In the last column I showed you how I made felt from cat fur, this time round it’s something slightly more conventional, with less of an ‘ick’ factor I hope.
Have you ever looked at people posting images of the amazing prints they’ve made with their print Gocco machine, or wished you could get your head round screen-printing? Well I can’t promise to help you master the art of those printing techniques, but here’s something that anyone can do at home- it’s cheap, it’s easy and the results are super cool. What is it? It’s mono printing of course!
Monoprinting
You will need these things:
A sheet of glass or Perspex
Water soluble printing ink, or thick water based acrylic paint
A roller (or brayer)
Paper (try a bunch of different kinds)
Pencil/pens
Inspiration
It had been a while since I’d done any mono-printing, and I was a bit worried I might have forgotten the technique, so I got my good friend Alys Paterson to talk me through it again. We were feeling a bit the worse for wear as we’d been up late the night before (entertaining these boys ) and we had to print and cook spaghetti bolognaise at the same time as we were in a rush to get to a meeting at the shop) but still- as you can see from the results, it really is super easy, and even with hangovers and spaghetti sauce to worry about we created our own mini works of art.
The process:
1. First things first- make sure the area you are working in is well covered with newspaper or something similar, in order to protect it. Lay your sheet of glass or Perspex (is this what you called Plexiglass?) on the newspapers. We used a sheet of glass that was only small- but there’s nothing stopping you using a huge sheet- just bare in mind the safety issues of working with glass.
2. Apply a small (I mean it) amount of water based printing ink, or thick acrylic paint, onto your glass
3. Using your brayer (roller) roll the ink out evenly over the entire plate of glass (Alys went so fast it was just a blur- but take your time over this to make sure it’s a thin even layer)
4. Take another look at your inspiration and get ready to print
5. Place a sheet of paper over the inked up plate
6. Draw using pen or pencil (or whatever you want really) onto the sheet of paper
7. Remember that any writing you do needs to be reversed (which is pretty tricky)
8. When you have finished your drawing, gently pull the sheet of paper from the glass and admire your handiwork
9. Not happy with it? Easy- roll the ink again (no need to apply more yet) and start again. Warning- mono-printing is addictive and soon you will end up with a pile of prints
There are several variations on mono-printing you can try:
Draw directly onto the inked up plate of glass with a twig, paintbrush, pencil, anything- and then place sheet of paper over the inked plate and press gently to lift the print
Draw or paint with the inks directly onto the glass in a design you like, then press a sheet of paper over the ink and see what you get.
And not content with just showing you how easy mono printing is, I’m going to let you into the secrets of making your own paper bags, a trick I learnt when my friend Jane (Trick Pony) took me to meet an old man called Bob at the Industrial Museum- combine the two and you have the perfect technique for making unique wrappings for your crafty gifts, or maybe use them for trick or treating…
Paper bags:
You will need these things:
Paper
Glue ( pritt stick or whatever it might be called in America)
Maybe a ruler or something to help with the folds.
Making the bags is basically origami, and as such it makes much more sense when you are actually making them, than when you are reading the instructions. I decided to draw the instructions out- if you need clarification on any points let me know and i'll try and help you.
Just remember that it's much easier to monoprint onto flat sheets of paper rather than onto the made up bags- if you are printing onto flat sheets take into consideration where the image will be once the bag is made up.
There's no need to stick with white paper and black ink- you can use pretty much any paper to print on, and you can draw with anything you can think of- fingers, sticks, keys, palms of hands, wooden blocks pressed into the paper...the list is as endless as your imagination.
Camilla Stacey lives by the English seaside in Weston-super-Mare. She is sometimes Made by Milla, other times a curator at here shop and gallery in Bristol. She has just gone back to school to study art all over again and is thoroughly enjoying herself. She likes buttons, cups of tea and unravelling her knitting.
Project UK - make felt from pets
by Camilla Stacey It feels like I’ve been crafty all my life- from a childhood spent watching my Dad making pots, and my Mum learning to spin, through to art school and my latest incarnation as a curator and maker. It’s not always been a smooth ride- after art school I refused to have anything to do with the ‘creative’ world for years, and it was only when I took part in Ladyfest Bristol in 2003 that I was willing to connect with the arty side of me again. Over the last two years I have been rediscovering and reclaiming crafts and am slowly rediscovering and reclaiming myself and what makes me happy.
