Velvet & Bleach

I love Angie Hughes' work - you may remember that so far I have made a bookwrap and a foiled velvet bag using her techniques. Yesterday 3 of us had a play day and tried out something new following instructions on this dvd (lovely selection of DVDs available from Minerva).

Have a peek at the contents on the YouTube preview
As with much of Angie's work, there are a variety of layers built up. Because of the limited time we had available, Katherine kindly did steps 1 and 2 for us a day before. This is my piece sprayed with silk paints

followed by quink ink

This technique works well with wooden printing blocks - we pooled our resources and had a lovely lot to use.

Then we went about the business of applying bleach gel to the printing blocks

and pressing them onto the coloured velvet.

You can see in the above photo that found objects like lego and bobbled coffee cup holders joined the wooden blocks for mark making with bleach :-)
This process discharged the ink, and revealed the paints below.

As we built up the layers we created pieces that look like gardens at night.

Once we thought we'd used enough of the bleach, we then overstamped areas using a variety of metallic paints. Here are the 3 pieces at the end of our playday.

Mine

Katherine's

Rhonda's

Next step is maybe some foils and definitely lots of stitch.
Check out this post by Angie of work by students that were lucky enough to have her take a class for them in person.
And see more of Angie's beautiful work at her website or her blog
Have a lovely weekend - thanks for stopping by.