yesterday we had a session with Elaine (our contextual studies tutor) and we were set a task to collect loads of images and information (5 Internet sources, 5 books, 5 magazines and 5 from other sources like our own drawings, questionnaires etc) relating to what we are studying or plan to be studying. i am going to be doing about launderettes and laundry and already planned to go to a launderette soon. Elaine suggested that i do a questionnaire. ha ha i thought about that when she was talking about the task that we needed to do but i don't know if i really wanna do that. no offence to anyone who frequents a launderette but i don't know what sort of people I'm going to run into there. but it would be fun if i find willing people who have interesting things. Elaine was really interested in the topic and especially like the idea of what the launderette means to the community, as in like some people might use it like housewives might go together, and for people who don't have a washing machine its like a vital place for there lives. i am actually very proud of myself as well because I've already taken out two books from the library. one is called 'Twentieth Century Design: Electrical Appliances" and the other is called "Kitchen Antiques". i found them both by searching 'laundry' on the library computer. there was two others but i thought i would ease myself in slowly. so i have sort of already started this task. tomorrow we get our briefing about our new project, but we pretty much know we have to do a project where our outcome is like a scarf or shawl and it has to be about Norwich like history or something, but not entirely sure about all of the specifications.

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we dun r printin babez

i am freshly back from uni with dyed hands from the printing inks as today was the day we printed our repeat pattern which was one of the most exciting things ive ever done at uni? it was well scary aswell though. we only had one chance to print it so there was a lot of pressure on us to get it right. theres a lot of technical stuff but i think i will start wrtiting all my technical notes in a seperate notebook rather than on here. any way heres some photos of the print in produstion and the final outcome.

at first we did a little bit wrong but the with the other print over the top its not so noticaeble. it took a really long time but it was definately worth it. im so happy with the result and so are the other members of my group. i think the colours work really well and look really pretty expecially the pink because PINK IS MY FAVOURITE COLOUR. my group done extra print on paper and extra bits of fabric that they had taken in but i decided not to. i think it will be really interesting to see if i can actually do it myself and remember all of the steps that we had to do to make the print (sort of interesting). so i think im going to try that but using my own imagery that i will collect over the next week. i have planned to visit a launderette tomorrow. i was going to do it yesterday but i want to wash my bedsheets while im there, and i didnt have any change but now i do. i am intriuged. i sort of dont know what its oging to be like. in my head its like the launderette in eastenders but i doubt it will be like that. i really want to meet dot cotton. i wonder if she'll be there.

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another r e p e a t workshop

PHOTOSHOPPPPPPP & some rushed DRAWINGSSSS

i realised late last night that today for a workshop we needed to have some drawings. i, at that time , had so far no drawings! we haven't really been given a specific thing we need to be drawing, or even told that we should be doing drawings outside of our group project which is where the focus has been in all our workshops. so for today we needed 3 or 4 drawings, and the e mail said that they couldn't all be linear. i was like linear? i don't even know what that means but judging by other peoples comments on facebook it mean that they couldn't just be line drawings and that at least two of them should have some sort of shading or block colour on them. so i quickly rushed a few drawings. i was not overly happy with them but thought they would do for the workshop, they also had to be scanned in so thankfully i got a scanner over the summer, a good one, and scanned them in at 300dpi, if that makes any difference.

so i turned up to the workshop and to be completely honest with you didn't understand much of what he said. it was about making a pattern which would be able to repeat by using photoshop, but that where it got really confusing. although i didn't learn any of that (although i am going to try to get someone to help me or maybe ask for some help from the tutor) i did find the workshop really useful because i haven't really used photoshop in over a year and it was good to go back to it, it was like a refresher, and it sort of opened my eyes to what i can do with it and i think it will be useful to generate more ideas and outcomes. i did learn about what he called a 'power copy' though, where you hold down i think command and alt and click+drag an area to duplicate the item.

anyway i know its not very good and i probably wont include it in my work but i will try to learn more photoshop

codatrace

so now we have made our design for our repeat print and filled in all the background areas it actually looks alright. we've done it so quickly i cant really believe it but working in a group definitely helps you work faster and especially my group, they are both such hard workers and its like normally i would just be like 'oh ill do it later or next week or something' but they;re so driven its like, 'no we'll come in tomorrow and stay all day' and i'm actually really happy about that. even if i didn't learn anything from doing the printing or setting up our design i feel like i have learnt a lot from them about like a good work ethic and actually what is expected from you and needed from you to get a good grade.

