Thursday, July 17, 2014

Blog post from another site today

From my post on And Then We Set It On Fire blog today:

When I thought about what I was going to do for this Round Robin, I realized that almost every piece of fabric that I've created over the past few years was a series of different techniques that I performed on it, which is technically what a round robin is.  Usually it gets passed on from one person to the next, but we're doing our own kind of round robin here--a Solo, which is a little bit harder, in my opinion.

We all probably have some fabric we've dyed or done something to that we aren't in love with--what do you do with it?  I tend to put mine away for a while, and think about what else I want to do with it to try to get something I want to use.  So, for this, I pulled out a piece of fabric that I dyed a while back that was just kind of "blah". It's about 2 yards long x 44 inches.  It was originally dyed with turquoise and sun yellow.  I had dyed it flat, pouring the colors onto it and leaving it in the sun, covered, for a few hours.

I really had hoped that the two colors would blend more and create more green, which didn't happen.   So, I ripped it up into several smaller pieces.

I decided to batik one of the pieces, so I got out some circle shapes.  I choose the smaller one, part of a pool noodle (not recommended, as you will see)...


Heated up my beeswax in the electric frypan, and stamped one row. 

My pool noodle piece started to melt after I stamped one row, so I had to find a replacement tool quickly.  I found a potato that was a similar size, cut it in half and carved out a hole.
Then I got one of those corn-on-the-cob holder thingies and used that to hold the potato while dipping into the hot wax. 

Here it is all stamped, you really can't tell the difference between the pool noodle shape and the potato shape, can you?

 Then, it gets dyed in some turquoise dye (a strong solution).

Here it is all done:

On another piece of the turquoise & yellow, I used a foam paintbrush with cutouts to make some stripes, and dipped into the beeswax and spread it on.

 When that was done, I folded it up--

 And poured some dark navy blue dye on it.

Let it all soak in for about an hour--

Here it is with the wax removed, washed, and ready to go:
I may leave these pieces as is, and not do anything else to them.  Any suggestions from readers out there?

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