Monday, November 22, 2010

Still TAPping

In an earlier post, I spoke about a product known as TAP (Artist Transfer Paper). Although there were some things I did not like about it, I know I will find many uses for it. Recently I took one of my feather designs, drew it directly onto fabric and coloured it using ordinary crayons. I quite liked the way it turned out and decided to use the TAP to duplicate this one.So I scanned the original and then printed a couple of the images onto a sheet of TAP. Cut one out and transferred that image onto fabric using a hot iron.The original is on the right and the TAPped version is on the left, finished as a postcard. I must admit this was kinda cool!

Monday, November 15, 2010

Lino Cutting

I am still playing with feathers. I wanted to create a stamp of one of my feather designs, so I broke out my lino cutting tools. Here you see the stamp as I began the cutting process. The lino block I am using is 4 x 6 inches in size.
The finished stamp with textile paint applied. Instead of "stamping" onto the fabric, I laid the fabric (a sheer) on top of the wet stamp and rolled a brayer over it.With just a little more refinement to the cutting, I think this is going to work quite wellHope you are not tiring of feathers, because I have many more to show over the next little while.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Do you Tap?

This post is going to be about a product known as TAP .....Transfer Artist Paper, but first I want to tell you about Heather Ordover. Heather has a site called Craftlit a podcast for crafters who love books. She recently contacted me to let me know that she had in fact mentioned me in one of these podcasts, Cool! She just had so many wonderful things to say about what can be found here on my blog that I think she may have actually made me blush, so when you get a chance please go on over and check her out.........you just may find yourself tuning in to listen to Heather as you happily while away the time working on your current projects.

So........Tap. Have you heard of this stuff? Have you, do you, use it? I have been wanting to get my hands on this for a long time and was so excited to find it last month, that I bought a couple of packages. I am going to reserve judgment as I go along using it in various ways. I will tell you what I like about it and why I am also quite disappointed with it.
First of all what is it?...... well it is a paper that has a coating on one side. You can put it through your printer, you can draw and paint directly on it and then, using an iron you can "transfer" your image onto all sorts of surfaces, fabric, glass, wood, metal, paper...etc .......but I really only care about using it with fabric at this point.I must tell you that it is a kind of expensive medium to play with as 5 sheets at 12.95 plus 13% tax means that they are costing me nearly $3/sheet so you can bet I'll be using every inch of this stuff.The first thing I did was try to draw directly onto this and found out very quickly(to my great disappointment) that a pencil or crayon dragged across this paper just causes it to "scrape" the coating off.........not real happy as it was one of the things I wanted this stuff for. So the next thing I did was run a sheet through the printer. I created some text for a label and a couple of feathers to experiment with. The results going through the printer were good. Nice sharp, clear text, but when it is ironed onto fabric (as in this label) you still see the "edges" where it was cut from the paper and it is a little stiff........I thought it was not suppose to change the hand of the fabric much....well trust me it does! It softens a little after washing but I honestly did not find this really much better than the T shirt transfer papers that are out there. I left this photo as a large file so if you click on it, you can see what I mean.okay, so then, I went on to using some markers, inks and paints. I printed these quickly drawn feather outlines onto the TAP and then went over the lines with a sharpie marker. The marker glided over the paper fairly well but the coating will gum up your marker in a very short time. Next I got playing with paints. The yellow and orange feather was created using Setacolour transparent paints straight from the bottle.........with the green feather, I decided to really test the paper. I brushed a clear gel over the entire surface and then went in with all purpose inks, added more marker here and there and let it all dry.

Once the green one was completely dry, I went back in and scraped away some of the colour........this actually proved to be quite interesting. I cut the pieces out fairly close to the image and have saved every scrap of the paper for later use. I WILL use it somehow.Finally you see the images after they have been ironed to fabric. I have to say that the images really do transfer beautifully.I can see where this stuff would be great for collage work, but I was not impressed with it on a plain solid fabric. (as in that quilt label) Also, you should know that if you plan to do any micro-stippling on this stuff, you will need to be prepared to get lots of little Tap Dandruff on you.
I will continue to play with this product and post the results.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

I was at Quilt Market in Houston

well.........no, I wasn't really, but I almost feel like a little bit of me was........why?
Well, you see, I have been fortunate enough to have been involved with the creation of a book called Zentangle Fabric Arts, Quilting and Embroidery published by Suzanne McNeill of Design Originals. I am delighted to be one of the guest artists/designers
The book has just been released this week and is available on her site Design Originals as well as Amazon.com
Here is Suzanne at Quilt Market in Houston last week promoting the new book. (open to my pages) :-)
These photos were sent to me by Linda M Poole , Author, Artist, Instructor, Quilter and Fabric Designer. Linda was attending Quilt Market and snapped these for me. Thanks Linda I am so excited to see them
I did a design exclusively for the book (see those postcards in the background?) and Suzanne has also featured a close up shot of my quilt "Graffiti"

In Suzanne's post today, she even has included a link so you can check it out on YouTube

I have not seen the book yet but there is one on it's way........I can hardly wait till it arrives!!!!
Thank you Suzanne.........It has been a great experience.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Paper Towel as Fabric

Whenever I play with paint, I keep the paper towels used in clean up. I always think I will use them in some way. Yesterday I decided to create a paper/fabric postcard using one of these pieces and a recently purchased stamp.
This gorgeous stamp was purchased from the fun ladies at the Colouricious booth during the Toronto Creative Festival. visit their website to see the amazing array of fabulous hand carved blocks they have available.
I began with this paper towel
To the stamp, I applied textile paint with a sponge and just began randomly placing the stamp, pressing lightly in some areas and harder in others.A mat with a 4 x 6 opening helped decide what part of the printed paper towel I wanted to use
Finished postcard and close up. I simply stitched a tight little stipple to enhance the appearance of layered leaves

Copyright Jill Buckley