This piece is drying on my screen porch. I used rubber bands to secure those little plastic gems. If you look at the picture above, you can see that some of the bands were tighter than others. Looser ones allowed more of the dyes to penetrate.
How I did this:
Soaked fabric in soda ash solution overnite, usually I only soak for 30 minutes.
Squeezed out the solution, saved it for next time.
Secured my golf balls with rubber bands. The piece is narrow, so I just placed them down the middle.
I then put them into a 1 gallon plastic pitcher I use in my dye studio experiments.
Next came ice cubes. I wanted my dye powder to break and give me lots of colors.
It was then time to sprinkle on the dye powder, after putting on my particulate mask!
Now they needed to go out in the sunshine, and after 3 weeks of dreary days, I was anxious!
As the powders started to combine with the water from the melting ice, I chose to use my fine mister and keep the dye flecks off the walls of my pitcher. This also aided in getting the ice cubes to melt.
Then came the process of waiting, cold rinses, cold soaks, hot rinses, hot washes, hot soaks, well I'm sure you get the idea. I find it very important to be sure all dye particles are taken care of. I don't want surprises later on.
What did I take away from this experiment?
I will try it again, with these changes:
rubberbands will be snugly secured.
longer batching time.
use a raised platform in a rectangle pan so I have a single layer of ice. find a "sugar" shaker for applying my dye powder, to have better distribution across the entire piece.
AND,
I will make another batch of dye powders. Perhaps even tweaking the mixture a bit!!
This one was made up of equal parts of watermelon, orange crush, Sahara, daffodil, azure, sea glass, baby blue, hyacynthia, & bougainvillea. These were from Dharma Trading Co., Spring 2014 Pantone inspired collection.
If you have any questions or comments please contact me. Until then,,,,
Let's Create Today,
Luann
No comments:
Post a Comment