White on white preparation

I will be teaching my week long workshop "Quietly and Gently" At Fibres West in July this year.  It looks like the most wonderful gathering of fibre artist and participants and I am so looking forward to getting over there and being inspired.

I have done a plan of my yearly commitments and must say I am already teetering on over-committed, so am trying to be very organised and plan and prepare in advance of the many things I have on.

Part of that approach has seen me working on some samplers for Quietly and Gently and also on trying to work out if I can get a crisp emboss.  You may recall last year I tried to see if a tabletop press would help me get a crisp emboss; and sadly discovered that it wouldn't.  The location of the workshop is 100km east of Perth in the Wheatbelt, in an Agricultural college, so there isn't an art room in which to find an etching press.

I went out and bought a wee die cutter and embossing tool with my fingers crossed and I must say that so far results have been very encouraging!

I trialled several different templates to see if the wee machine could handle them. First up, I used a milk carton template with hearts, on Arches Velin paper.

The press worked so well that you can even see the tiniest of grooves in the plastic.

And a first for me on the reverse side.  The pressure generated is so strong that it flattened the surface of the surrounding paper, producing this rather intriguing flat heart with rough texture of the paper.

Definitely something to explore further...

 I tried it with a photopolymer plate. Tick.

I put a piece of lino through and tick.

I had a piece of lightweight textured copper and ran it through as well. Tick.

I retrieved an old piece of work, using thin plastic desk mat and it worked as well.

So tick, tick, tick, tick!

I may have found my solution for portable embossing.

And then I moved onto some samplers of a different white on white technique. This time I was playing around with layering.

1cm border between each square.

1/2cm border between squares

And then 1 cm border, turned slightly...

All good fun and also all good preparations underway.