A TECHNIQUE DRIVEN Blog dedicated to mastery of surface design techniques. First we dye, overdye, paint, stitch, resist, tie, fold, silk screen, stamp, thermofax, batik, bejewel, stretch, shrink, sprinkle, Smooch, fuse, slice, dice, AND then we set it on fire using a variety of heat tools.

Friday, June 10, 2011

One more surface design swap

How are you all doing with your swaps?

I have passed along my burning sun fabric and now have a new piece to work on.  I am so into my fugitive/immigrant medium that I started right away.  Here is the fabric as it came to me.
 The entire piece is about 1/2 yard wide and the full width of the fabric.  Hard to take a picture of the whole thing so I am showing sections since it is the same pattern over all.  The piece was originally the mottled orange. The next person did a soy wax stamp on it and dyed it green.  The next person put painted fusible circles between the doily shapes. They appear white because the backing has not been taken off yet.  I left the backing on while I worked to keep the fusible clean.
 For my addition I wanted to knock back the green a bit and play up the orange.  It did that by using charcoal around the edges of the doilies and inside a few of the doily holes and then using orange and yellow chalk on the doily shapes. To make the immigrant medium permanent , I painted the cloth with Pro Chem base extender, let it dry, and then ironed it.
THEN I held my breath, and threw it in the washer.  The charcoal and chalks were permanent (huge sigh of relief), the hand of the fabric is still pretty soft, and the backing has been removed from the circles.  It is now ready to go to the next person.

3 comments:

  1. I love the dimension the charcoal gives the piece. I tried using the extender to bind pastels to the fabric when screening. I'll be bloggng about that dismal failure soon. :-(

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  2. I love how this fabric is turning out! Question: does the base extender work to adhere the chalk to the fabric? And re: the fusible circles... was fabric paint used to color them? If so, was it applied to the fused side before fusing to the fabric? Neat ideas! You gals are inspiring me to experiment with surface design techniques again!

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  3. I did the circles. I used acrylic paints watered WAY down to a slurry and painted it on wonder under which gives the best results. Yes, I painted onto the fusible web itself, dried then ironed on. The more wrinkled and curled the paper, the better the results. MUST be covered in parchment to iron from now on. A bit of a draw back but the results are fabulous. Getting the paint watered down enough is the learning curve. It looks like there's nothing on the fusible web but that's the beauty. The thinness of the paint is semi-transparent and gives a wonderful effect. First time I tried it AFTER being told to thin way down with water, I became alarmed at how nothing it looked and added too much paint. Try it out and see the difference between big honkin' globs of paint or the semi-transparent shimmer of watered down paint. Metallic and pearls are great to use with colors too.

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