Bleeding colour. Melissa Cooney stitches together her textiles course with Spike Print Studio.
Rising secured a spot for a young artist to join the Textile Transfer Technique Course at Spike Print Studio. Melissa Cooney spent five weeks learning from Justyna Medon, a surface designer who creates beautiful hand printed textiles and wallpapers.
As a textile artist who mainly works with embroidery and appliqué, I was eager to delve into the world of textile print and transferring techniques.
For the first few sessions, we experimented with painting and mark making on paper with transfer dyes, then transferring them on to fabric using the heat press.
It took a while to get used to how much the colours changed once pressed on to fabric with the heat press. What looked brown or dark blue on paper would come out bright pink and vivid blue on fabric (as seen in the photograph below). As someone who loves working with bright colours, I was very excited by this!
I am usually quite a perfectionist when it comes to my own work, but this course really helped me loosen up and experiment with lots of different techniques.
We used sponges, brushes, bubble wrap, lace, and anything else we could find to create an interesting shape or pattern, and by the end of the second session, I ended up with a huge stack of printed fabrics!
Our “homework” was to come up with three illustrations that we would then screen-print on top of the mark- making backgrounds we’d created using the heat press.
I’d screen-printed before, but never onto fabric. I really enjoyed the process, and Justyna was really patient and helpful to everyone, making sure we all knew what we were doing and helping us when we got stuck.
At first I found it challenging to know how hard I should press when printing my image, so the ink in my first few prints bled a bit, but I soon learnt the right technique and got used to it. Here are some images of the silkscreen prints I made using textile inks, on to my heat-transferred backgrounds:
We also screen-printed our designs with glue, the purpose being that once it dried, we could layer a sheet of foil on top and put it through the heat press, which would bind the foil to the glue.
Once cooled down, we could peel the sheet off to reveal our print in foil. I absolutely loved this technique, and got a bit addicted to printing with the glue!
I also printed with something called puff binder, a water based 3D screen printing medium, which, once put through the heat press, expands and creates a raised effect, as shown below:
Ultimately I feel the course was a brilliant introduction in to the world of textile transfer techniques, and I feel like I learnt a lot.
As someone who had barely tried any of the processes before, it gave me a great insight into what I could achieve and the kind of images I could make in the future.
It also gave me lots of new work to add to my textiles portfolio – I’m already embroidering and stitching into various samples.
I found the printing process very satisfying as I could make so many samples in such a short space of time, while experimenting with different colours and techniques. This stopped me from being so precious with my work, and allowed me to have more fun with the process, learning as I went.