Finishing Fabric

More work today, finishing off fabrics that have been in process for a couple of months.

The first one is raw silk and began with a gelatin plate print and thickened dye that wasn't dark enough. Today I overprinted it multiple times with various mostly-grid things.

The second piece is a nice cotton that only has this one layer. I very intentionally printed this to serve as backing for two small quilts that I'll make from linen napkins I printed recently.

This is a piece of heavy cotton, underpainted a couple weeks ago, overprinted today with a glue gel screen I made recently. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of this screen...after my first use, in which I made 6 or 8 prints, I went over what was left of the pattern on the screen with more glue gel, and now I've used the screen repeatedly, on two or three occasions. And still the pattern is strong. Glue Gel is that blue Elmer's school glue that you use as a resist, either on a silk screen or right on fabric kind of like gutta or wax. It's another one of these wonder products that washes up with soap and hot water -- it washes right off the screen when you're finished printing, likewise the resist will wash out of the fabric after it's been dyed.

This is a piece of rayon/linen that I originally printed with construction fencing. It was then overprinted with two different deconstructed screens, and finally finished off today with the dots that you see.

This is my favorite of the bunch -- it's a piece of cotton that was printed with one of the last takes of a deconstructed screen about a month ago. A few days ago I overprinted with another screen, which had only thickened black dye on it but which printed off a navy blue. Today I overprinted it with one of my favorite grid patterned things with turquoise and black dye.

Printing fabric is such a mysterious and wonderful process. Rarely do you get what you anticipate, but the surprises are always so much better than you could have imagined!