Bonding Workshop

On Wednesday the 23rd of January, I attended Les's 'bonding workshop', we were introduced to melting plastics and materials either by themselves or onto a fabric. Les showed us his samples that he's been experimenting with using all sorts of materials and playing around with composition, layering and melting. He had a huge bag filled of materials: old tents, carpet material, garden/plant netting, bin bags, mesh material, an operating cloth and other odd bits of fabrics and interesting materials he has found. Our task was to take some of these materials and experiment with them by melting them together, seeing what melts and what doesn't, creating interesting experiments of material properties.

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Here are a few examples of Les's experiments. I specifically liked these ones as I feel they could link to my current fashion directions project, the composition and material used is extremely interesting, and since I've been using foil/metallic material within my work and sketchbook I wanted to try some out.

This workshop was very interesting as I have never thought to do anything like this before, I created two samples in this workshop, one was bits of material melted onto this rubber/plastic material and the other was a few bits of material and a sublimation print heat pressed onto a piece of material.

Furthermore, once I had finished my tutorial of this workshop, I got on with my printing that I'm focusing on for this project.

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This was my first sample I experimented with, I used four colours of 'disperse' dye mixed with 50ml of water to 1g of dye for a pale colour, then mixed with indalca paste which thickened this dye. I had to use this paste as disperse dyes can be used on most fabrics, and I was printing onto 'active lycra'. Moreover, I heat pressed this sample once I had completed it and it seemed positive, however, when you stretched and pulled on the material the paste started to crack, although I liked this sample, the paste was not going to work on this material. I then tried transparent binder mixed with a few colours and printed my designs onto the lycra using this paste, after heat pressing this fabric and stretching it, the paste worked well and didn't crack, therefore I found my solution for this technique. Moreover I printed more designs using this paste, I experimented with the gold and copper paste mixed with transparent binder as this reflects within my sketchbook work using copper tape and gold and silver card and pens. Furthermore, I learnt that to make a colour metallic, you could mix the silver powder with this, which created a metallic pink/purple colour.

This was a good experiment as I had a problem with my printing and solved it by trying out something else. Experimenting with material and print techniques has been the main focus of my projects so far as I wouldn't be able to develop and progress with my work if I hadn't been doing this.