Steaming my first digital samples

In the last week I have experienced peaks and troughs of activity and motivation. 

I printed about 2 metres of cloth with different sizes of my hand drawn pomegranates.  They scaled up very well, showing the hand drawn detail, in 12, 18, 25 and 50cm samples in both the colour and monochrome sketches.  When printed the colour were a bit subdued. 

Lisa and I then took all day on Friday, to steam fix the sample.  We had to clean out the large steamer, then it took about an hour to come up to steam, because it uses about 2 cubic metres of water in the boiler.  I pinned my fabric onto steaming cloths, which need to be bigger than the printed piece.  Then you have to ensure the bottom of the steaming cloth is higher than the water level in the steamer.  Lisa showed me how to hook the fabric into the steamer, secured the door correctly, and brought it back to steam, and steamed it for 40 minutes.  When we took it out, the colours had considerably brightened in the steaming process, but there were a couple of places where there had been a condensation drip from the ceiling of the steamer, which had damaged the printed pattern.  Not sure what we can do about this.  Maybe the answer is to hook the fabric on, using every row of hooks, rather than spacing them out to occupy the full space in the steamer.  If there were less space between the coiled fabric, the drips would be caught on the top of the steaming cloth, not catch the fabric half way down.

The next stage is to wash the fabric to remove the soda ash fixing agent.  Then I will cut it up into separate samples.  Feedback from other students suggested I keep this sample whole, then print another to cut up into a sample book.

I called my tutor, Sara, to have a look at the large sample.  She was clearly of the opinion that I should just cut up the samples and put into several different sample books, graded by size, so that I could line them up, and look at all the different scales together in a row, for each drawing. 

Sara also said I needed to get on and progress beyond observational drawing.  She wanted to see design work.  This stunned me a bit.  I have been concentrating on observational drawing, because this is what I thought she told me to do, before Christmas.  And when I had my tutorial with Sally on my return to class last week, she was pleased with the breadth of progress in my sketchbook.  So I feel a bit stunned to be told to do a lot of design work, "so I can see how you draw".  This has considerably knocked my confidence and motivation - I know I need to use photoshop to get the designs worked up, my skill level is not good and I don't feel I have been given any guidance on how to develop my work.