Tuesday, February 22, 2011

All batiked out

February has been batik month at And Then We Set it on Fire. If you want to read about how these were made, check it out here.



Wednesday, February 16, 2011

February Batik again

I bought these little cookie cutters at Walmart the other day for $3.00. They're nested, and I used them for batiking on Sunday. I had to use a little clamp to hold them while dipping into the wax because they got pretty hot.

After dipping the flower shapes, I painted with dye/soda solution, then removed the wax, and dyed the whole piece in a light periwinkle color to get rid of the stark white outlines. This piece looks spring-ie, I think.

Here's a potato masher batik piece that I painted with fuchsia & green, then removed the wax and overdyed in khaki.

On another unrelated note, how many miles on my car is too many? It's something that wears on my mind a lot...

Monday, February 7, 2011

Batik on Sunday

I just posted these on "And Then We Set it on Fire"--make sure to check out all the great projects there.

Where did the weekend go??? I didn't get started on any batik until late Sunday afternoon, first I waxed some large leaf designs on a piece of fabric that was around 18" x 44.
Then I stretched the fabric over a large box, pinned it in place with push pins, and took it outside to paint. Which I could do because it was in the 50s and sunny.

The leaves are painted with avacado and the background blue is sky blue. Had to keep moving the fabric down and repinning it.

Here it is all painted--I went inside to get a large garbage bag the cover this so it didn't dry too quickly in the sun, and by the time I got back outside, it had blown across the lawn because it was kind of windy. The blue and green blended by rolling across the lawn, which I didn't really want to happen.

I left it overnight, will have to work on it again tonight after work.

I also had time to wax another small piece, this was done with a weird kitchen tool that I got at the Goodwill store. I mixed up a little rust orange dye, then left this overnight. Rinsed it out this morning--think I might dye this again in a warm yellow after I remove the wax.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Hand Stitching


This little piece started out a while ago as a drop cloth underneath some things I was painting and dyeing last summer. I really liked how it looked, so I added the flowers a while back. It still didn't speak to me, so I added the avacado green border. I was happier with it then, but I've been doing some hand stitching on it and now I'm really starting to like it.

A co-worker of mine is having a baby in April, her theme is dogs, her colors are light brown and chocolate brown. I volunteered to make her a baby blanket, and ordered the dog prints from fabric.com (one of my favorite stores). The dog print fabric arrived today (I already had the rest of it), so I better get started!