(DISPLAY BOARD PIECE - BOARD 2 OF 10)
Natural resist
I used gum tragacanth made into a resist paste (with a little added natural dye colourant so I could see the stamping!) to create a border pattern down either side of this print fabric. This motif was stencil-printed using an acetate stencil.
Natural bleaching
The central motif is the same image this time using the pipecleaner on board and utilising lemon juice as a bleaching agent.
Natural dye
The glazed cotton fabric was mordanted with aluminium acetate then dyed with natural madder in an alkaline solution to give a purple shade (madder contains purpurin which is released in a strongly alkaline environment. The alkali was sodium carbonate).
I thought the purple was effective with the resist paste but the lemon juice didn't discharge the colour as much as I had hoped, so I re-applied both resist and lemon juice and changed the pH of the remaining madder dyebath to turn it to red using citric acid (rather an interesting fizzy effect!)
The resulting fabric when rinsed gave a stronger effect on the resist but the lemon juice was still quite subtle. Maybe a stronger acid or a thickened solution would be more effective?
Handpainting with fabric paints
I decided to tackle the dark brown hessian next. After a somewhat abortive attempt with dyes (didn't show up at all and just soaked straight into the fabric then disappeared!) I used some gold fabric paint to paint large, bold versions of this motif freehand. This time I overlapped the motifs which gave a surprisingly different effect. The bold look very effective against the dark brown and the inherent stiffness in the fabric meant that the slight stiffness in the gold paint wasn't an issue.
I chose the calico fabric and the modelling clay stamp to create a structured repeating print with procion fibre reactive dyes thickened with manutex. The fixer (sodium carbonate) was added to the dye. To add interest and movement I inverted the stamp and offset each row by one complete stamp. This print could be repeated on a range of fabrics in a variety of sizes. The slight variations in the stamp as it warmed added a degree of quirkiness and softened the otherwise rigid nature of the pattern.
Potato-cut printing with thickened dyes - on cotton muslin and dyed cotton
My initial attempts at potato printing were embarrasingly bad! It took me a while to get the dye consistency and the depth of the cut right (and the patience to allow the potato to dry out a bit) before I got some half-decent images. Eventually I cracked it and got these very simple but pleasing prints which I based on a tiny segment of the airplant, simplified it and used to print a border pattern on a piece of fine cotton muslin.
I had some of the cotton I'd dyed in the natural dyes experiment left over and the muslin was very fine so rather than waste the dye that was squidging through the fabric I thought I'd use the fabric underneath the muslin to see if I could get a second print from the "waste" dye. The resulting images were, of course, less solid, but nonetheless quite interesting. I finished off the piece with more solid direct potato prints using the same print in a darker colour. Totally accidental but the outer "stars" almost seem to be moving round the central section.
Potato-cut printing with thickened dyes - on felt
I had some leftover acrylic felt which had a slightly fluffy finish and was obviously a bit thicker and more spongy than a regular fabric. I had quite a bit of the procion dye left so I added more dye to change the colour a little and used a potato print for a simple image based on the airplant. Being a potato print I sized up the original image and just worked at random rather than recreating the airplant structure. The fabric worked surprisingly well, although how permanent it will be given that the fabric is acrylic I wouldn't guarantee. No reason why I couldn't try this on a wool-felt tho' (altho' I'd have to use acid for the fixer and steam-heat or iron to fix the colour).
