Fiber Junkies - Color Lifting

Hi everyone....Well, it's been a crazy couple of weeks and thanks for hanging in there with me.  I spent last week in Atlanta helping my daughter set up her new classroom in a new school. She was a 3rd grade teacher in the Decatur City School system but moved over to another position - that of an EIP teacher in the same system but a different school. After much organizing and cleaning out, she decided she needed curtains to cover the storage space but more on that later (you can guess who got to make them). That same weekend was my granddaughters 2nd birthday, you won't escape some pictures, but for now..down to business. Being so busy, I totally forgot about our wonderful Fiber Junkies meeting I always love to share.

  So a little late, but here goes. This month we explored color lifting through the use of several products, one of which I had never tried. We used Soft Scrub, a bleach pen, discharge paste and decolourant. Denny was so clever; she made a silk screen out of a piece of fabric that was "Shibori-ed'.  She screened discharge paste onto the fabric and "instant" Shibori.

We used some fun tools for applying the various discharge products. Mary cut away a foam brush which gave an interesting look to the fabric. On right, another foam brush purchased at a home improvement store in the paint department.

 Denny is a character, she always wipes her hands on her bottom which proved to be embarrassing and also ruining lots of pants. Now she wears an apron front AND back and marks it with tape.

 I had never used the decolourant before which I liked but didn't love. It also comes in colors so as you're discharging, you're replacing the discharged area with another color. I personally didn't see the point of this as you could achieve the same thing by using paint through the stencil, pretty results though.

 Kate used pewter color decolourant to produce this pretty result - a little more subtle than straight decolourant or bleach.

Denny lined up the products she used in front of the fabric, a good way to see the results of each. The one on the right used 3 different products. It's a good test when you use the same fabric for each. 

 Mary got some interesting results with her foam brush and stencils.

 Val wore a heavy duty mask. It's important to be very careful when doing so many of these techniques. Good ventilation is a must and using Vals garage provided that.

 This is my version of Shibori using Denny's screen.

During lunch, we shared last months results from our deconstructive screenprinting. These are some of Kates (left) which I loved and we traded a couple of pieces. On the right is my finished piece, washed and ironed - just today, 2 weeks after the fact.

and a few more pieces. I like the one on the right the best and will do something with that someday.

One thing I've always done is to dye a large sample of fabric in both rayon and mercerized cotton when I buy a new dye color. It's a little bit of work but something I refer to over and over. I label it with the dye color and # and then discharge 3 lines to see how this particular color works with a particular product. It's amazing to me how they all discharge so differently. I used bleach, Soft Scrub and discharge paste (it says Thiox on sample, but it's discharge paste by Jacquard)
On another note, the last couple of days have been amazing, like a fall day and my favorite time of year. Enjoy the last days of summer and all the fun things you can do with fabric like rusting, ice dyeing, color lifting - all better done outside.
Til next time ......