MIXED MEDIA PIECE FOR MARGARET, COLLAGE PIECES AND COFFEE STAINING

A mixture of success and failure today in the studio.

Coffee Staining

The three plastic lace table runners that I ordered from Ebay arrived yesterday. I got a multi-buy discount and they weren’t expensive. They are very pretty.

I set up a coffee staining station on my studio floor, in the narrow space between the pull-out units and the main storage shelves. I laid out a large folded plastic sheet, and arranged the first of the table runners on top. After spraying liberally with coffee, I laid down three sheets of A3 printer paper to cover the whole length of the runner, and sprayed them again, pressing them down well onto the table runner and making sure I got rid of any air bubbles. I put some more sheets of paper on top and sprayed these liberally too, and left the whole thing to dry overnight. It was very late when I had finished, and I forgot to photograph the setup.

In the morning, although the puddles of coffee had disappeared, the papers were still very wet. While I was working in the studio in the afternoon, I pointed my small desk fan at them in order to speed up the drying.

Unfortunately as soon as they were dry enough (but not dry enough!) they started to move under the fan. I separated them and peeled them off the table runner.

Epic fail. Only the faintest suggestion of pattern had been transferred at all, and this didn’t really show up until the papers were dry.

Here are the papers that were laid on top. I wasn’t expecting any of the pattern from the table runner to transfer to these. I just didn’t want to waste all that coffee floating around!

There are some quite interesting patterns caused by the coffee pooling in certain areas, and also by air bubbles trapped under the paper.

If you look carefully at this next picture, you can see the vaguest suggestion of a pattern but if you blinked, you’d miss it. Thoroughly underwhelming.

This is the one with the best air bubble patterns on it.

On this one you can see one or two vague swirls from the table runner. More interesting are the concentrations of coffee in the creases.

This is the paper that shows the pattern the best. It’s still not very impressive. Nice air bubbles, though.

It’s interesting how blue the mat has come out in the photos. It is actually grey. I photographed these papers in artificial light (daylight bulbs) which always produce a blue cast, needing editing towards the red, but even after this, the mat is still looking blue!

I think part of the problem with this project not working as intended is that the pattern on the table runners is only raised where the gold design is. There are a few small holes where the larger lace pattern is, but the rest is solid. This wasn’t what I expected when I ordered them; I thought they would be full of holes like real lace, and would act like a stencil.

The fact that the papers moved before they were properly dry may also have had something to do with it.

The other thing was that despite my best efforts, quite a lot of coffee got in between the folds of the plastic sheet, and some got onto the floor. It looked as if the lamination in one place was lifting a bit. I wiped it all up and am hoping for the best!

I am going to try again, this time working with just one section of the large table runner, and working on my wet board on the pull-out unit in the middle of the room.

Some of the resulting papers were quite interesting, despite not showing any pattern from the table runner. They are definitely useable.

It seems to be quite difficult to get hold of plastic lace here in the UK. All the videos I have seen of people doing this are from the USA or Australia. It’s very frustrating!

The table runners might work quite well for creating texture on the gel plate, but that isn’t why I bought them. If I can’t get them to work for coffee-staining, I am going to have to try with real lace, which of course is going to end up coffee-coloured! I have got quite a lot of this – various crocheted doilies and some lace table runners from my grandmother which I don’t use, but I’m still reluctant to spoil them! Paper doilies work well but they aren’t very durable. You can also use stencils.

Mixed media hanging

This afternoon I made good progress on this project, working on the focal point, which is an image of two deer cut from a Christmas card. This image needed something in order to make it stand out from the background.

The triangular pieces of fabric resulting from my having unpicked the cushion covers were quite small. I chose two fairly similar green ones and stuck them together using fabric glue, to form a square. I deliberately didn’t choose identical ones as I thought the subtle difference made it more interesting.

I glued the image onto this, and trimmed around the edge.

I roughed up the edge of the fabric with my thumbnail to distress it.

There were some bits of lace in the box Margaret gave me, and I chose a piece long enough to gather to form a frill, and I attached this around the piece using fabric glue. After it was dry, I took the gold thread she had given me, and couched some of this around the edge of the lace. It is many, many years since I did any gold thread work embroidery!

The finished piece, complete with a small red ribbon bow that was also in the box. This covers the hole I made, through which I passed the ends of the gold thread, in order to fasten them off on the back.

This gives the image a frame which will make it stand out from the background a bit better.

Christmas card fragments

Last night in the sitting room, I finished inking the edges of the torn up recycled Christmas cards, and sorted them into colour groups.

It is interesting that there is a predominance of blue – I had expected red and/or green to feature most prominently! I suppose the reason is that a lot of the cards had night skies with stars, and the few nativity scene ones usually featured Mary wearing blue.

These fragments are now ready to attach to offcut strips of card, of which I have far too many (a common problem, I know!). Its a nice way to use them up, and create some useful collage strips. I will be posting about this in due course.