A Day of Dye Painting

Dianne hosted a day of dye painting with me and Becky on Sunday.  These are Dianne's pieces.  She grumbled in the morning and wasn't sure she liked the whole process but I think her pieces speak for how successful she was!!

We basically were working with dry soda ashed fabric and very thickened, very intense colors.  Instead of making the powders into a liquid, I mixed the dye powders directly into the print paste.  Because there is so much urea in the print paste, it was a cinch.  I then did a brief talk on how to work with these.  Basically if  you want still thick dye but a lighter shade, you just add more print paste to what you have spooned into a separate little cup (we used old cat food plastic cups).  If you want a thinner "paint", you just add water.  As you can see, when you use the intense dyes with a lot of thickener immediately take on the fabric, don't move even when you add additional watered down dyes later.

These  next four pieces were done by Becky.

She microwaved her pieces but nuked this one too long and actually burned it which are those dark spots.  It didn't flame up until she opened the microwave!

The next few pieces are mine and are not particularly good although I like this one and the next one okay.  I was really trying to illustrate what you could do with these dye paints rather than concentrating on creating good pieces.  In this piece, I did very dark crosses, then added print paste and got lighter crosses, and did this a couple of more times.  Then I watered down the dyes and painted the whole piece over the crossed images.  This fabric was not white but was a light blue to begin with.

I used a silk screen I had created to first stamp with very thick dyes and then I watered it down and painted over the whole piece.

This was also a colored piece of fabric to begin with and probably not even pfd!!  I picked up wet dyes that had bubbled on the plastic, then painted some crosses and then painted on wet dyes over the whole piece in a couple of different colors.  It was very wet.

I used household sponges to sponge different colors down on a piece of green fabric (very light green).  I probably shouldn't have added the red last!!  Lots of texture though.  I hate any white spaces on my pieces -- always have so avoid that at all costs!

This was one of my "failure" mandalas that I cut in four and then pieced back together with the pieces formerly on the outside now on the inside!!  I also trimmed off about an inch all the way around.  I thought the newly painted fabric might make good borders around it.  The green one actually looks better than in this picture for some reason!  

I don't know why I feel compelled to take the mandalas that I count as failures and work on them first instead of the ones I like!!  Guess it is the challenge to make something that I like out of something I don't care for!!