More Tumble Dye action…

Try spraying a T-shirt too – a great fun project for kids of all ages. After spraying, air dry the piece the heat set in the dryer for twenty minutes to make the colour permanent and washable.

 

T-shirt spraying with tumble dyes

 Overprinting with the Tumble Dyes

 

Printing over with Walnut Tumble Dye

SEI Tumble syes are so easy to use. No messy chemicals or lengthy preparation. Just shake the bottle and off you go. Its great with stencils or other found object or use simply to colour cloth. We found we had good results with a variety of fabrics.

 

Fun with Tumble Dyes

Tumble Dyes are water based and heat set

Tumble dyes are water based, heat set, permanent and washable. You can use it on fabric, ribbon, lace, silks, dried flowers, baskets, wood , paper and more. You can apply them by spraying or painting them on the fabric. Combine them with stencils to have lots of fun.

To use the sprays simply place your cloth on a level surface. Place the stencil on top. Shake the bottle of Tumble Dye well – this is important to ensure its all mixed up.  Spray the colour onto the cloth.

Spraying onto cloth

 

Colour over the whole stencil

 

Spray a series of images along the cloth

 

 Tumble dyes are great for tie dye and of course scrunch dyeing in a tub. Simply place wet fabric in a tub. Scrunch up, spray with a colour, move and scrunch again then spray with the next colour. use at least 3 colours to create an interesting fabric.

Scrunch dyeing in a tub

 Tumble dyes are a great way to create your own unique cloth to transform into fantastic textile art. We tried Tumble dyes on a variety of fabrics and ended up with lots to use.  The best part was that even with 3 of us using the sprays and basically going for it, trying out whatever we pleased, there was still lots of colour left in the bottle. In most cases we still had half a bottle of dye left. This was impressive as we’ve all experienced the sprays which run out after colouring 1 – 2 pieces of cloth. Overall we had a fantastic day playing with Tumble Dyes!

Some of our tumble dyed cloth

 

If you would like to purchase some check out my online store at Essential Textile Art

 

 

 

Evolon Soft Xperiments

Evolon soft is a spunbound product wih a wonderful stonewash finish. Lovely and soft, it has a great feel and drape. A fun way to embellish it is to use heat transfer. Simply get yourself a photocopy (must be a carbon print, can also be a laser print but doesn’t work with inkjet).

Evolon Soft with a B&W Photocopy

Place the photocopy face down onto the fabric and then use a hot dry iron to transfer the image. You will need to press firmly for 30 – 60 seconds to get the transfer to occur. Check your progress by carefully lifting one corner. The end result is a great image transfer to Evolon Soft:

Image transferred to Evolon Soft

You can then paint and embellish the fabric as you desire! You may wan to try foiling as well. As the surface of Evolon soft is very grippy you don’t need an adhesive. Simply place the foil coloured side up on the fabric and once agin use you hot, dry iron to apply the foil.

Foiling onto Evolon Soft

Its great to play with so have fun with this new material. I stock all the supples at my shop so if you’re looking for some check out Essential Textile Art .

Filigree Fluid Fun

Stewart Gill Filigree Fluid

Been playing around with some Filigree Fluid and having a bit of fun. The thin nozzle makes it easy to create fine lines with this puff paste. Essentially its a puff paste, meaning that the filigree fluid puffs up when you apply heat from an embossing gun. The difference with this product is that you have a fine nozzle to apply delicate lines and the puffed results are really firm.

Filigree fluid applied to fabric

Apply the Filigree fluid to fabric and then sprinkle a little embossing powders like Opals on the wet fluid. I like using Opals embossing powders because they are flexible and thus are perfect for fabric.

Powder dusted onto fabric

Use an embossing heat gun to puff up the fluid.

Puffed Up Filigree Fluid

The result is a very firm set of delicate lines to decorate the fabric. By firm I mean not as rubbery as other puff pastes can be so the fabric is still flexible, the fluid is not going to snap off. You can add filigree fluid to any porous surface including paper.

 

 Team with Byzantia Paint to get great jewelled effects.

Recent Textile wanderings…

Been playing with a few different things of late. The image above is from a piece I made in Isobel Hall’s workshop a couple of months again -impasto gel through a stencil and then painted. I decided to embellish the flower centres with magenta beads to give the piece a bit of a lift. The gold is some encaustic wax. I finally found a use for the birch craft iron – it makes a great encaustic wax iron!

