Locating

For this project of locating I have chosen to work towards one of the Bradford Textile Society briefs. I work better when I am given some sort of starting point to sparks some initial ideas. Section A1, Any process or combination of Processes, asks for designs to be created based on one of the archives samples.

Based on the sample above I have started to look at Paisley pattern but more from an angle of mark making. Paisley pattern is quite common in the selection of samples so I think it would be interesting to see how I can original a sample I can make in response to this theme. I am conscious not to create a typical paisley pattern that everyone has seen before. The brief states that I can consider changing ‘one or all of the following: colour, texture, scales, proportion, repeat and introduce new elements’. In the sample I have selected to work from, the black pattern is a very dominant feature which I don’t want to happen in my designs. 

A lot of the qualities within paisley pattern remind me a lot of that which can be achieved in shibori. Fabric dying is an area or practise I have explored before and would be keen to push this forward in my work for this project by developing a sophisticated, refined colour pallet. 

Developing colour pallet based on colours used in shibori with a selection of wool fabrics. These gave a much more sophisticated quality than some of the other fabrics I experimented with…. 

These were a variety of silks.

I started to do some pen and water drawings focusing completely on the marks from some of the shibori patterns to influence my own shapes and designs that I took on to experiment with when dying my fabrics….

The samples I created using Shibori were not working well. I tried to change my technique such as using a synthetic thread such as nylon instead of wool to see if this would make a difference as the wool just absorbed the dye not allowing any marks to be left behind in the fabric however the result was pretty much the same.

Taking the idea of leaving areas of fabric undyed I began to think of other ways I could achieve a similar effect. I wanted the marks to be much more striking than the outcomes I was getting from the shibori. I have previously experimented with bleach which works in the opposite way and removed some of the colour. This allowed me to make much more successful controlled samples.