29 April 2014

Backgrounds

Monday (Patriots day for us from Massachusetts and Maine), Judith came over for a play date. Something I was really wanting to try was making black marks on white fabric that I could later dye a certain color for inclusion into a piece. I made the marks in sections so they could easily be cut out at a later date and dyed or used in some other way.

I assembled a PILE (really) of mark making tools and Judith and I had a ball. My fabric was pre-soaked in soda ash. Judith used print paste with soda ash already in it. Both of us were using really old print paste from the back of my refrigerator. I found out after washing that Judith's print paste was fairly exhausted but the end of the day and the color changed from black to green. This is why I am including photos of the marks wet which were all black as well as photos of the cloth washed and iron (and green).

I'm starting with the wet prints made with black MX dye and print paste.


The alphabet stamps I used with thickened dye on a glass plate.


 Upper left is my smacker (below)


The piece below was printed with small bubble wrap (center), a lint roller with carpet pad on it (below), a monoprint off the glass plate on the upper right and solid and hollow circles made with an empty cone spool (below)







This was a thin line of thickened dye with a wide tooth comb run through it. Not one on my more successful attempts. It worked great on paper with India ink. (below)




These were done with my rope stamps (below) 


This , which I LOVE, was done with a square cut out of a car sponge (below)



Now the washed, dried and ironed versions:


I switched from my squeeze bottle of black thickened dye to Judith's exhausted dye. Had I known......


a thin line of dye with a credit card run through it vertically


pale grey dye applied with a credit card


This is a large panel done with the dye in a syringe graffiti style



Credit card dipped in dye. I think if the dye was thinner, it might have come out better


I printed letters and figures for a reason I will talk about in the future.


Monoprint from the glass and designs made with letters and numbers (fun!)


The smacker


The solid circles were made with the screw on cap from my soda ash jug. They smacked like the smacker does. The left side was done with a lint roller with elastics (below)


I will do more of this, possibly trying to perfect a few mistakes and maybe trying new mark making tools.

2 comments:

  1. Lots and lots of great ideas here! And even though some of the dyes were spent, I still love what you were doing... your use of lint rollers as a base for creating texturizers is great!

    ReplyDelete
  2. There are really some wonderful experiments. Dye with soda ash in it can only be used for 4 hours, isn't it?

    ReplyDelete

I love hearing your comments. Thanks for visiting

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.