Many moons ago, whilst studying my Art and Design Foundation degree at what was UCE Birmingham, i created this fabric and colour book.
I could have created something brand new, but chose to recycle and repurpose as much as possible to build this as part of my fashion and textiles rotation assignment; a subject which would become such a large part of my life.
It began with an old dictionary i found in a charity shop which was falling apart. I think i paid about £2 for it from Oxfam and recycled the pages not only for this book, but also for my main assignment sketchbook which focused on repurposing man-made materials such as plastic.
My tutor Jo gave us great ideas for how to repurpose old books as sketchbooks as at the time, a more formal sketchbook would set you back about £10 or more, and to a cash strapped student, that seemed a bit excessive (thanks Jo for this lovely idea!)
I took separate sheets of the dictionary, turned them landscape and sewed them together to build the book itself and then set about filling it with found items and hand dyed scraps of cotton. I made the cover out of scraps of leftover wallpaper glued together for something stronger to reinforce the rest of the book.
The campus at Bourneville had the most amazing set of dyes to mix with, and it was great to freehand paint the colours of the rainbow over scraps of cotton and calico to boost the colour variations as i worked through the book. As you can see, i saved every teeny tiny scrap of fabric of every colour i could find to add to magazine images, thread scraps, Dulux paint charts, scraps of tissue paper and mixed media squares of colour.
I wanted to try and include as many tonal variations as possible. There isn't just one shade of any colour; black particularly has over 150 different tones within it, so I felt it was important to include as many different hues and textures to show the evolution from one shade to the other.
I also stitched into pages for titles, combined different types of papers, found trims and bits of plastic; I think there's a leftover straw on the yellow page as well. I also used a technique called 'plastic fusion' where i shredded up a damaged plastic bag, arranged it between two pieces of newspaper, and with an extremely hot iron, melted it together. It looks a bit like lace when its finished and actually became a key component to one of my recycled pieces (head over to the
Ecological Projects page to see more)
Ideas were also split into 2 sections of the book; research colours and design colours. In the end i think i focused more on a 'colder' colour palette for the final 'make', but found flowing through the shades 'rainbow style' in this book helped to show development and idea generation.
Sourcing i think was key to the success of this idea, along with layering of different materials and textures. As the colours and pages progress, shades evolve effectively and look different due to what they are made from; even if the colour is the 'same'.
Drawings were added in using permanent pen on different materials, and paper and plastic were folded, cut and manipulated to symbolise the various techniques i was exploring in other aspects of the project. There wasn't a lot of green included (not really a fan of green :/ but thought it was important to include it as part of the rainbow) but a wide variety of blues instead.
This idea is quite rough; its nice to not have everything perfect sometimes and gave a good 'vibe' of ideas being explored and evolving.
