New Year - 2010

Well I went away to Spain for 10 days over Christmas and arrived home to a blanketing of ice. It was that bad even the taxi driver wouldn't take me to the bottom of the street so I had to brave it with case down the small bank - much to the amusement of the neighbours I am sure.

Well today is the start of a new year, lets hope I get through it without any major traumas. I awoke this morning to a few inches of snow covering the whole street. It looks beautiful knowing I do not have to go out in it. Since taking these pictures the sun is now shining and outside looks so beautiful.

Well I have had a long break from uni work and unfortunatley it cannot go on, so my plan for this afternoon is to work on my disseration some more and try to get it almost finished as the deadline is looming. over the next few days I will have to start drawing at some point and sort out some sort of brief for my final major project!

While I was away in Spain I got to thinking I might change my major project, not the theme but maybe the end product. I will see how things go and assess at a later date - and see how confident I feel (which will really be the deciding factor).

Deadline

Well today was D-day for my minor project - War Memorabilia. Here is a quick pic of how my bay looked after I had set it up ready for marking.

pulling things together

Well tomorrow is D-day for my minor project. I started off with anything war related as my inspiration. I began with medals and just let it take me wherever from there. I ended up with keys, watch parts, WWI embroidered postcards and the such.

The last two weeks have been spent embroidering all my final desgins. All of my finals are unisex ties and are heavily embroidered. I have mounted them as you will be able to see and have made up a paper collar to present it a little more professionally. Here are three of the six designs, I will add the other three when I get my work back.

Progress to date

My minor project is coming to an end, we only have 2 and half weeks left. The whole year group has been given an extension due to problems with the emulsion used for coating the screens.

I have finally dyed my fabrics today with lovely coloured hands to prove it!

I will be going into uni tomorrow to expose my already coated screen and will be spending all day printing - I actually hate printing but it must be done, I always feel it is such an experimental process and there is so many factors that can go wrong, which it tends to with me. Anyway I'm hoping I will get enough printing done not to have to go back into the print rooms before the end of the deadline. I am using the printing process as a indication to my designs rather than having the printing as the main focus. All of my designs will be heavily embroidered. I will try to take some pics of me printing tomorrow and post them later in the week.

Bracelets Galour

Yesterday in our Professional Studies lecture we were asked to think of a product and packaging that we would be able to sell at the Knitting and Stitching Show at the back end of this month. So I got thinking and came up with the idea of making bracelets with the beading technique we had been shown recently in a workshop with Tracy Franklin.

So I set to work last night and have managed to almost finish two of the bracelets. I am pleased with how they have turned out and plan to make a few more.

time passes too quickly

I swear someone is tinkering with the time - it seems to be going by far too quickly. Since last week I have been trying to work on my development. So far I have managed to sort out 2 multi-directional repeats and get the 2 koda traces done for each of these. Although there is still no photo sensitive paint in the building to coat my screen with, therefore I cannot print as yet!!! I have also started doing small amounts of sampling with stitching and beading.

Last week I was able to attend two mini embroidery courses at uni. I found these really enjoyable but am unsure as to how I am going to translate any of the techniques into my project. Having misplaced my camera's memory card I am unable to show you what I have done so far, but once found I will show you how it is going.

Just over 3 weeks to the deadline - yikes!

Determination

I have tried so hard to get out of doing more uni work this evening, but it was fruitless! So here I am on a Friday evening doing another drawing sheet to enable me to have more imagery to work with for my development. Although I have already started the development process I did think I started to wonder today if I would have enough imagery.

I was a little disheartened this afternoon, after spending a good part of the day on doing my koda trace, I was hoping to expose my screen with said efforts. It exposed well, but when I went to use the jet wash i realised all of the emulsion came off, along with the design! Well they do say God loves a trier so I thought I would just coat another screen ready to re-expose on Monday and get cracking with some printing. One of the first years was coating her screen only for us to realise that she had used the last of the emulsion with no more supplies in the building. How does that work! Oh sorry they have some on order which will come in at SOME point next week!

So I plod on with development and drawing tonight and over the weekend.