printing on fabric with flocked lino

I experimented with glueing flocking powder onto a lino block and printing onto fabric with it.

The reason was to get a stronger print because the flocked surface should hold more textile ink than the smooth lino surface.

You can buy ready-flocked lino for textile printing, e.g. from heart-educational.co.uk, and I have tried printing with this. The problem with it is that it is difficult to carve the flocked lino with a lino-cutter. If you cut out solid shapes with this flocked lino it prints well, but it's hard to carve lines or detail into.
That's why I thought I'd apply flocking powder to a block that had already been carved.

William Morris used to apply velvet flock to the large areas of his wooden printing blocks, and when I went on a one-day block-printing workshop at Tobias and the Angel a couple of years ago, we used lino blocks coated with wool-flock, and these printed well.

 

I used an old lino block that I carved a while ago as an example for a card-printing workshop. First I rolled textile ink on it and printed it without the flocking powder, so I could compare the difference later of prints with and without the flocking powder.

I applied PVA glue to the block with a foam roller then shook flocking powder onto the block through a sieve, and left it to dry.
Then I inked up the block in the usual way I do for fabric printing - by rolling textile ink on it with a foam roller. I printed the block just by applying pressure onto the back of the block with my hand.

The result... Well, it didn't work very well! In the above photo the bottom half of the fabric shows the prints with the flocked block (and the top half shows just the inked-lino prints). The flocked block did print a stronger image but lost some of the detail of the carving (the flocking powder had filled in the crevices), or if I pressed more lightly it just didn't print well.
Plus because I'd just used PVA glue to adhere the flock, when I washed the block the flocking powder and glue washed off as well as the ink, because PVA is water-soluable.

I'd like to try it again though, as there was some more intensity with the flocked lino block. Next time I'll use a waterproof glue, and apply a thinner coverage of the flocking powder to try to avoid losing some of the detail of the carving.

dreams exhibition in the Freud Museum

 

Here are my 'Flying and falling curtains' in situ, in the Freud Museum, north-west London.

 

dreams exhibition

 

 

I have been making a piece for an East London Printmakers' group exhibition, 'Dreams', which will be at the Freud  Museum from next Thursday 3rd March.  My contribution is 'Flying and Falling Curtains' - block printed and screen printed figures, embroidered onto lightweight muslin fabric and hung as curtains in the museum.

I printed the block print lotus design by cutting my design out of a piece of lino, rolling some textile ink onto the lino using a foam roller so that the ink doesn't slide off the lino (as it would with a hard roller and runny ink), then just pressing the lino face-down onto the fabric.  I used different tones of pink for the lotus prints on flying figues and overlapped the flower images.

 

After I'd printed the figures, I embroidered them onto the muslin with a sewing machine - I embroidered an outline all around the flying figures in gold thread, and the falling figures (on other curtain, not pictured) are embroidered around with outlines in red thread.  See the East London Printmakers website for more details of this group exhibition.

t-shirt print

This one was not at the kitchen table - I printed it at East London Printmakers - you could print this at home, but would need some equipment to prepare the screen.  This is a t-shirt I printed for a birthday present for a friend who likes meditation and motorbikes.  I made the print by scanning in the cover of the book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence, printing out the scanned image, coating a screen with photo-sensitive emulsion and exposing the stencil onto the screen using a uv lightbox.  I then printed it in a bright blue colour on the t-shirt.

linocut greeting card

I taught a class last week on making greeting cards using linocut stamps.  I prepared an example by cutting out a traditional design from the copyright-free pattern book, 'Sarasa Woodblock Patterns', and carved it out of a small piece of lino then printed it by rolling ink on the block and pressing hard on the back of the stamp.

press printing and potato printing

I did some quick tests for community art classes that I taught this week.  The first method is polystyrene press printing.  It's a nice simple introduction to relief printing.  All you have to do is scratch your design into the polystyrene tile using a pen or pencil, roll some block printing ink onto the tile, then print it by placing the tile face down on a piece of paper and applying pressure with your hand or by rolling it with a clean roller.
You can get polystyrene tiles for craft use at www.homecrafts.co.uk 

Next I did some potato printing to get ready for a 'Crafts for Families' class that I started teaching this week.  Again, a simple but effective way of making a quick print.  I printed the heart stamp onto some plain cotton and then sewed it by hand into a little drawstring bag.  Parents can do this activity with their children - if the parent cuts out the potato, the kids can do the printing and then the parent make it into a bag for their child to carry around their toys, slippers or pyjamas.

thistle print 2

I didn't do much on the thistle print last week as I had a cold and felt like I had no energy, but went back to it briefly at the weekend.  This print isn't really working out for me - I'm going to leave it for the time being and work on something else.  At least our cat, Trumpet, enjoyed the print table!