I finally had a chance to "play" with disperse dyeing. I had never even heard of it before, so it was something TOTALLY new to me. I purchased a 100% patterned polyester table cloth thinking the pattern might produce some interesting results, and my friend had a "Transfer Printing Kit on Polyester using PROsperse Disperse Dyes" from ProChem on hand. The kit included 10gm Yellow D118, 10 gm Bright Blue D459, 10 gm Red D360, 75 gm Thick F (used to mix the thickener paste), and 50 gm Metaphos (also used to mix the thickener paste). We mixed some dyes to get a purple and an orange so we'd have more variety in color. We really had fun painting the papers with the thickened dyes. For all the papers, we did one layer and let it dry (which took way longer that we thought it would), then we did another layer of dye on top of that.
As you can see, my first results were terrible. Hardly any color came off the paper onto the cloth. I started ironing the papers from the top right...then down...back up to the top...then down, etc. On those first two, I followed the directions that came with the basic transfer printing kit. Those instructions said to "set the iron at the top of the polyester range and iron for 1 minute for a pale shade and up to 5 minutes for a dark shade." I ironed both of those for more than 5 minutes at that polyester setting without good results, so I upped the heat to a cotton setting and increased the ironing time on all of the other pieces. I ironed each succeeding piece for a longer amount of time with much better results.
My friend and I each did several small "prints." The painted papers are on the right of each of my samples (except for the one in the bottom left-hand corner). That print is a reprint of the second paper on the right using more heat and a longer ironing time. Wow, what a difference!
This is my first attempt.
This is my second attempt.
Here is where I upped the heat setting on the iron and ironed for a longer time. The background was painted first, then I used a stamp to make the yellow image.
You can really see the pattern on the table cloth in this print. I painted the background of this one and used yellow dye on bubble wrap to make the design.
I also used bubble wrap for this print.
My favorite pieces are the images where I used bubble wrap. I'm planning on overprinting some of the designs I'm not crazy about with other designs. I like that effect (see Robin's images below). I've been thinking of ways I might use pieces of these samples...stay tuned.
These are the samples my friend did.
Robin painted, stamped, and overprinted some of her designs.
This was an enjoyable experience, but I don't think it is something I'll use frequently. The long ironing time made it really tedious for me.
