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.

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Another example of using soy wax

For today I am going to show you another example of using soy wax resist. Using this computer part, officially called a metal wire finger guard grill for a computer case fan as a stamp. I bought mine at Amazon.



It is metal, so it get hot when you put it into the soy wax. Be careful and use pliers to hold it. With this grill I stamped the whole fabric.


Placed it flat on a raised platform in a container, added snow to it and sprinkled the soda ash powder together with the Procion dye powder. I used Better Blue Green, Parakeet and Kingfisher Blue (all Dharma). Left it like that till the next day. After rinsing, washing and lots of ironing it turned out like this:



In both today's as well as the previous blogpost I used snow, but this could also have been done using ice dubes. As you have seen, soy wax works great in combination with snow and ice dyeing, but keep in mind that not all resist will work that well. Resists which dissolve in water like potato dextrin, sugar, baby food do not work. While the snow or ice melts, it dissolves the resist. You will get some pattern on your fabric, but not as clear defined as you might have wanted.

6 comments:

  1. Love the stamp! I never thought of shopping for stamps at the computer store... will have to check that out!

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  2. Never thought about computer parts. This would make a great stencil to spray through!! If you've not tried potato mashers, they work great and you have a handle to hold onto. Love the soy wax and ice/snow dyeing!

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  3. I think you can find stamps everywhere, as long as you keep your mind open for fun ideas. In May coming year I will be talking about all kind of different stamps on this blog. Yes, I have tried potato mashers as well.

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  4. I've been enjoying your posts. I use an old electric heating element from an electric stove which creates a similar design. Glass and some plastic objects work as well with soy wax because you only heat it around 200 degrees. Keep your eyes open in the housewares department at the thrift stores. All these items can also be used to put under fabric and do rubbings with paint or thickened dye, besides the obvious stamping with them.

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