Easter Holidays

After a very small break over the Easter weekend, I am back on making final samples.

Large scale piece that I worked on throughout Tuesday:

Layers of PVA glue on kodatrace, drawing with threads, monoprinted remazol dyes, more layers of PVA glue!!!

More dissolvable fabric

More dissolvable fabric samples, this time with a hot water fabric. I used the machine once again to translate my drawings literally using photocopies of my work.

Using a bolder weight of line - opposed to a single line of stitch.

Hot water to dissolve the fabric.

Layered into glue.

This piece looks a lot different to my other thread-in-PVA samples due to the much heavier weight of line. I like how there is a single thread that connects the marks due to my not cutting the loose threads when i was finished stitching. I find that this gives a nice contrast of bold and fine, the denser areas of stitch are much more solid and rigid whereas the finer areas are more free and show more movement and chance in their placement.

Setting Stitch in Resin

As well as setting cold water dissolvable fabric in PVA glue, I placed some in ash trays filled with resin.
To make the resin; 100:1 ratio of resin to catalyst.

Machine stitches visible in

Layered over drawings - almost 100% transparent.

Results: the cold water dissolvable fabric has disappeared in the resin, leaving the stitches suspended as ghost like traces of the fabric that was once there.

Dissolvable Fabric

To translate my drawings into stitch more literally I used the sewing machine to stitch into cold water dissolvable fabric, tracing the lines of photocopies from my work.

Machine stitch on dissolvable fabric.

Immersing the fabric into a tray of PVA Glue.

*As this dissolvable fabric works in cold water,

the fibres disappeared very effectively in the glue*

PVA Removed from the tray once dry

Results: I really like the results of this technique, the construction of the stitch is really visible which breaks up the line and contrasts against the linear aspect of the piece - opposing the otherwise crisp lines of my other developments. The dissolvable fabric has completely disappeared leaving the stitch completed suspended on it's own within the glue, yet it does not appear that the surface has been stitched into - it is obvious that the threads are trapped inside. 

So far my only concern with this is that the dull surface of the tray has impacted the surface of the PVA glue. Glue that I have previously peeled away from Kodatrace and Acetate has a high gloss, shiny surface whereas the glue here appears matte and more opaque than usual.  To combat this in future developments I may start to pour the PVA onto glass surfaces so that it inhibits the smooth surface.