Stamping on Felt and Another Stencil

Posted on July 29, 2016 by ruthlane under class, surface design

I’m working on week 3 of my online class which is about stamping on felt. It’s all about how to make your own stamps from a variety of material and then stamping with thickened dye.

This was stamped with a commercial stamp and then over dyed. I am using felt made from prefelt because it’s smoother and easier than making a bunch of hand laid out felt.

This is a sample with a bunch of different stamps on it. Again, this was stamped on white felt and then over dyed.

And this is a stencil that I made last week. I hadn’t tested it out so I stenciled this one with a stamp pad on paper. If you’ve followed the blog for a while, you might recognize these poppies. They are from a sketch I did a while ago. Next up is the “playing” portion of the course and then it will be nearly complete. I think it will run in mid September but I’ll announce it over on the Felting and Fiber Studio once I know the exact date.

Stenciling Over Screen Prints

Posted on July 22, 2016 by ruthlane under surface design

I am steadily working down the list of what needs to be finished for my upcoming online class. Today I worked more with making stamps, stencils and I printed a few stencils on felt. I decided to use some felt that already had been screen printed.

This one was screen printed with soy wax resist and a deconstructed screen. I then added the blue today into the negative space.

Here’s the positive space stencil. This is on an old blanket that had been screen printed several times. I added the green with screen printing ink. I think this one needs some stitch. I wish I had a bit of a lighter green but I was running out of yellow and white screen printing ink and just had this dark green. But I think the leaves will be highlighted by some stitching. Hope you have a nice weekend.

Birthday Gifts

Posted on July 15, 2016 by ruthlane under surface design

For my birthday this year I asked for stencils and art supplies. I got the stencils from Stencil Girl Products. They have some great stencils there. I decided to get ones that were really complex and mainly repeating type patterns that I wouldn’t cut myself.

These are the 6″x 6″ ones that I got.

And these are the 9″x 12″ ones.

And here are the results of printing on sketchbook pages that already had color on them.

I also purchased these sponges and a “Smudgee” with the stencils. And they worked great for application on paper. Now to try them with thickened dye on fabric/wool.

I also got an order from Pro Chem. I had made my own gel plate but it just wasn’t as sturdy and didn’t work as well as the Gelli Arts plates. Plus this is a big one at 8″ x 12″. I also got more print paste as I have found that this mixture works better than just sodium alginate. It definitely keeps the color in wool better from printed dye. The last item is Color Magnet. You print or screen it on white fabric and then dye the fabric. The places that have been printed attract more color. I wanted to see if this will work on felt. I’ll let you know how it goes.

And I did print the water lily stencil on felt. The background felt is a deconstructed screen printed piece. I stenciled with my new Smudgee and screen printing ink which worked great. You just put it over your fingers and dip it into the ink, then stencil with it. I will probably add a little stitching to this and then frame it. So lots of new toys to play with and I’ll be making print paste soon so more printed felt coming up soon.

Printing Stripes

Posted on July 8, 2016 by ruthlane under sketch book, surface design

I was playing around with foam stamps today and made a stripe roller.

Here’s the roller. It’s really simple to make and you can decorate the strips of foam in a variety of ways. You can also make your roller with randomly placed pieces of foam too. But this way you can print a fairly long piece before you run out of ink.

I just printed it on a some sketchbook paper that was already colored. Hopefully, next week I will get some felt printed and stenciled to show you. Have a good weekend.

Water Lily Stencils

Posted on July 1, 2016 by ruthlane under class, printing, sketch book

I made another stencil today. This one is of a water lily. I got the design from a photo I took at the Botanical Gardens in NYC. I turned the photo into a black and white rendition and played around a bit with it in Photoshop. Then I used it to design this stencil.

I made the stencil in two parts so it would be easier to use two different colors. I had some previously screen printed paper from a session of deconstructed screen printing. So I used that for the background.

And here’s my rendition of a water lily. I liked how it came out on the background as the blue tended to affect the white paint and give it more depth. So I cut it to fit into my sketch book and added it to a page that was already colored in my sketch book. It’s like I planned it 🙂

Ruth Lane Art

Experimenting with Arts Endless Possibilities