My little blue book...

I've been busy making this little book for the latest theme for Art Club/Around the Kitchen Table which is blue this month.  It is part of another blog that I run, which you can find here. 

The task was to make something based on the theme 'blue' and it took me a really long time to decide on something - blue is such a huge theme!  I finally decided last week on making a fabric book.  I found some great instructions on this blog here. 

My year 11 students are currently working on an artist book project in class and they have to make use of a range of textile based skills to create a book of some sort.  I find that it helps to have exemplars to show students and I also really like getting to make things at school!  This was made using tie-dye, shibori, salt lift, solvent transfer, lino printing, screen printing, hand embroidery and free motion embroidery. Hope you like it...

Solvent transfers on top of tie-dye and shibori dyed fabric...

Lino printing on top of a painted piece of fabric and free motion embroidery on top of shibori...

I used blanket stitch to bind half of the pages together then just sort of stitched all of them together in three lines. It's a bit messy but I don't mind that...

The front...

The back...

The binding...

Detail of free motion embroidery on top of tie-dyed fabric...

This was the first step I took to make the book.  I used a metre of white poly-cotton and painted lots of shades of blue procion dyes and just had a bit of fun really! 

These are the tie-dyed pieces of fabric pre-dye bath...

Shibori...