Rubber bands

Rubber bands come in different sizes and thicknessess and can be used in different ways as stamps. This is how I used them today. I prepared my picture frame with double sided cellotape and placed some rubber bands on top of it. I was not paying attention to the thickness of the bands, so my first set up was like this:

I placed my fabric on my printing board. Applied paint with a brayer or foam roller and placed the stamp on the fabric. This was the moment that I realised that not all the bands had the same thickness. As you can see in this picture, not all the shapes are well defined.

So I replaced some rubber bands with others ones:

And printed again. This time with better results:

For me it is not compulsary that each and every shape should be as well defined as the other, after all the irregularities make the fabric more interesting. The first fabric certainly has its use, but I wanted to show you the difference as well.

Rubber bands

Rubber bands can be used in different ways. In earlier blogposts I showed them to you in combination with yoghurt cups or with pinches of fabric. Here is another way of using them:

 The fabric was soaked in soda ash before I wrapped the rubber bands around it.

Each rubber band will leave a mark on the dyed fabric. This 'snake' was placed in a container on a raised platform and covered with snow.

I did not measure how much dye powder I used for this one, but the colors I used were Aquamarine, Dark Green and Black (all Dharma). When I work with dyepowder, I prefer to cover the powder with a thin layer of snow. This was left to batch till the next morning.

The fabric was rinsed, washed and ironed and now looks like this:

Instead of using the rubber bands to create a 'snake', you can also use them this way:

The soda soaked fabric was crunched into a ball and rubber bands were wrapped around it. This ball was placed in a container on a raised platform and ice cubes were placed on top. Dye powder was added and some more ice cubes. Sorry, but I forgot to write down which dye powders I used.

After rinsing, washing and ironing the fabric looks like this:

This is a 0,5 yard piece of cotton. Depending on how you crunch this, certain areas will be closer to the outside of the ball than others. This will effect the way the colors show. Areas which are crunched tight, will be lighter than areas where the fabric is more loose.