Sunday, February 10, 2008

Play Day

As promised, I've spent today on creative stuff. It's amazing how blissful a whole day to play is. I did some monoprinting in layers (photos to come later, as I'm still doing the layers) and also some flour resist. Above is one where I "wrote" in the flour, and I was very keen to see how it would come out. I let it dry, crumpled it, and then applied dye.
Here it is with dye painted on - I love the look of the crackle background and the lettering is clearly visible. Click on the photo for a closer look at the patterns.
After hot washing, drying and ironing. I love how the colours have gone very subtle -the light brown has turned quite pinkish - but it wasn't what I expected. The wording is no longer visible and far more dye attached to the fabric than I thought.
Here's another of the 3 that I did - this had no designs in the wet flour. Above is the "before" shot.
And here is the "after". Again, the flour has toned all the colours down, but most of the dye has still penetrated the resist. And lastly, this one - no "before" shot was taken, just this "after" one.
This one was done with a whole pile of different browns. Lovely subtle shades, but little hint of the underlying design as most of the dye got through.

Summary: more work necessary. There are a number of possibilities as to why these didn't come out as expected, so I'll keep experimenting.

3 comments:

Julie said...

I have never heard of this method Shirley. I love the crackled effects.

Anonymous said...

Hi Shirley, what were you using for your "flour" resist? I have one that uses rice,wheat, corn flour starch & alum that is a good resist if allowed to dry well. Jan in Australia

Val said...

Wow! Some of these are magic! Lovely, especially the bottom two. Dyeing is such fun!