It's Easter Sunday, and I'm off to a good start!

Today is Easter Sunday.  It's about 10am.  I've already cycled 30 minutes to the pool, swum 1200m, and cycled back.  I'm starting to get ideas for my History of Art essay about how art has represented feminism, and post-feminism and whether narcissism has influenced the feminist movement.  Lots of reading and thought required before I start writing!  I'm also full of ideas about my textile project.

While swimming up and down the pool, I was thinking about all the different design projects I could do when I get back to the UK.  I have so much inspiration from my time here, that I could create a whole series of Australian inspired designs, for fabrics for different uses.  I have been thinking about projects to design fabric for swimwear, casual clothing, garden furniture, and interior furnishings, and how to create a series of fabrics for each function.  There is so much potential, but I need to save these ideas for my return to the UK.  I have enough to be getting on with here.

I've also been thinking about the environmental aspects of textile design - largely because I have spoilt two attempts to emulse and expose my most recent silkscreen - which is wasteful of expensive, and unenvironmentally friendly materials.  I can't live in a totally environmentally friendly way, but I can limit my impact.  So if I want to experiment with different spot designs, and print 8m lengths, it would be wasteful to prepare a large silkscreen (c8 feet by 5 feet) for each different spot design.  Particularly if I decide to only create one 8m length.  So I've been thinking about creating a single spot motif and use it in a variety of ways.  This means I need to work out how to mark the repeat on cloth, without the marking system being permanent, so that I can create several different fabrics, with minimal use of emulsion for the silkscreen and electricity for the exposure light.

Repeating spot designs, where the direction of the motif changes.
3 spot, 4 spot and 5 spot designs.

I think that a good way of creating temporary markings along a 8m fabric length, would be to use coloured sticky dots.  I don't want to use chalk - does not remove easily enough; or stitch - too laborious.  If I create a paper matrix, based on the layout shown above, I can punch a hole at each corner of the space for each motif to be printed.  Then if I place it on the fabric, and put a sticky dot at each hole, and repeat it down the cloth, I will be able to see where to place the prints.  Then I will only need enough emulsing fluid to coat a 12" screen, and will be able to work up spot prints for 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 spot designs, without needing to create huge silkscreens for each variation.

So today's task is to create a single motif ready to expose on my small silkscreen.