Unit X | Fabric Sourcing and Emboridery

This week we sourced our fabrics in order to prepare them for sampling. We decided to stay experimental with our fabrics and give ourselves a lot to work with. I went for a range of cottons and silks, both light and heavy weight.
We attempted to source outside of the universities resources and visited Bennett Silks. A few fabrics took our interest but the prices were around £23-£28 a metre, which on a student budget isn't very economical. In the end most of our fabrics came from the MMU fabric store, with the exception of a few online buys and some sourced from fabric shops in the city centre.
We dyed the fabrics different grey shades to keep with our colour palette.

Me and Nicole also sorted out our screens for the print room and booked some space. Unfortunately the print room can get very busy and is often fully booked, so to prevent people being left with no time there is a new rule for this unit where you can only book two days per week. Because of this, I will need some other form of sampling to experiment with as my time printing will be really limited.

Another specialism I have been mixing with print is embroidery. I thought I could develop the embroidery skills I already have in both machine and hand. I started by pin tucking different fabrics with different needle sizes, and also layering fabrics together to see what texture was created. I think they turned out well and they relate to the bandage drawings I have chosen to screen print. I plan to incorporate the two mediums together and possibly pin-tuck a screen print or print on top of some embroidery. 

Print | Week 5

I worked in the print room quite a bit this week. I began to dye my fabric using the vats to see which colours I want to work on. I decided to try and create a vast amount of colours from my colour image and test all of them to see which ones I want to use. In the end I had colours ranging from dark blue to light peachy-oranges. I was quite happy with the colours, although the yellow was far too bright so I decided not to work with that one.

 I have also noticed that n Beatriz Millhazes work the background colours tend to be more subtle and the colour is in the design on top. I kept my backgrounds toned down but without banishing colour completely.

The first two sessions I've had in the print room were very much just testing sessions. I wanted to see what the pigment colours looked like on the coloured fabrics and how well they worked. I learnt a lot by testing things out, I now only want to dye fabrics subtle blues and oranges then dye onto them to create the other colours in my colour image. I feel this will help make the colour mood better as blue and orange are the most used colours in my image.