Also did a workshop with Sandra Meech, playing with making books for creating artistic inspiration. I’ve made a few now – they are my favourite holiday activity. Here’s a look inside some:

Now I just have to find the time to work into them! There are 1/2 A4 size cut horizontally. So really easy to do when travelling. I simply take a Koh-i-noor watercolour set, a selection of papers and brushes to spend some time paining up the papers in the colours of the area. Then using some linen thread do a simple binding and weave to connect all the separate signatures together.

Its still school holidays here in Queensland so entertaining a few young ones today. Have to check what all the noise is about!

Do it Yourself Bleach Pen

Check out the latest issue of Embellish magazine to see my new article on using a refillable bleach pen. The magazine you’re looking for at the newsagent is Embellish Issue 6. It was great fun playing with this and making lots of drawings. I turned to a refillable pen after the one we all get from the USA was dried out when I bought it. Also bleach has a USE BY DATE, that’s right – as it gets older it is not as effective. So having a pen you can refill whenever you want to do any discharge dyeing is very handy. I sell the pen at my shop if you would like to get one. I also stock kits with ideas for discharge dyeing.

Discharge dyeing involves removing the colour from cloth and the results can be quite surprising. A black cloth can discharge to red or orange (as in my image at the top) or another colour entirely. Discharging patterned cloth is also a lot of fun. Only thing is to remember to cover up and work in a well ventilated environment. I also recommend using Sodium Meta-bisulfite as the bleach stop instead of vinegar and that way you won’t get exposed to chlorine gas which is released if vinegar is used.

Embellish magazine also has a great range of other articles to have a read through. Have a look at their website for more details.

Shisha Glass and Inktense pencils

Playing with Inktense pencils is a lot of fun. For my latest article check out the feature in Embellish Magazine  (Vol 2, Issue 5 – current issue as of today). The article takes you through using a few different mediums with the Inktense pencils on fabric as well as how I created the flower above.

The most easy way to apply Shisha mirror to any fabric is by buttonholing over a cardboard ring and then appliqueing the ring over the mirror onto the fabric below. I have used this often to put glass onto a project. It is an authetic Indian technique as I got this idea from abook which showed 9 different ways to apply the mirrors. The other eight were all the contorted stitching over the mirror type approach which is what makes it so awkward to attach but no.9 was a gem of a technique!

Cardboard ring ready to buttonhole over!

You can buttonhole over anything really – curtain rings, metal washers etc. Then simply place you background fabric below, mirror on top and then covered ring over. Stitch down though the loops of the buttonhole stitch around the edge – very easy and saves the background fabric from being worked over. I begain using this technique when applying shisha to silk paper because it just wouldn’t take the usual stitched technique.

Discharge Dyeing

Been playing around having fun removing colour from fabric using plain old household bleach.

Patterned fabric – some lines remain

I use a refillable bleach pen that comes with a metal tip as this means I know it will be fresh and not dried out – plus I can keep re-using it. Put all the instructions together for this for my new Discharge Dyeing kit you can find on my website.

Enjoy!

Kunin Felt Lace

Been playing with foils and kunin felt lately and had a bit of fun. This was the first piece I put together:

Kunin Lace Blue

I mounted it after stitcing onto a black painted canvas which has meade it easy to hang. I hung it where it gets lots of light so the foils sparkle. I enjoyed stitching this piece so much I had another go in a different colourway :

Kunin Lace Copper

In this one I stitched leaves into some of the sari ribbon pieces to reflect the feature scrap of ribbon that I had. The kunin felt is foiled, free machined and then cut with a soldering iron. The melting point of kunin felt is pretty low so you have to be careful when cutting out the felt. Kunin felt is made from recycled plastic bottles (PET ones) So most of the items in this artwork are from reclaimed or recycled materials.

Want to have a try at Kunin Lace? I’ve made up a kit with a 10 pack of kunin felt with sari ribbon, foils and WonderUnder with full instructions. Have a look at my website .

Sketches

Been feeling like sketching a lot lately so been playing around with some whimsical images. Here’s a couple I’ve done recently.

Whimsy 1

Whimsy 2

Trying to get looser in my style of drawing which can be more diagrammatic than I want fo my artwork. The weekend away at Newfarm really gave me a bit of head space to start playing around. Still having a major block when drawing anything alive. Think I’m going to have to use cartoon like images to get over that.