Florence Turnour's Blog

We have a 3D Printer. It's a Makerbot 2, if that means anything to anyone. Here's a vine I took of my cutter and the 3D Printer side by side working away. On Sunday, I drew some fish with a pen on paper. I scanned them into Photoshop, and edited them a bit. Here's one. I changed it into a vector graphic in Illustrator. Then it looked like this. Next I exported it into a 3D drawing program called Sketchup, which I got for free on the internet. I thickened the fish into a 3D model. I exported it to the appropriate format for 3-D printing and sent it to the printer.  It took about 2 hours to print, and cost me $0.87 in plastic. Voila! It's for block printing. I attached a knob to the back with velcro so that it would be easier to pick up without getting paint on my fingers.  Then I used a brayer to roll on block printing ink for fabric and printed my fish on a piece of cotton. How much fun is that? I'm rather excited. I'm going to make a cat and...

Here are my first diatoms on fabric. I'm so excited about the stencils! Now I'm ready to learn to put some texture and depth into the background. I did make one discovery: the colors do better if they blend by them selves on the edges. When I paint one color over another, I get a blend, but it is muddier. (Though I admit that might be because the blue I'm using has some black in it). For example, on the test patch below, I did not overlap the yellow and the pink. They bled into each other at the edges, but I tried not to brush one over the other. These are the brightest colors I've managed so far. On the diatoms, I used only purple paint, not mixed with other colors. I think I need to buy more colors!

I'm sun dyeing again. Here is a blog showing the process: LuAnn Kessi's Blog In my last dyeing experiment, I laser printed an image onto an overhead projector, acetate slide, and pinned it to my fabric. I was hoping the printed image would mask the sun, but the slide itself would let the sunlight through. In fact the slide masked the sun, and created a very crisp rectangle, as the paint pooled a little around the edges. The vinyl also gave a very crisp image, but it is hard to reuse the vinly, since it rolls up and sticks to itself when you peel it off. So I thought I'd try making some stencils out of acetate, which I can rinse off and reuse. I drew some diatoms ( What's a diatom? Artist Ernst Haeckel ) using Adobe Illustrator, and cut them out of acetate using my plotter cutter. They are now sitting in the sun, and I'm writing this entry partly to keep myself from watching the paint dry. Here's an image of my stencils. I hope it works! One great thing abo...