Experimenting with Bleach

First the successes.  Seeing the interesting results obtained with resists in the previous posts (especially the one with the flour -- that's right outta my playbook)  I decided to get out my old smocking pleater and pleat up some fabric for discharge.  It was fun because I didn't care whether it was on grain (a must for hand smocking) or even if I "popped" some of my pleats.  

 I used some Egyptian cotton that I keep around because with deColourant it discharges to white. The top two were folded in half, then pleated and dipped in a diluted bleach solution.  I really like the patterning, but I'm not crazy about the color.  The bottom one was pleated in a single layer and I brushed on deColourant, then hit it with the hair dryer.  Nothing happened.  So I moved downstairs and hit it with my steam iron and got the wonderful stripey effect.

I know I've been AWOL a lot lately from the blog world.  I haven't even done any snow dyeing because my personal life is crazy busy these days.  Of course, there hasn't been much snow, but it snowed last night, so I thought, "Snow discharge!"  I sprayed full strength bleach over the top of the snow packed on three different  scrunched-up fabrics.

 This was the Egyptian cotton.  Blah.  I like the pleated stuff better -- I'm thinking I may have to mix up some flour and water and re-do it.

 This was some commercial purple batik that I must have really liked because I have a bunch of it in my stash.  I will probably over-dye it.  Meh.

This was Kona black.  Again -- not thrilled.  I'm thinking another resist (and bleach or deColourant).  I wasn't crazy about previous experiments with deColourant and resists, so I suppose it's worth a try with bleach.  And I've decided that snow is better reserved for dyeing.  

A couple of discharge projects.

I am hoping to work on some discharge projects this weekend but till then I thought I would show you a couple of wall hangings I have. They are not "high ART" but I have them hanging in my office and actually get more comments on them than I do on my more sophisticated pieces.

 

This is a piece of black cotton from Joann's that I brushed with Decolourant to see what would happen.  I know it is Decolourant because when I used bleach, the fabric discharged to brown rather than this grey.  To integrated the two colors, I used some embroidery floss to quilt outline the discharged area.  I was experimenting with copper wire and affixing beach stones.

In this piece I got a bit more adventurous and did the quilting with the embroidery thread before I discharged the material.  If you look in the discharged areas you can see the added texture I got from discharging it after quilting.

Are you familiar with Decolourant?  Here is the product page with how-to's for painting, printing, stamping, screening, and spraying with Decolourant.  I'll be doing some of that this weekend!