Playtime!

I had a play date yesterday, a rarity for me. I met with Linda Waddle, Lin Schiffner and Denise Schmidt to play with paper lamination and molding paste. Oh did I have fun!

Linda is an expert at many methods of surface design and shared her techniques and knowledge with us. She has studied with Jane Dunnewold and regularly uses laminated paper in her work. I wish I had thought to take photos of some of her work yesterday. She uses paper laminate in a variety of ways in her work and I saw how useful this technique could be in my own work.

We each chose a variety of paper images to play with and I used comics from the newspaper, printed music from a book, paper napkins, images printed on copy paper and other newspaper images. I assembled them randomly on polyester organza:

I then coated the entire sheet with:

Linda has experimented with a variety of mediums and found this to work the best. Once all the images were coated I layered on a few other techniques: thermofax screen and stencils. I pounced the medium on the stencils and scraped medium over the thermofax screens.

Just for grins, on a portion of the stencil I tried to simply spread medium over and that did not work well; the medium seeped under the stencil, which we kinda thought it would.

I have to let it all sit for 24 hours before I can heat set it, then peel off the papers and see what I have. The images should transfer to the sheer organza. Dang, I do NOT want to wait! I am most excited about the napkins. I have a pretty extensive inventory of napkins:

They have such marvelous colors and fabulous designs! It’s easier to find what I want in a napkin than fabric.

In 2019 I took a wonderful “Paper Cloth” class from Margarita Korioth and I absolutely love one of the projects that came about as a result of that class:

I want to make more of that blue “fabric” and I think I will try to paper laminate more napkins to create another piece. For some reason I have been itching to do something along the lines of the piece above. I see the paper laminate method as a fairly easy and quick way to get the look that I want.

We also played with modeling paste by putting down a resist stencil and adding the paste directly to the fabric. We tried both products:

I used the Golden paste but I think Lin used the Fast ‘n Final. I added some acrylic paint to mine:

My technique needs some work – the stencil came up a bit at the lower left corner and seeped. The final product can be embossed, which Denise did and it was fabulous. I forgot to take a photo. I see promise in this but I am less likely to use it in the near future. I can definitely see laminated paper in my future!

And just for grins, I tried adding texture with a comb:

The little globs of white happened because I did not clean the comb before I used it.

And one last thing to share – Santa brought Linda this cool toy:

You can find it here on Amazon. You can’t tell from the photo, but each color is printed on high quality paper and the colors are so vibrant! It would be way easier to tell what color you need to add to a piece by using these as opposed to digging through your stash. I would like a set of these but I will hold off. There’s that kitchen remodel thing going on soon….

I should play more often! I do have a busy travel schedule coming up and I may have to cut back on my blog posts and newsletters. In the meantime I will be posting at:

Nina-Marie’s Off the Wall Friday