Flour,Water, Color and a Skewer !

No,this is not any old piece of wax batik fabric!!! This was created using a paste of

FLOUR and WATER!!!! Is this not the coolest???????

I adore True batik fabric, the type that you see from Indonesia and Bali. Nothing can replace the beauty and mastery of techniques that comes with experience from the master craftsmen of that part of the world. However, I am a big fan of using simple everyday products from around the house to yield interesting and unique fabrics with ease and a good many "OH COOL" moments!!!!

So here you will find a stepped out tutorial so you can try this easy, slightly messy but oh so much fun technique!!!

(Full disclosure and giving credit where credit is due, I first saw a description of this in a recent Quilting Arts Magazine- at the time , I was not too interested. Then I saw the technqiue discussed a second time on the QUilting Arts newsletter by Pokey Bolton. She showed some really juicey green fabric` samples that she had created . Her pictures really pulled me in for a closer look. This is NOT my technique. I am simply providing pictures with discussion of my expereince witha few tips and some things that I learned along the way!! Thank you Pokey Bolton for sharing your wonderful fabric samples and for inspiring me to have a go!!!!)

Supplies:

1 cup of baking flour

1cup of room temp water (NOt HOT)

bowl and spoon for mixing

old credit card or other spreading tool

wooden skewer, bottle caps, grids for patterns

cotton fabric (I worked with pieces that were approximately 12x18 inches

old towel

safety pins

fabric paint or acrylic paint mixed with textile medium or thick dye

1 inch siff bristle paint brush

1). Mix flour and water with spoon till all lumps are gone.

2).Pin fabric to towel in the corners and once along the middle of each side. (as flour paste dries, it will draw the fabric in and you want it to stay as flat as possible)
3).Pour a small puddle of flour paste into the center of the pinned fabric and spread it around with the credit card till it is about 1/8th of an inch thick and covers the entire piece of fabric.

4). Allow the flour paste to settle on the fabric for about 5 minutes until you see the srface become glossy.

5). Now is the fun part!!! take your skewer and drag it throught he paste creating patterns and designs in the paste. wipe the flour paste off the tip of the skewer occassionaly to keep it clean. As the flour paste dries the lines will broaden so keep this in mind when you are creating your design.

Here you can see the glossiness that the paste takes on when it has settled. I have started to design my patterns with the skewer.



In this shot you can see that I have finished drawing on the top piece fo fabric and I am spreading more paste on the lower piece.

I used this plastic "grid thingy" that I found at GoodWill as a stamp to press into the smoothed paste. So I was removing paste from the areas that came in contact with the grid.

6). Allow the fabric with paste and pattern dry thoroughly. (I let mine dry overnight but on the next sunny day, it dried outside in the sun in about 3 hours)

Here you can see what it will look like when dry. you can see how much the dried paste draws the fabric up and why the pins are important!

7). Wad the dried fabric up in a ball and skrunch it around in your hands. This will crack the flour paste.

8). Smooth out the scrunched fabric and place on several sheets of newspaper to protect your work surface.

9). Spread your paint or thickened dye onto the paste covered fabric with a paintbrush and be sure that you cover all areas of white and spend a bit of time brushing the surface to work the dye/paint into all of the little cracks.
( I used full strength Setacolor paints on all of my samples)

10). Allow the painted paste fabric to dry thoroughly.

11). When dry you will see lots of tiny little cracks in the paste surface.

12). Place the fabric pieces with dried paint and paste into a large bucket of warm water and let it soak for several minutes. the flour paste comes off fairly easily with a bit of scrubbing.
13).Iron dry to set paint or dye.

Below you see my green sample that was dyed first with green on white fabric and then overdyed with a yellow green.

The picture below shows the first dye step, before the bright green over dye.

This piece was done with a mixture of blue, fushcia and purple paints on white fabric.

I did have problems with the piece that I dyed with yellow. I did not get a thick enough layer of paste on this piece and I used dye that was too thin. The paint spread under the thin layer of paste and the pattern was lost.

the result was a yellow piece of fabric. Not to be detered, I carried on and mixed up a new batch of paste and stamped it with the plastic "grid thingy" once again. This time I painted with undiluted orange Setacolor paint.

Here you see yellow fabric covered with a good 1/8 inch thick coating of paste and then stamped with the grid to remove paste form the patterned area. Left to dry.

Then painted with full strength Orange Setacolor. Cracking in the paste is clearly visible.

Here you can see the dried orange painted flour paste just before it went into the soak bucket.


TA DAAAAA!!

