Friday 15th May 2015

As usual on a Friday, i went to my local Primary school today to help out in a year 1/2 mixed class. Normally this would mean that I take most of the day out of uni, but now i only have 2 WEEKS until hand in, I wanted to make the most of any spare time I have left.

I still wanted to go in, it gives me a nice change, but I still wanted to work.
It was almost like this day was planned out to match this, as I was in charge, for a great deal of the day of leading a block printing workshop project with small groups of children. I enjoyed this so much! The children first tied up a piece of cotton and dip dyed it in brusho dye, to create a tie dye effect. Whilst this was drying, the children created two stencils to use to do their block printing, one out of polystyrene and the other, like a collagrapgh print, using matches to create a shape. the children then used a rolled to help apply the paint to their stencils before pressing them down onto their now dry dyed piece of cotton. This was amazing fun and we got so much done, definitely a valuable experience which directly relates to this textile project!!!

Over lunch, I had a great quiet opportunity to catch up on this PDP blog and think about how best to focus my efforts, thinking that the sampling i obviously a point which I need to continue working on. In the afternoon the children had some 'activity time' so gave me a chance to have an hour off before going home and cracking on with some more work.

When I got home, after buying some straws to use in my more experimental work, I began some hardcore uni work, working further with my netted sampling. I brought the straws with the intention of beginning to combine these with the netting to add bright colours. I decided to combine them with the wire netting as I thought, they would probably be able to handle the melting process better. I started of by creating a piece of wire-work with straws threaded through, before melting it in the oven. The oven was to hot and the straws near melted off, leaving chunks of plastic behind. Based on this, I then created another piece of wire-work which I woven straws in and out of, all in the same direction. When I melted this one, it worked better, but the straws started to curl at the ends, so I think perhaps the iron may work better. This is in my plan for tomorrow, creating another piece combining the straws and wire and melting by hand with the iron. There will be more control over the heating and melting process in this case.