Saturday's workshop

Yesterday's workshop went very well and they were an enthusiastic, experienced bunch. Great results for the brief time available.

Here is my example screened on to calico (muslin)....


Lots of concentration here!

Busy, busy....

A small selection of pieces achieved.....

Another Workshop

Tomorrow I am off to conduct a half-day workshop in Masterton. For 27 years I taught regular workshops around my local area, and also in just about every where in New Zealand. I felt very privileged to be able to do this, and thoroughly enjoyed the exchange of ideas and meeting such lovely people.

About five years ago I decided to devote more time to my own art work which, as you can imagine had become very truncated with teaching and other involvements. I decided to make a clean break and politely declined all requests for teaching.

However, having now lived several decades, life has taught me that things are not as black and white as we thought or think they should be. Last year I agreed to take a workshop with local senior school students while my solo exhibition was on in Upper Hutt. This went well and it was great to be involved with a younger generation and their fresh ideas. What did surprise me however was how much preparation it took for this short workshop! In the past when preparation was on-going this time seemed to get absorbed into the overall scheme of things.

I am repeating this workshop tomorrow and once again I feel I have been organising and gathering together stuff all week! I am of course looking forward to tomorrow and sharing my skills with an enthusiastic bunch.

Think I have everything sorted here, but there is also a list of last minute things....

Dye painted on to a silk screen which at this stage looks a bit fuzzy. I will demonstrate screening this on to a soda ash soaked fabric tomorrow. Will show the result next blog.

Autumn Footprints

I have now completed my Autumn Footprints piece. Apart from getting two small brass eyelets at the top of each piece that is. Although I can 'do' eyelets, some do go wonky so I am going to take these pieces to a local canvas goods maker for a quality job.

I am rather pleased with this diptych. If you recall they use left-over pieces of cloth from previous projects. This presented restrictions which I may not have considered if I had more cloth available. I like the narrowness. I decided to go with the fact that one piece was shorter, and I like this too.

This project reminded me that tailors used to call their left-over scraps 'cabbage'. If they were very clever they could make another garment from these pieces and therefore claim more profit. This was not my intention but any irregular pieces of discarded cloth will now get more consideration than in the past.

2010 ©Diana Parkes, AUTUMN FOOTPRINTS, dye and pigment on silk, size (overall) 107cm x 27cm /42" x 10".


These pieces are lined with a red silk.

Autumn leaves

More work on my two long strips over the last few days. I have printed some skeletal leaf shapes to continue the idea of autumn. This piece is to be called Autumn Footprints. Now about to finish the edges and make a decision about the hanging for display.



In my last post I showed am image of my car number plate and my new bumper sticker. I neglected to mention where I got the bumper sticker. I get Alyson Stanfield's regular ArtBizCoach postings every week. It is about 'art marketing action, Alyson's weekly steps for taking charge of your art career' and is very informative. Recently she advertised were to get such stickers, and others, from Cafe Press

text prints

Not much hands-on stuff this week but plenty of thinking. I decided to add some blocks of text to my two long strips. It took time to compose the five blocks of text but I finally came up with the words to convey my idea for this diptych. I then had to make a photo-sensitive screen to get the text on to the fabric and of course this takes time too.

Detail only. Still contemplating next stage before finishing off edges etc.

Nothing to do with the above but I have a new bumper sticker on my car. Along with the number plate it sort of states where I would rather be!

UPPFAB stands for Uppity Fabrics!

Screening the two strips

My silk/linen fabric order from Thai Silks, USA, has arrived. It took just six days from ordering to its arrival here in NZ. Definitely no complaints there. As I rolled it on to a cardboard tube I contemplated how all this lovely white fabric might end up, all transformed into something stunning (or not!?).

There has been more progress on my two long strip pieces.

Here I have placed my very large silk screen over the two strips. The strips themselves are covered with pieces of glass (edges taped for safety) and the frame is just a few millimetres or fractions from the glass. Viewing the design already on the strips I can reliably paint on the screen with a dye wash.

Once the dyes on the screen had dried I lifted the screen off so that I could remove the glass pieces. I sometimes wonder whether I will ever forget to do this, and screen everything on to the glass!

Here is the screen after screening with a dye colour mixed with sodium alginate (manutex).

More next blog.....

Two long strips....

In my last blog I mentioned that I had ordered more of my favourite silk/linen fabric from Thai Silks in the USA. Hopefully this will arrive sometime this week. While checking through my fabric stocks before I knew that I had to make this order, I discovered that all I had left of this fabric was two long strips 14cm/5.5" wide, obviously off-cuts from earlier works. Initially I returned these into storage... and then had second thoughts. These two pieces could offer a nice challenge.

So.... after placing them side-by-side lengthways on my display wall and contemplating them for a few days, I made a start.

First I printed a block design that I had prepared sometime ago. Pieces of dense foam were stuck on to a block with double-sided carpet tape (which is so sticky there needs to be a warning!). I then added some printed circles. Both applications are with thickened Procion MX on to the soda ash soaked fabric. It is somewhat difficult to see these long strips of fabric because of the background, but they will show up better next time.

Next I painted some coloured shapes on to a silk screen, and once dry these were screened on to the fabric.