The Blobs and Dots

I drew on a couple of my screens with thickened fabric dye and a plastic syringe. It seems almost impossible to control the lines, as the dye blobs out at its own free will at times! Another aspect of this printing process that is usually delightfully unpredictable, and I love working with the resulting prints. Today I'll do some deconstructed screen printing after this dye dries on the screens. Holy Smoke! I have so much to learn!

See Judith's posts this month on "And Then We Set It On Fire" for her work with this technique (among others). The link is in My Blog List at the right.

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