Kathy blow drying her work.
This was supposed to be darkish purple with light blue underneath. This is before the wax was removed. I had ironed the wax out of my two other pieces and wasn't happy with the grease spotting it left. The big piece I did in high school was solid wax, so I didn't have that problem, the whole thing was spotted. I wanted to try to boil the wax out of this piece.
Amber tried boiling at Kathy's and was not successful. I researched it a bit, and discovered a few key things:Add soap
Keep the cloth submerged until the water cools and the wax can be removed
This was messy and as you will see I lost significant color from this process. It is a learning experience, and I'm so glad I made up "practice" pieces. The bonus to the boiling is how soft and wonderful the cloth is, and it can be washed and dried when ironed batiks can't.
Instead of purple and baby blue I got pink and white. Eh, I've learned never to expect anything when dealing with dyeing textiles. It does what it wants and it usually still turns out cool.
This was another experiment, I took straight dye powder and threw it on the fabric that had been soaked in soda ash. It was really cool how the different colors pulled out of the powder.
I then dripped wax over it
And dyed it green. I think next time I will make the dyes stronger and leave them in longer. The colors weren't as vivid as I had hoped.
The finished product on the left. I am going to go back in with wax and touch up the non-grease stained areas so it's consistent and bright all over.
Amber making up the yellow dye
My yellow fabric ready to be waxed
After waxing
The dye bath
The ring on the right has been ironed, the one on the left has not. I haven't decided if I will go back with wax to make it all saturated or not. I think if I boil it it will fade too much.
It was really fun to get together and to get in touch with my creative side. I have several more projects on the way, and since I'm cutting back my work hours a bit, I hope to have more time to do things like this.
3 comments:
That looks like fun to me. I want to try sometime.
This looks like so much fun! I want to try too!
molebite = megan, on that last comment, apparently a while ago jason set up a blogger account for me and he gave me that name for some reason so when i signed into google to post it remembered, anyway, all is well now. (name has been restored)
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