Viva Gallery is an artists cooperative that I am proud to be a member of, and we recently featured a group show, where we each took home an 8×8 canvas, to go all arty on. Now for the painters, this was not such a “think outside of the box” kind of challenge but as a weaver and sometime jeweler, it was a little bit a stretch.

Since I had of course waited until the last minute, a tapestry image was not going to happen. I have had a chicken laying an egg, tapestry in the works for about 10 years now. So scratch that.

I have always liked the idea of finding a way to combine fiber with one of my other passions, ie; glass or photography. That led to the slippery slope of learning about image transfer so I could print one of my favorite images onto fabric and then include that in a weaving that looks like birch bark, partly because of a cool Habu yarn called Aresco cotton.  So I choose a tree image but also printed a bunch of my other favorites to play with later.

For the transfer I choose to use a method where a gel medium is layered on the fabric and using your image; that has been ink jet printed onto a transparency paper, you burnish it onto the fabric. While this did work. I didn’t like that the image was not as darkly black as my moo cards, that I had printed up for hang tags. Long story short, after many trials, I ended up sewing my moo card image to my weaving. Oh well. The show must go on…However I have not given up on the idea of image transfers being used in my weaving.

Using an app called Paper to sketch out ideas for my square

trying out the printed fabric image and not liking it
printed images on fabric on the left and images still on the clear transfer paper to the right
Images laid out on the gel before burnishing
Some of the finished squares