so now we have done our design on paper we need to put it on this stuff called cod trace. its like see through like assotate and what we put on this will get put onto our screens and then printed onto our silk. normally in past years the project has been done and its only done in black and white so theres only one codatrace but this year they have changed it so we do two colours. the days involved a lot of communication between us all, about what parts should be what colours because we want it to be balanced so there isn't too much of one colour and so its mixed so it doesn't look to heavy on one end. it took a while but we did get it done. we used china pencils, pigment ink pens and this stuff called photo opaque which is painted on and its a brown colour. my favourite thing to use was the china pencils because they have a quality sort of like a texture more like a crayon rather than a pen which is really flat, but i'm not sure if when we print it it will look as nice. we used a range of marks to make it more interesting like we drew a mixture of thick lines and thin lines, and had huge blocks and in some areas we scratched into the photo opaque with some scissors. we then had to check it on the light box to make sure the coloured areas were opaque cos otherwise it wouldn't transfer to our screen and wouldn't print, we did have to do a few areas again. i am excited to get this printed because until we have chosen our colours and printed it we cant imagine what it is going to be like properly.

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f i r s t o n e t o o n e

today i had my first one to one with a teacher. i had started looking at and drawing laundry because so far we haven't been told any specific thing to be drawing. since i came back from home back to uni its so weird its like i have been looking forward to laundry days. omg it sounds so lame. but  i like couldn't wait for my washing to build up so i could wash it and then hang it all up to dry. i don't know what it is its like therapeutic, and i have like a little technique like an order of how i dry things, like if i want to wear something the next day that goes straight on my towel rail. i figured out on my towel rail i can fit two t shirts or one pair of jeans and then about 7 socks. and then all my other tops jumpers and t shirts get put on hangers and hang from on my shower rail and door frame, i find they dry quicker if i spread them out more on my shower rail and my door frame. i also have a thing with lots of pegs on it for socks and underwears, i don't know what that could be called i just call it a thingy. anyway i had Grainne for my one to one and she got really excited but she gets excited about everything. i find talking to her really good because its like you can give her the tiniest things and she'll go off on so many different tangents and its literally like the only way i can think to describe it is like and idea fountain and theres no stopping it, she just goes and goes. some ideas that i'm excited about are like finding out what the symbols mean on like the tags of clothes and also i really want to go to a laundry shop. i can imagine it like all the washing machines are old and will probably look a lot more interesting the the boring average ones in houses. but then i knew at some point i would have to look at some historical context which i always hate but i think that like this wont be as bad as it could be. it could be almost maybe slightly enjoyable if thats possible. i also knew she'd say 'draw bigger' and 'draw onto colour', i will do that but at the start of a project i always feel like drawing onto white , and its like just at the start getting all your thoughts together and stuff.

xxx

choosing our colour scheme

we only started this project two days ago and already we're choosing the colour scheme for our work! its gone really fast i feel like i've learnt so much in three days its unbelievable, if this whole year is this quickly paced then by summer i am going to be absolutely knackered! 

first thing this morning we had a print induction. at first it was so confusing! there were screws an this metal thing that is shaped like a T, and stoppers and all sorts just to set up our printing and i was just thinking like OMG this is not what i expected. its kinda crazy cos art is like so free and like your able to do what ever you want sort of thing but then there is this whole other side to textiles where its really technical and involves so much maths and like a screw driver or whatever. but i will write about how to set that up when we do it in our group and i understand it more!

