Cool Little Workshop - Part One

This week I had the great good luck to work with Pat Pauly on some surface design techniques on fabric using thickened fiber reactive dyes.

Pat with some her fabric

Lesson 1 was monoprinting. We dropped blobs of dye on a plexiglass sheet then spread the dye around using gloved hands and fingers, plastic spatulas, spoon handles, and whatever looked interesting. Pieces of white fabric (about fat quarter size), pretreated with a soda ash solution (to encourage the dye to bond with the cotton fibers), were dropped onto the dye-cover plexi. Then we used our hands and a couple of different rollers to press the fabric onto the dye. My preference was the standard paint roller.

The pieces we made that day were left to batch without rinsing, so we could continue applying dye next time. One of the very best things I learned from Pat that day was the magic of applying more dye using just a spreader of any type to add color to the "background". This piece below in red was my first monoprinting attempt, using only my hands to spread the dye and then to print with my hand. Wait until you see what happened next!

Cris' monoprint - stage 1