Snow Dyeing Results

There's nothing like a bit of snow to get you blogging every day ;-)  So, withiut further ado, here are the results after the fabrics were rinsed with cold, warm, hot with Metapex, lukewarm and lukewarm water (cos I can't stand the cold) and then spun and ironed dry.  The Metapex, or Synthrapol, is a detergent that holds the loose colour in the water and stops it going back into the fabric thus shortening rinsing time and saving sore hands.  (Many thanks to Annabel who gave me this tip a long time ago).

This (above) is what the silk noil and silk scrim from yesterday actually look like.  The colours from the scanner were well off the mark.

These colours are not totally accurate but they do show the exciting marks that the snow has given.  They remind me of storms brewing or of gas clouds in space.

The next images are from the tray dyeing,

Above is a piece of 80/20 batting, cotton velvet and a scrap of vintage cotton doily.

And finally the pieces that were in the pot

I can't remember what the fabrics on the left above were but I think one is a bamboo cloth.  On the right is the overdyed onion dyed cotton and the light fabric is Evolon.

This piece above is a very old piece of cotton sheet that is very thin and worn but which has taken the colour at the bottom of the pot beautifully.  All of the colours are a bit more turquoise than the computer is showing.

I am quite pleased that I did get some nice greys in a couple of the pieces and the rest are all leaning towards turquoise with deeper tones, all of which will make an appearance in some future project.  As ever I used a range of fabrics to see what happened but sadly I didn't note anything up so I can't be sure what I was using if I wanted to repeat the exercise.  Will I never learn? lol

My erosion bundles enjoyed sitting under their coating of snow for a couple of days and some of them disappeared completely from sight.  There are two bundles sitting under the snow on top of this old watering can.  What mysteries await?

Evolon

I finally managed to get to our monthly mixed media workshop/playday today having missed the January session when my DH was ill. I didn't achieve anything concrete but I did have a play with some Evolon which I bought recently from Rainbow Silks. This is a new product, said to be similar to Lutradur in that it is paintable, printable, sewable and probably a few other -ables too! It does feel softer and denser than Lutradur, more like a fabric.

I decided that I would use acrylic inks to colour the Evolon with and sprayed water onto the fibre to dampen the surface.

This is the surface when wet and with inks squirted on neat from the dropper. As you can see the ink was very reluctant to move even when sprayed with water. I did try and spread it with a brush and water to close some of the gaps but I think it would have been more successful if I had diluted the ink in the first place.

I don't think there is much difference to be seen between this dry sample and the wet version.

This is the reverse of the Evolon when dry. There are some attractive textures here I think.

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I did cut some samples from the sheet of Evolon that I had painted and subjected it to the heat gun but with very limited results. In fact, the fabric barely altered at all. I would like to have a play with it with a soldering iron as we did find it was possible to cut out shapes with it but unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of the tiny bit we did. Oops!

The above photo shows some oilbar (Shiva paintstix) rubbings on Evolon over rubbing mats. the black shape in the middle was done with a Neocolor crayon which of course is not water resistant.

This time I diluted the inks and then brushed them over the oilbar rubbings. Even though the ink was diluted you can see that it was still reluctant to blend. The ink/paint seems to stay where you put it and not migrate through the fibres.

The photo above gives a closer look at the surface of the Evolon.

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Obviously I have barely scratched the surface of possibilities with this fibre and when I get chance I will experiment further.

Footnote: I have just Googled Evolon in images and have been linked to Carol Clasper who has blogged about her own experiments with Evolon last year in a much more extensive way than mine. If you click the highlight of her name you can read all about it.