after that my super organised group booked the dye kitchen so we could sort out what colours we wanted to use on our work. we have to choose three colours: one dyed colour for the background, and then two colours which we will print on top. i was kinda wary like i didn't wanna go too crazy and choose really outlandish colours, but then my group actually were kind of on the same wave length as me. we all decided that we wanted a really pale colour for the background and then the two other colours would be stronger and quite complimentary. i really liked this picture that our tutor had showed us which was in like china or somewhere and there was a orange sky with like this building in front of it, but then there was a lake where there were lots of blues and some bright green, almost lime green, lilies. i liked that as an idea but we tested a few colours out on swatches of fabric (i forgot to take fabric so i don't have any actual samples but hey ho). first when we got there we used these dyes, i think we were testing dyrect dyes and then after about an hour we found out they were the wrong ones. we were like wahhhhhhh but we had more of an idea what colours we liked. we were looking at like a mustard yellow or a peachy colour for the background and then like a pinky mauve colour and a turquoise for the two colours to be printed on top, although we tested a few others as well. this was like the first time i had actually mixed up dyes and printing pastes so it was a bit tricky but easy to get the hang of measuring everything out, it had to be so precise which for me wasn't easy [preciseness i don't like]. but anyways after we were using the right dyes we were sure we wanted a peach for the background and a raspberry and a turquoise for the printing, but then we couldn't decide how strong the peach should be! i liked it a little stronger because i just felt like the weakest one looked a bit drab and like dead like hfffff, where as if we used a bit more then it was a lot brighter and felt alive. we have decided to just try going for in the middle. it was then suggested to us by fran, the printing technician that we try doing some discharge dyes, ay ay ay. it was a really good idea and then we couldn't decide all over again. we have been talking about maybe doing two so one we dye raspberry and then discharge areas and then print raspberry over the top so some of it you ll see and some you won't, as well as doing our peach/raspberry/turquoise one.

we started making our repeat prints. at first we were not sure what we were doing we literally got into the class and started drawing but thought they were just drawing exercises and we would start our actual design within the next week. so we had our drawing, in our groups there were three of us and we each had about 8 drawings.

this is one of my drawings that didn't get included. its an earring!

this is a sponge, we could only use one colour. this drawing is quite boring

we cut out some cirle-y dottys from this drawing of a tea pot for our pattern

heres all my groups beautiful drawings on the wall

we then had a large piece of paper and had to cut out our drawings and stick them on in a nice looking way down the middle, we couldn't go too close to the edges.

once we were happy with that we had to find a route down the middle of the design, called a 'cut through'. a cut through is made so that that isn't an obvious join in your repeat pattern, if you worked in a box and repeated the box it would be obvious where the join is, so you have to find a line through the middle where you can cut so when it gets printed next to each other it matches up. none of us were really happy with our drawings because they were all so rushed and because we didn't think these were going to be used in our actual design we didn't really put a lot of care and effort into them, they were also timed drawings between 5 minutes and one of them was only given a minute. it was different for everyone because everyone has there own way of working and doing things and to be honest i wouldn't have spent as long sorting out the placement as we did but the other two members of the group are a lot more thoughtful and are almost perfectionists, where as i guess i'm more slap dash and then go back to things to refine them more. it was difficult also because i feel that the two other members of the group have a similar sort of aesthetic which is really different to mine. once you have done the cut through you stick it back together but so that the edges that were on the outside were then on the inside down the middle. so then our design was busy round the outside and empty in the middle, we then filled in the empty areas with more drawings and patterns to fill the space. we weren't overly happy with our design but the exercise seemed to be more about how to do the process of making a repeat pattern. we also figured that at the moment our design was only in black and white and blue, because blue and black were the colours we were drawing in but when we do the actual printing it would be in different colours so it will look nicer. talking about colours i am nervous about choosing colours because i don't know my group very well and I'm not sure what their taste in colours is like, i like bright colours that clash: my favourite colour combination would be a yellowy green and pink, but i could be surprised i guess.

xxx

NEW PROJECT!

for the new project we are looking at repeat patterns. i am excited to look at repeat patterns and learn how to successfully make a good repeat pattern. they always seemed really interesting but i've never tried to produce one because to be honest it looks sort of difficult to make. we are also working in small groups of 3 or 4, which will also be interesting. art and textiles is always really something that is like just you by yourself and then after developing your idea you get feedback and group crits, and thats like the only input from other people and the only time when other people are actually involved in your work. i haven't worked in a group since high school and i worked in a group for a geography , and it is fair to say i didn't really pull my weight but that was more because i found the work hard and boring so hopefully i will find this more interesting and be able to get more involved.

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