A better day

I went to class today, full of angst about my lack of progress.  I had a good day.  I did not create much work, but what I did, was fruitful preparation.

I found a bag of fabric leftovers from last year's project, so I have some reasonable fabric on which to print.  I took this to class, feeling quite relieved to have some materials with which to work.

I started by printing the spot repeat, on paper.  The 3 images below show the amazing difference of using the same spot pattern, in the same 6 grid spot repeat, but varying the scale of the grid upon which they are worked - 6", 5" and 4".

6" grid

5" grid

4" grid.

I felt quite happy having actually printed something, and this motivated me to get back on the bus to go to Officeworks, to have the artwork reprinted, that yesterday was printed back-to-front.  The assistant recognised me (I think it is the straw hat that makes people remember me) and when she realised it was a faulty copy that had made me return, she did not charge me for the correct versions.  This was unexpected, and most welcome.  It was not her fault the first copy was reversed, because each side looked very similar. I returned to class in good humour due to the good quality copies.  I also had a bus turn up, both ways, as soon as I arrived at the stop, so the round trip only took 40 minutes.

Then I used one of the large photocopies to expose a large screen, and that process went perfectly.  So thankfully I have a good quality screen to use - third time lucky.  Next I worked on darkening the positive and negative versions of a simple stripe design, and this also was successful.  I don't have a screen available on which to expose the designs, but it's all ready to roll.

Two long narrow designs - in fact two stripe patterns

The black motifs will reproduce well on a screen.  The black background version will need to be dovetailed carefully to achieve quality print, but I'm quite confident I can print some interesting repeat patterns with these two complementary designs.

So not much actual work, but lots of successful preparation was the tone of today. Not before time.  Hopefully lots of printing tomorrow.