Block printing experiments

Last year I was on a secondment to a new team. They're all lovely people and continue to be very supportive of my learning curve. One of the benefits of being part of this team is unrivaled access to spare B bags. B bags are used to house the secondary chip samples from RC drilling. These samples are stored in large barrels in the event that an error occurs at the labrartory when assaying the A sample. Every so often, we make a duplicate sample to validate the lab process. This creates spare B bags. As a result, they are used for all sorts of things, from wiping the mud of vehicles, to temporary sun shades. The B bags are made of calico and sized with a water-resistant starch of some kind.

Since lino printing is one of the few crafts you can do when working in a muddy environment, i took advantage of the daily B bag haul to practice my skills. Eventually, when I was happy with my skills, I made Christmas wash bags for my team. I didn't take images of many of the bags, but follows are some of my experiments:

I experimented with a lot of techniques and made over 20 wash bags. This is, hands down, my favourite. I called it "blue bubbles" for obvious reasons. I used a cardboard tube (paper towel inner tube) and a shampoo bottle cap to make this. The ink was the blue screen printing ink used in previous experiments. I found if I diluted it just right, it'd flow rather than glomming onto the stamp. Unfortunately, the cardboard tube held the water quite well resulting in some of the more smeary bubbles. After the first few, I doctored some of the others with water to give visual interest and lend more colour and balance to the bag. There are some areas the paint was a little thick, but apart from that, this was perfect. It's very difficult to make out the B Bag number as well.

Swancare Mk I. I spotted the Swancare symbol while house shopping and was quite taken with it's simplicity. I adapted it and carved up a nice lino stamp. I found that with a larger stamp body, the ink doesn't really adhere very well. This, the body of the swan was often pale, but the edges where the paint would collect when I'd brush it on were darker. The first swan below shows the problem with this. Conclusion: stamps with complex, fine detail may work better than larger solid colour areas. I ended up adapting the design for Swancare MkII by handpainting wavy lines for water. I think elongating the swan make it balance better as an individual print, but crowded the bag  which had been printed on an alternating square print pattern.

I made a number of tree bags. Mostly because I had some handy-dandy 'scent' trees lying around my room. They worked really well as a sort of stencil for me to paint around. I made a few Christmas tree themed bags with them that I quite liked the look of. Unfortunately, they were some of my last attempts so weren't photographed.

To complement the tree, I thought I'd experiment with hand painting. I whipped this one up with purple ink which left over from my St Florian experiments (more later) and nice and smooth to paint with. The image fits the bag size well, but probably needs more foliage at the top. Ah well.

I had no iron with which to fix the fabric paints. There's supposed to be one in every laundry on site, but I could not find one for the life of me. I tried all the wash-rooms in my side of camp to no avail. Instead, I tumbled them in a hot dryer for at least half an hour each. Experiments with my red-dyed ones indicated this would be sufficient to fix the colour. I've heard no complaints, but I did advise everyone to wash the bag with their blue pants and put it through a dryer cycle before using with paler colours.