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Cerise/red and red/orange curtains, finished

When we built our house in 1996 I made calico (muslin) curtains each with a 30cm (12") hand-painted border around the bottom edges for the studio. At that time I was still very much into embroidery and my skills in surface design were embryonic. Over the years as my skills matured I kept thinking I must re-do those borders. As common with such thoughts it often takes time to actually do anything!
Well... I now have new curtain borders! During the last week or so I removed the old borders from the curtains, washed them, printed up some new borders and stitched them in place.
As this was not to be a serious time-consuming project I screenprinted the design using some existing screens and textile pigments. I had a rectangular screen with a grid of dots and used this twice, once masking off a circle in the middle of the screen, and then masking off the space around the circle. With a light grey pigment I randomly printed these two screens on to the borders as a background. Then I used two more existing screens which resulted from drawings of a chrysanthemum flower head. Only the second of these two screens needed registration.
As with the original curtains I used colours relating to the rainbow. There are four windows, eight curtains. They start with yellow/orange, then orange/red, red/cerise, cerise/purple, purple/blue, blue/teal, teal/green, green/yellow. Hopefully they will last at least another 12 years!

Grey dots and first print of cerise

Cerise and red print completed

Blue/teal print

Teal/blue and blue/purple curtains, finished

Next Blog: Shades of Grey