Working In A Series Base Fabric

I'm using Jane Dunnewold's 'Art Cloth' exploring surface design. I've dyed some base fabric and overdyed it in the same session. I first manipulated the fat quarter fabrics, more on that later, and dyed first in Marine Violet and second in Cerulean Blue.

Working left to right: this fabric was folded in squares and 2 canning lids were clamped on each side making a fabric sandwich. The blue, second dye, seemed to make no impression at all. The next piece was accordion folded and laid in a tray to dye, next one was also accordion folded but stood up in the tray and seems to have sucked up more dye than the one laying down. Last piece was scrunched in an onion bag, dyed purple, fixed, rescrunched, put back in the bag and dyed blue. Lots of texture in that last one.
These pieces will be the base for more techniques applied to them.
I also made up some markers for applying paint. Mostly legumes glued, dried and then painted over for protection. Bonus, legume drawer cleaned out! Also some glued down string and corks bundled together.
Discharging is one of the techniques coming up and I'm finding it difficult to find the product that stops the bleaching action. Can find the discharging stuff but not the stop so I'm not sure what I will do about that.

Click over to Vicki's to see what everyone else is working on.

Working in Series - Art Cloth - A Beginning

The first exercises are about dyeing fabric and over dyeing fabric with resists. You can get markedly different results with  the type of dye you use; either pure dye or compound dye. The compound dye is made up of several different pure dyes and they may strike at different rates. My first exercise was to find out what dyes are used in each of the compound dyes I have in my studio. In all my studying about dyes this has never been suggested and I think it is a great idea. You cut small pieces of PFD fabric, spray water on it and then sprinkle a tiny bit of dye powder and the different dyes that make up that particular colour will be revealed. I did have some difficulty with this as my dye powders were statically charged, making them hard to control. But here is the outcome of this exercise.














Next I need to choose which colour to use as my first dye bath and get my base colour dyed. Then these pieces will be used in the exercises that follow.
Pop over to Vicki's to see what everyone else is doing in their series.