The End of the Process

The process of laminating fabric as developed by Claire Benn, has a bigger learning curve than I anticipated. I purchased her book, Paper & Metal Leaf Lamination, read it, watched the DVD and thought about the process. She recommends printing the papers to be laminated at least a week before the lamination process is begun which I did not strictly adhere to and I believe this is one factor that affected the lack of stronger colors in my fabric.

The collage above shows the photographs I began with. The two on the left and the black and white photo were photos of iris manipulated with a kaleidoscope filter in Photoshop. The brown photo was pine leaves, also manipulated.

The final process, after rubbing with oil pastel colors to create texture and fusing the pieces to a white sheet, was minimal quilting. No batting was used. The quilting design was based on the diagonal lines in the black and white photo above.The borders were sew on after quilting and the last step was to adhere the completed piece to a gallery wrapped canvas.

I am not sure I will try this process again. It was very labor intensive and probably takes months to perfect the technique. The outcome is different than what I anticipated. It is definitely one of a kind. I still have no come up with a title, so give me some suggestions.

A Never Ending Process

After seeing the results from my previous laminating experiences, I decided to try laminating images printed in only black and gray and black.

The black ink only image remained black.

The black and grays image became a paler black and the grays have a greenish tinge.

So back to more experimenting.

Time is Wasting

The actual process began today. It isn't as if nothing has been going on. The thermofax screen has been, prepared for use. The printing surface, plywood covered with 4 layers of old sheet and a bottom layer of felt is ready. The images for laminating have been printed.

polyester voile, images, thermofax screen, matte medium, padded print surface

applying matte medium to voile - images are underneath voile

heat setting to laminate the voile and the paper using parchment paper

soaking to soften paper for removal

Removing paper from back side of voile

the result

It appears that there is a whole lot more practice with the process which needs to happen before I have anything bordering on what I was expecting. Most of the colors on the printed image vanished, and the matte medium was not evenly distributed so some of the image did not adhere.  Back to square one.