I've spent the last couple of weeks at the bench printing fabrics. I love it! It is a little bit like a merry-go-round, once you're on it is difficult to stop. But stopping and assessing is really important so yesterday I cleaned, tidied and finished rinsing out and ironing the fabrics. This morning I looked at what I had printed. I used the samples that I have been stitching to help and used the trick of framing small sections. I have printed approximately 18 square metres of fabric. About half is 'perfect' and so will be put through a final machine wash to make them ready for use. The other half need additional work. Some just need a few lines adding but some need some serious intervention! (And, being honest, a couple probably need throwing in the bin!). These will all be soda soaked again and hopefully printed over the next week. So lots more fun at the bench!

Well I am a long, long way from transforming my ugly ducklings into beautiful swans but I have had some success using the soya wax screen on a piece of really awful fabric. Again I found that using white 'L' frames to select small sections of fabric really helped me to evaluate the results. As a big piece of fabric it does absolutely nothing for me. But in small sections it shows promise!

I also took a piece that was original printed with the soya wax screen and added more lines, mostly in a mid grey colour selected from the same Dunure colour family. The resulting fabric is also best viewed in small sections but is definitely starting to spark!

As well as stitching lots and lots of lines over the last couple of weeks I have also spent a few hours doing 'wet work' inspired by calm and tranquility. I was fairly pleased with the pieces I had printed over the August bank holiday but this time around all I seem to have made is a bunch of ugly ducklings! Using the Dunure colour family I made some more pieces by monoprinting off glassine and by using breakdown printing. I also did some scraping with thickened dye and some dry brushing. Usually I can predicate, and somewhat control, the outcome when I layer up colours from within a colour family. This time most of the pieces came out rather dirty brown or dull looking. I think I have lost my mojo!

But I like a challenge so I sat and studied the pieces. I used paper 'L' frames to isolate sections of each cloth. This helped me decide which pieces needed more of the same - for example adding more bands of colour by monoprinting off glassine. And which pieces needed the addition of a layer of something different - for example adding fine lines using a soya wax screen on top of scrapped fabric. I also hung some of the really ugly pieces side by side to see if there were any 'sparks' between them. I now have separate piles to work through over the coming days and weeks. Let's hope I can find my mojo again!