Saturday, July 10, 2010

OMG!!!! Color!!!!

Have I ever mentioned how much I loved to finger paint when I was a kid? It was too exciting! Well... I never felt the same about any other art form until I started dyeing back 12+ years ago. And you would think by now that the excitement would have worn off, right? NOT! As I mentioned in a recent post, I bought a book about dye recipes, which I thought would be a nice reference in case I ever want to create a specific color. But tucked in the back of the book is examples of several dyeing techniques... most of them I have tried already in one fom or another, but today I tried one I have been wanting to experiment with for quite awhile. I laid heavy plastic on a table, then took a yard of soda-soaked fabric and flattened it over the plastic. Then I used the primary colors - Lemon Yellow, fuchsia red and Turquoise - and squirte them out randomly on the fabric. Then, being careful to rinse my gloves frequently, I smooshed the colors together to blend them. Then - and this was a sudden inspiration - I kind of crunched the fabric up and swirled it a little:


Then I added some rock salt to see if I could get any salt markings on it. I was also interested in whether the crunching/swirling would add markings. I waited about an hour, then rinsed/laundered and dried. Here is the result:

And a closeup of some of the salt markings:

I am really jazzed with the results! Needless to say, I plan to try this on clothing, and with other colors on both fabric and clothing! What a rush!

2 comments:

Vicki W said...

What fun!

Cate Rose said...

Awesome, Judy. Modern art at your fingertips!