I finally had a chance to try this month’s technique. I didn’t have time to run out to get some marbles and cool polyester fabric, but I had some poly on hand from when we did a method where we actually “set fabrics on fire.” I used plastic buttons of varying sizes and tied them up in the polyester with crochet thread. Here is what it looked like when I had it tied up.
Once I got it all tied up, I plunked it into some BOILING
water and kept it from floating by placing another pan on top.
After 30 minutes of boiling, I used tongs to remove the
fabric from the boiling pot and placed it into a pan of ice water. I then
placed it on a towel to dry. Here is my finished product.
Before I got this posted, I had time to try some
more
experiments. Nienke and I had the same idea about using rocks and
disperse-dyed
fabric. This time, in addition to the buttons, I decided to try the
process with rocks and those rounded glass pieces you put into a vase to
secure the stem
of a flower. Disperse dyeing was one of our previous projects here on
the Fire
blog, so I decided to use some of that fabric for this project. Here are
the
pieces before the process.
Fabrics tied and ready to boil.
Here I have untied the pieces after boiling, dunking into ice water, and drying.
I really like the texture achieved with this
technique. I was looking at these pieces and trying to decide which
shapes appeal to me the most. I think I'd have to choose the rocks; I
like that all the shapes are not uniform. I’m thinking several pieces
done like this might look really
cool “caged” in my bias strips for a new piece in my series.
Oh and if you’d like to see how I have actually used some of
the beautiful fabrics we have created on the Fire blog, check out my post
here. In the piece I have shown, I have used hand-dyed flour-paste-resist
fabric, sugar-syrup-resist fabric, and snow-dyed fabric in the piece.
