A couple issues ago, Quilting Arts Magazine featured a technique by artist Linda Colsh, called deconstructed rubbings. And I'd been anxious to try that, so I did, this week. Deconstructed rubbings are made by rubbing watercolor crayons (I use Caran d'ache Neocolor II) on a screen that's been placed over textured objects, and then printing the screen with acrylic medium instead of print paste. The acrylic binds the water-based color onto the fabric -- just like soda ash does with fiber reactive dyes.
But I prefer not to slather acrylic onto fabric, which is one reason I try so many things with thickened dyes rather than using acrylic paint -- like monoprinting, etc. Acrylic stiffens fabric, and gives it a bit of a plastic feel. So after my initial attempt with the deconstructed rubbing process -- first photo, above -- I thought I'd try something else.
The next two samples were made with the deconstructed rubbing process -- watercolor crayon over textured objects on a silk screen -- but instead of using acrylic medium, I pretreated the fabric with Bubble Jet Set 2000 and let it dry, then used print paste to release the rubbing on the screen.
The fabrics turned out a bit stiff still, but without that acrylic plastic feel. I even washed the samples in Synthrapol, but the hand of the fabric didn't change. The fantastic part of the experiment, is that the water-based color is completely permanent on the fabric. There was no color loss at all.
It's all definitely worth trying again, and tinkering with. I do think I'll try Linda's original process again with a more liquid acrylic medium, and perhaps even water that down a bit. And I'll try it again with BSJ treated fabric, perhaps thinning down the print paste, or maybe even just using water thickened with sodium alginate.
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