ice dyeing and salt

First of all I want you to know that I am not a scientist, but when I heard that salt reduces the melting time of ice, I knew that I wanted to test this with ice dyeing. For this experiment I used 2 fat quarters, ice cubes, a mixed red Procion and plastic plant containers. Each fq was presoaked with soda ash and crunched into a container with ice cubes on top. I used about 3 tea spoons of dye powder on each and on the left container 3 tea spoons of salt. To be certain that there would be no pooling of melted ice I placed everything into my kitchen sink.

After 3 hours I could not see much difference in how much ice had melted:

After rinsing and ironing I put both pieces of fabric onto my desig wall. The salted one is on the right:

I cannot say that the salt reduced the melting time of the ice. The pattern of the salted piece shows more white and has sharper lines, but is this the effect of the ice or just coincidence? I cannot say for certain. Guess that more experimenting has to be done.

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Another painting technique

If you read my blog on a regular base, you know that I prefer working with my own hand dyed fabric. This time however I decided to work with a multicolored batik. To change the look I decided to apply paint to it. This is how I did it. First I started with stitching lots of folds. The folds were - on purpose - irregular in width and not at all neatly lined up :-). The stitching is time consuming, but it gives neat sharp lines after the painting.

After the stitching my fabric looked like this, top:

and back:

Cover your work space with plastic or old newspaper because now is the time to add the paint. I used Lumiere halo gold blue, one of my favorites, and a foam brush.

Apply the paint till the whole top is covered.

Let the paint dry. Next step is to remove the stitched lines. Iron the fabric from the back and this is the result:

As you see the lines are outlined sharp and irregular. 

layered painting

For this technique you need different types of paint, foam brushes and a surface to paint on. I worked with textile paints (opaque and transparent) and acrylics. The surfaces I used were fabric, brown wrapping paper and canvas. The fabric I used was a hand dyed one, which looked dull and definately needed more.

I prepared my working space by covering it with old newspapers, but plastic will work just as well. Crunch your fabric or paper and iron it flat. 

The colors will overlap. Keep this in mind when you pick your first color. If you start with a yellow transparent and use a blue one for the next session, you will have green. Pick a color of paint and a foam brush and dabb the paint so that it looks like this:

 

No need to be precise when you dabb the paint. Let it dry and iron your pieces. They will look like this:

Not yet very interesting, but that will change because we are going to repeat this process several times. Apply as many layers of paint as you want till you have an interesting looking result. This is how my samples looked at the end:

It was the first time that I used canvas for this technique and I discovered that the thickness of the material made it difficult to use. Even after ironing it did not want to stay flat but remained like this:

I applied the paint as best as I could, but for the next sessions I folded straight lines and ironed these. That worked much better.

Wordless Wednesday

Townscape

Being late is not something I like, but this time it happened. The October theme for Sky-is-the-Limit was townscape and this is what I created for it:

Only the doors and the windows are my own hand dyed fabrics, the other ones are commercial fabrics. As it is Friday I am linking this post to Nina-Marie's Off the Wall Friday.

Wordless Wednesday