a good photographer, taking good and artsy shots.  Hmmm.  Not so much.  Some were good, but most were….ummm…boring!   It appears I have trained my eye for composition somewhat in the intervening decades!   Anyway, this one was good, so I used it to cut a lino-block.

Here are the assorted prints drying on the floor:

Some blurred a bit, and will be cut up, tossed, or printed over.  Others turned out great!  I used three fabrics:  a pale baby blue fossil fern (the one that looks grayish), a commercial sky print (the bright one), and a blue fabric I painted and fiddled with (and used some for the mermaid I blogged about recently).  There are also two guardian Owls for a friend whose husband passed away recently.  Owl’s are a favorite of hers (I carved the block during the class with her in mind!), and decided that she and Lou needed a guardian Angel Owl.

One difficulty I have had with the class, is that the teacher–Dijanne–is from Europe and Australia, and not so familiar with US brands.  The Speedball water-based printing ink that I find makes the best prints is, shriek!, not wash-fast!!!!!   So I have begun doing some testing.  Here I took prints (heat set with the iron and not) of a sun, then treated each with various things like soft gel medium, a varnish for textiles, GAC 900 (a compound for using paints on textiles), and nothing. I also want to run another test where I treat the fabric FIRST, then apply the Speedball ink.   I don’t like how on a couple of these the color of the fabric changes so much (not to mention how stiff it got)!  I also have tried using Krylon Spray Fixative, an archivally safe spray fixative; it is often used on top of pastels so they don’t smudge.   Anyway…here’s a picture of the test, in progress.  I next need to soak these and see what happens.  Stay tuned!!

And here’s a shot of all the postcards in the swap:

One Response to “Fabric Postcards”

  1. Marjolijn Says:

    Oh, I wish I was in this swap! Lovely cards.
    Marjolijn