Tag: silk and paper lamination fabric

Here are the finished silk/paper lamination collages: my camera flash reflects a bit of glare from the center of each piece. I use a matte gel medium for the lamination, but even a matte finish seems to generate some reflection.

Now…time to piece on a border and quilt. But I’m going to have to dye some fabric first. These are #3 and #4 in a series, and I want each piece to have a slightly different color border. Not necessarily an easy task; most desert wildflowers (at least, the ones in my yard that I photographed!) are on the yellow or pink spectrum.

There are a few violet wildflower outliers, like my favorite desert lupine (a dwarf lupine compared to lupines from more lush climates)…but they aren’t as common in my neighborhood in the spring. I’ve seen acres of them out west on the Tohono O’odham reservation, but in my own backyard I see maybe one every other year.

So. I’ll need some variety in my yellow and pink borders for this series. I think maybe I’ll dye the yellow and pink fabric for these pieces with a bit of gray shot through, to pick up on the black-and-white photocopies in the background.

 

Today I laminated the collages it’s taken me all summer to make. Clearly, the long, hot days really got to me this year!

Here are the Desert Marigold and Penstemon collages, with silk organza pinned very tightly on top.   I silk-screened each piece with acrylic gel medium. You can see pics of this process elsewhere on this blog.

Once the gel medium is applied, you need to let the silk/paper set just a bit, 10 minutes max, and then quickly take out the pins and pull the pieces off, otherwise everything gets stuck: the gel medium is strong and dries super fast. It’s easy to rip silk organza if you have to exert too much force pulling it away.

I got rust-proof pins last time Joanne’s had a half-price notions sale: this way I can take the pins out, put them in a small tub of water to get the gel medium off, and drain.

Once dry, each silk/paper piece needs to be ironed on the hottest setting, slowly, with baking parchment. That’s Bruce Bochy walking out to the mound.

Then you have to soak in cool water for about 15 minutes….

…and then you first pull, rub and then scour all the paper off.

This is the wet paper I pulled off; it’s the size of a baseball:

How do they look? I need to press them; but not now! You’ll have to check in later tomorrow to see, but the results are pretty good this time. 🙂

The picky shredding and ripping of paper continues at my dining room table; these are my most recent results, the product of 2 re-runs of The Closer and a few major league ball games:

It is a bit tedious and I’m getting a bit tired of the limited color palate. I figure I need a couple more ball games (about 6 leisurely hours) and I’ll be done.