product play - tumble dyes

A few weeks ago I purchased some Tumble Dyes and a couple of stencils from Susan Pietsch of  Essential Textile Art while at the ATASDA social day. It was a really nice day we met up at Mount Tamborine in the Gold Coast Hinterland area. We enjoyed a couple of demonstrations and lots of wonderful show n tell by members as part of the show case table. I've been exploring how the dyes work

the dyes come in spray bottles the instructions on the back of the bottles are very clear

But you basically just pick your color, shake the bottle first and then start spraying  

 and of course I went over board with the first piece and used every color and stencil purchased

and didn't allow drying time between overlapping the colors so it became a little murky - but I had a ton of fun creating it. And then I became a bit more focused

using a tree stencil and the carbon colored dye I sprayed the first tree, 

lifted the stencil covered the area with a piece of paper and then sprayed the next tree

using the tree stencil again and laying it onto a piece of light weight Lutradur I sprayed the piece using the carbon colored dye. When the piece was dry I've laid it over a couple of my digital images of our macadamia nut tree that I've printed onto fabric

 This time when I was cleaning up I had a few squares of cotton fabric which I slightly pressed to the top side of the stencils before lifting everything off. I quite like the softer image that results. 

 I've enjoyed using the Tumble Dyes and envisage using them again. 

Susan has a couple of examples of how she's used the Tumble dyes on her blog.

fun with the sun

 Sunday last week was hot, sunny and humid but a great day to have a bit of fun with painting fabric and doing some sun printing. I've used transparent paints by Hi-Strike and Pebeo Setacolor . I've also mixed through a couple of metallic fabric paints. I first learnt how to do this technique in a workshop with quilt artist Gloria Loughman and really enjoy returning to the technique.

The fabric used was white homespun and pre-washed. Damp pieces of the fabric were laid out onto my work surface. I then paint the fabric pieces with paints which I had diluted. Once the pieces were painted I laid the macadamia leaves across the top of the painted pieces. Everything is left in the sun to dry, the leaves act as a resist. It's fun to play around with different shapes laid across the top to get different effects.