Yesterday afternoon I made a break after having printed some monoprints, to eat something and watch TV. I switched to CreateTV, my favourite channel, which is devoted to cooking, gardening and all kinds of hobbies and crafts around the house. I stumbled into a quilting show, called Quilting Arts, where Barbara Schneider was presented.
It was shown how she developed textile patterns from her own photos of natural objects, using photoshop to manipulate image colours. Then she uploaded her designs to a website for fabric printing-on-demand to obtain the printed fabric she had designed.
I was stunned. I like sewing and had always dreamt of designing fabrics, but never pursued this further because I thought there was no way for me into this. I also photograph a lot and used to play around with photoshop when I had an image of an interesting texture. Seeing Barbara Schneider’s work made me feel like “Oh wow, I could do that as well, and I’d love to!”
As soon as I could, I did some research and found the TV show’s website and the actual episode. My main interest was to know more about Barbara Schneider’s work, and find the website for textile printing that came up in the show.
Barbara Schneider’s art is centered around natural forms, she explores moving water, leaves and things like that. Colours are subdued and the textiles look very organic. Unforunately the artist does not permit to use images from her site without permission, so I won’t post anything here. But the important thing is the reminder about possible avenues I might pursue with printing – it’s not only paper, but also textiles. I found this little excursion into textile arts very inspiring.
I also found the website that makes fabric prints on demand. Pricing is not cheap, but affordable for an occasional project because there are no large setup fees. It is possible to have not only fabrics, but also wallpaper, gift wrap and adhesive decals made from own designs. This is extremely cool!
I think the idea of fabric design had immediate impact on the monoprints I made – the last prints in series three, the red and black prints, were quite rhythmic and pattern-like. I don’t want the pattern approach to dominate my printmaking, but it is interesting and I might do some separate projects on my own.
References
Quilting Arts on Create TV
http://www.createtv.com/CreateProgram.nsf/vLinkTitle/Quilting+Arts?OpenDocument&Index=
Quilting Arts TV Homepage
http://www.quiltingdaily.com/content/QuiltingArtsTV.aspx
Quilting Arts TV Episode 1213 – presenting Barbara Schneider, Quilting Artist
http://www.quiltingdaily.com/blogs/qatv_series_1200/archive/2013/07/25/quilting-arts-tv-episode-1213-mixed-bag.aspx
Barbara Schneider artist homepage http://www.barbaraschneider-artist.com/Artist.asp?ArtistID=33119&Akey=HK234MVA
Barbara Schneider on Blogspot http://barbaraschneider-artist.blogspot.com/ with an interesting article about a textile exhibit http://barbaraschneider-artist.blogspot.com/2012/04/art-quilt-elements-exhibit.html
On a side note: Barbara Schneider is also a contributer to the Thermofax Confidential Blog, devoted to printmaking with a thermofax machine. This sounds interesting and I’d like to follow up this later.
http://thermofaxconfidential.blogspot.com/
Spoonflower: Printing your own designs on demand http://www.spoonflower.com/welcome