This was a wonderfully enjoyable adventure in surface design! I would love to do this process with kids and would be very confident that I would not have to worry about burns from hot wax or warm soy wax. No special supplies are required except some paints or dye and fun will be had by all !
If you have any questions about this surface design technique just give me a holler- youc an either ask in a comment or e-mail me privately. Now go on out and create a wonderful day for yourself!!

Snow Dyeing Experiment

I am sure that you have all heard the phrase, "Got Lemons? Then make Lemonade!!" to me this has always meant , make the best out of a not so great situation. Well, WE GOT SNOW-so Try Snow Dyeing!!! I loved the storm and the snow but then we had no disappointments or inconveniences because of it. It was hardly a bad situation. However, one requirement for Snow Dyeing is SNOW!! I had heard tell of this technique last year when other parts of the country got lots of the white stuff and we went without. Then this year I was reminded of it by Dye Queen Extrordinaire, Vickie Welsh.
Vickie has been involved in all aspects of fabric dyeing for quite a while and has all of the necessary supplies and dyes.Vickie is very disciplined and creates beautiful hand dyed fabrics in color groups and then creates beautiful quilts with her own fabrics. Someday we are going to get together as she lives not very far from me! You MUST visit her wonderful blog (link above) to see how this technique and oodles of others, are meant to be done. So Vickie's undertaking , having benefited from the same snowfall as we did, sewed the seeds of inspiration. I , however , have none of the Right supplies, just lots of supplies that might servea as good stand ins. I saw this as no reason to squwelch my enthusiasm , and forged ahead. After all , we had PLENTY of snow!!

This technique si meant to be undertaken with fabric dyes. Well I ahd Setacolor fabric Paints. Ok , so try those instead. I did not have any soda ash for pretreating the fabric. But Setacolor paints don't require pretreating other than washing , so this might actually work.

So here we go !! A totally unscientific stab at Snow Dyeing probably best described as messing around!!!!!

The whole idea behid Snow Dyeing is that the snow will melt on thefabric carrying the dye down into the fabric at varying rates and thereby the resulting fabric will show variations in intensities of color. It is kind of a resist technique, I suppose.

So we begin.

We have snow.

We have prewashed fabrics of various weights and sizes, Setacolor paint concentrates in yellow, cobalt and fushia. A glass vessel for easy viewing of melting and dyeing .

The fabric was wadded up and stuffed into the bottom of the jar. 4-5 inches of snow was packed in on top. I drizzled the diluted paints onto the snow layer and put it aside in the kitchen to melt.

I love the way it looks with the snow colored by the paints.

This is what it looked like after about an hour sitting inside.

After 3.5 hours it was time to end the process. The snow was pretty well melted and the paint had been carried down into the fabric. I was a bit concerned about the muddy pool at the bottom of the container. Soda Ash soaked fabric would have mitigated that problem somewhat. ah well.

After rinsing and drying , this was the result.

Too pale and not very colorful and prety gray- yuck!!

Oh Well. I used what I had. I played with the snow. I watched the pretty colors run down into the fabric and I got a far from stellar result!! I have decided that I am not a fan of Setacolor paints except for sunprinting. Can anyone tell me why I often get blackened edges on my fabric pieces with these paints???
I will probably try this technique again but ony when I ahve access to all of the correct ingredients, using actual fabric dyes. I would like to do it once , successfully and that will be enough!!
To se some great results, go and visit Vickies Blog or Gayles blog. These gals can show you all the right steps for fabulous results.
These fabrics will go back in the "To be DYED Bag" and will get overdyed on the next dye day at Artistic Artifacts. It was great fun to try a "What IF" moment and play about a bit. I need to let myself do more of this sort of thing in 2010!!

Turning Up The Color!

This is one of the pieces that came out of the jars from Dyeing Day. I was not pleased with the lack of color and the spottiness of the color that was there.

This doilie began it's life as a very dark ecru color and really needed a color intervention. After it had been thru the dye process, washed and dried it was even more washed out than it appears here. Sooooo, I fixed it!

Now it looks like this:

I used Setacolor Paints to juice up the color and I am very happy with the results! Now this IS COLOR!!! After it dried and was heat set with the iron,it was ready for use!!

This is what the paper looked like that protected the work space. this will definately find a place in a book or journal project!!

Once I started I had to do more so I added fushia Setacolor to this rust dyed piece.

There is a woven in texture to this piece and I love how it looks now with the added fushia and orange paint!!
And I painted this ecru piece of lace, that I believe was created by a great grandmother ( one piece of many that I have) with yellow and oranges. I will be using both/all of these pieces to embellish a jacket that I am planning to create from the linen that you saw hanging on the line!!

So if you don't like the color, CHANGE IT!!!!