I had a great time today at the Demense Yard, Castlecomer with the ‘South East Textile Group’.  We meet one Saturday a month and either one of the members or an invited guest hosts a workshop.  Today Jean (one of our founder members) showed us all how to create and use a lino print and in the afternoon we were using a printer to transfer images to a special medium and then iron them on to various fabrics. 

As my drawing is dreadful I decided to use the lino cutting as an opportunity to explore the possibilities of creating a tag or logo for my work.  I created a simple logo using my initials and some lines.  Once I had gouged out the lines a bit deeper than my first attempt I was very happy with the end result, thanks Jean for a great tutorial.

The printer here at Clasheen has just run out of ink so I jumped at the opportunity to use the group’s new printer and transfer some images on to the special paper that Jean had brought.  Deciding not to draw anything myself, I used some fantastic images of African women from a recent issiue of a fashion magazine that I had.  Armed with these as I was going home, I spent the hour driving home planning how I would incorporate them into a piece of nuno felt.  My biggest concerns were should they be colour fast once I started to wet felt and would the image shrink too much and become unrecognisable once shrunk and fulled.  FANTASTIC success!!!  I wanted to experiment with a wallhanging so I ironed one of the images onto a piece of white muslin and then laid it on a large piece of apple green commercial needle felt.  This needlefelt is new to me and came from Wollknoll in Germany,  usually I would create any prefelt from scratch but have been wanting to experiment with larger pieces in a limited time frame.  I then laid out apple green, navy and marine blue merino on top of all but the actual image.  These colours were chosen as they picked out the main colours in the clothes the African ladies were wearing.  A little white and red wool to highlight and away I went and wet the wool.  No problems with the dye from my printed muslin running and because I had positioned the fabric on top of the needlefelt it did not actually distort too much when fulled.  I am so pleased with the result and hope to take a photo tomorrow once I decide whether to embellish the piece further or just leave it as it is.  I would welcome feedback if anyone feels like making a comment as soon as I post the image of the finished piece!