Made by Milla is my current creative outlet. Inspired by ideas of feminism, domesticity, and re-valuing traditional crafts, I make aprons, brooches, cushions and clothing for girls that are ‘lumpy, not frumpy’. Made by Milla is part art, part craft and ever evolving- it’s current evolution has lead to a little something we like to call Project UK.
Project UK is a new column all about some of the more unusual crafty projects I’ve been experimenting with over here in the UK. Hopefully some of them will be things you want to try for yourself, and I’ll be providing tutorials on a new project every month.
The first Project is something that might make you go ‘ewww’, as it did when I showed the results to my sister but it was something I just HAD to try out- I hope at least some of you give it a go too!
When my cat Bernard was hit by a train and killed last year, one of the things that made me saddest was that I didn’t have anything physical to remember him by, I couldn‘t even bury him. As he was a very fluffy cat I was still finding bits of his fur around the house, weeks after he had died, and I wished I could do something with the fluff to remember Bernard by.
This made me think about the tradition of weaving hair into jewellery that was popular during Victorian times- something that artists Emma Caton and Jane Gallagheruse in their jewellery pieces where they weave human hair into lace.
Making lace from cat fur seemed a bit over ambitious for me, but I figured it couldn’t be that hard to make felt surely?
The only information about making felt from cat fur I was able to find was in Nava Lubelski’s 'The Starving Artist's Way' (see bibliomaniac's review) a book I had to sell my copy of because I was…starving, so my recollection of the method described in the book might be a little off, but it’s worked for me.
1. First collect as much fur as you can from brushing your cat, or collecting fur that has been shed in your house- don’t go and shave your pet just to make this! I collected my fur in an old shoe box- when the box was full I made the felt.
2. Using the draining board of the kitchen sink to work on I lay a tea-towel down and then added layers of fur- making sure to pick out any dirty bits, and trying to ensure that each layer of fur was going in a different direction. I covered approx one third of the tea towel with fur and then folded it over so the fur was covered, like a sandwich.
3. I added some squirts of washing up liquid to the top layer of fabric and then poured boiling water over the complete sandwich- using an old spoon I worked the soap and water into the cloth and kept rubbing the spoon over the fabric until I was brave enough to peak and see what was happening.
4. I then opened the cloth up and worked more soap and more boiling water into the fur directly - I continued to agitate the fur until it seemed to be really matting together.
5. I then folded the fabric back over the felt, and turned the whole sandwich over, pouring more boiling water over it and continuing to rub with the spoon. After a while I took the felt out of the fabric and just started working it on it’s own- I gently shaped it a little and made sure the felt was more or less even.
6. I rinsed the soap off the felt with one last jug of boiling water and then started to press as much of the water out of the felt as I could- the fact that I was using the draining board really helped here- I could press the felt into the ridges on the board to squeeze more water out- also it meant that any water just drained away into the sink.
7. Bearing in mind something my mum had said to me (wet cat hair stinks) I decided that I wanted to dry this felt off as quickly as possible to avoid having the smell of stinky cat fur in my house- so I wrapped it up in a dry tea towel and then pressed it with a hot iron- when it was as dry as I felt (ha ha) it could get I pinned it up to air dry a little bit more.
8. My original plan was to use the fur felt to make a cat-nip mouse for my cat - but in the process of making the felt I realised that I really liked the way the shape developed and I’m not sure If I am ready to cut it up yet- I definitely want to make some more felt this way and am really interested in trying mixing it with fleece, or other people’s pet hair!
In the next PROJECT UK column I’ll explain how I learnt to make paper bags from an old man at the Industrial Museum and I’ll give you a tutorial on how to make your own mono-printed paper bags- perfect for wrapping gifts in, or using when trick or treating.
Making lace from cat fur seemed a bit over ambitious for me, but I figured it couldn’t be that hard to make
