Tip of the Week.

Humidity helps when you are transfer dyeing, so if you are struggling to transfer colour from paper to cloth, try putting a steam iron about an inch or so away from the paper, and make some steam, taking care to protect your hands.  Don't stream the paper itself though, as you risk burning yourself from the blowback.

Try It Out Thursday : Keeping It Simple.

It is possible to buy spunbonded materials which are similar to lutradur in construction; one type of such material is known, here at least, as florists wrap.  It comes in a wide variety of colours, and may even be patterned; I have on which has the names of European capital cities in black on a white background, ideal for journalling. The temptation is to use them as they come, but remember you can always add to them using transfer paints or other media.  The image above shows a piece of orange florists wrap which I have printed some flowers onto in red.  I think it's really effective; it's simple, but striking.  It would be better, of course, if I had remembered that florists wrap is not as heat resistant as lutradur... the pattern was not transferring, so I turned up the heat a bit...only to melt the fabric onto the paper in one place.  Oops...

To try this, just take a piece of typing paper, and doodle flower shapes all over it with transfer paint or transfer crayons.  Leave it to dry, then iron it onto your florists wrap, or onto lutradur.  It would be fun to put something underneath it, but I have designs on those little flowers... which we'll look at next week.

Try It Out Tuesday : Avoiding Flat Colour

I need to make some pastel coloured lutradur and evolon, so decided to mix up some dye.  I've never really wanted pastel colours before, so, being an eternal optimist, I put less powder in than usual, and hoped for the best.  And, because I want rather a lot of the cloth, I mixed up a fair amount of dye... as you can see, I keep mine in coffee jars.  There's some lilac, some blue, some golden yellow mixed with scarlet and a darker red.
I keep the jars in a tray; that way, spills are kept to a minimum.  This is particularly important if you are working anywhere near wood.  Trust me, you will never get a transfer dye stain out of a wood floor...or cabinet...or anything you might be working near... sigh.

I use plain newsprint for my transfer dyes, if I want a large sheet; otherwise, I tend to use the cheapest possible copy paper for A4 and smaller.  Because I wanted  to use the dyes together, I simply took a pile of newsprint, put it onto the work surface and started sloshing on the paint.  You can see from the image above, that I really mean sloshing!  I want to

make sure that the paper is really well covered in the paint, as any missed parts will show up as white on the cloth...so the section on the right would have an interesting white triangle with a lilac blob in the middle.  Fine if you intend it...not so great if you don't.

When you take the first piece of paper off, you should find that some of the dye has soaked through onto the next paper.  This is good news... as you can then either continue to paint with the same colour, or add a second.

 The image to the left shows a piece of paper from later on in the dyeing, where the yellow/scarlet and the darker red had both soaked through.  As this was the last piece, I left it as it was.  It has some interesting patterning.

Then, I thought.... wonder if it works... so, when the paper dried, I tried some sample pieces.  As I had thought, the blue and purple were not strong enough; the reds, though, produced gentle, interesting colours.

 The red, on the left, had been combined with the blue; the yellow/scarlet with the red.  In both cases, you can see gentle variations in colour which I think are quite pleasing.  Tomorrow, though, I'll have to add some more dye powder to the mix and try again...  On the whole, I think I prefer to mix strong dye to keep in the jars, and add more water to the dye to produce pastels.  It's much easier to measure that way.

Try It Out Tuesday : Fussy Printing.

I really enjoy making monoprints with transfer paints, or thickened dyes.  The image above is an example of a monoprint, random black shapes on a yellow background.  The colours are muted because this is the paper version; transfer paints look very nondescript on paper, but brighten up considerably when ironed onto cloth.  I've taken off a couple of prints from this image already, at full size (A4).  But that's not the only way of using a monoprint, or any other transfer dyed paper.  You can 'fussy print' at a smaller scale, by finding an area of the print that you think is interesting, and transferring only that section to a piece of cloth.  In this case, I'm printing on small pieces of Evolon that were kicking about in the studio, offcuts from a larger project.

This time, I liked the upper part of the print, so I took a postcard sized scrap, and looked to see how much of it I could fit onto the paper.  I worked straight from the paper to the fabric, but if you find it hard to imagine what something might look like transferred, try making yourself a paper or card 'frame', or use a mount cut to the size of your cloth.  That way, you can move the mount around the cloth until you find the configuration you like best.  If you don't want to use the paper complete again, then cut or tear the selected area, so that it's easy to transfer to the cloth.  I ended up with this selection; see if you can work out where it came from!

It's interesting...but it doesn't feel quite complete.  There's a big gap roughly centre right, and it doesn't feel completed, somehow.  So I repeated the process, choosing another area of the paper, and produced this result;

To me, this feels a lot more balanced.  I'll now add some stitch.  Why don't you give this a try?  Paint a pattern of some sort, print one off at full size, and then, working at a smaller scale, build up a smaller piece using selected parts of the original print.  It's fun!