Sunprints

Sunprints
Sunprints I made in the summer at the family cottage

Thursday 28 September 2017

Gunnel Hag workshop

A few weekends ago I went to a wonderful workshop with Gunnel Hag.  She taught us her surface design techniques using her own line of fabric pigments, Colour Vie.  I especially enjoyed the flour paste resist and wax resist techniques.  Here is a photo of some of our pieces hanging up to dry.  The colours were vibrant.


Here Gunnel painted over a waxed surface.  The wax was rubbed on like a crayon in this case with a textured surface underneath.


Below is a photo of the flour paste piece I did in the class.  We applied flour paste to a piece of fabric and let it dry in the sun.  We crinkled it up.  We painted over the dried crinkled flour paste, let it dry again and then painted in another colour.  We repeated a few times and rinsed out the flour paste.


Here's another piece I made in the class below.  In this one I painted with a textured surface underneath and then stamped on top with my own rectangular stamp.



Here I used her colours to stamp on a white t-shirt.  I printed with wooden print blocks hand carved in India.


Thanks for having a look!

Friday 1 September 2017

What I did with the woad

So I finally processed the woad plant a few weeks ago.  It was a long process.  I followed the instructions found at woad.org.uk written by Teresinha.  I'm not sure if I did everything correctly because I ended up with such a tiny amount of dye.  Here are the steps I followed.  In the photo below you can see the woad leaves after I picked and washed them.  This is a very large bowl.


Then I steeped the leaves in water which had been heated to 80 C.  I used reverse osmosis water.  Then you have to quickly cool the steeped leaves by putting the pot into a basin of water to which I added some ice.  See photo below.


After straining the liquid I added the soda ash when it had cooled to 50 degrees C.  The next step was aerating the vat.  This is where I may have gone wrong because I didn't have an electric whisk so I used a hand whisk as hard as I could for ten minutes.  Quite the exercise!  It turned frothy and blue, see below.

Next I poured the liquid into a number of jars and left them undisturbed.  See photo below.  Lots of jars!  The liquid looked greenish at this point.


After leaving the liquid to settle for several hours I siphoned off the top of the jars with a turkey baster and consolidated the contents into two jars and eventually one jar.  The top 2/3 of the jar is siphoned off and fresh water put in several times until the sediment at the bottom starts to look blue.  All of this went well.


However when I finally filtered the last sediment with a piece of hobatai silk there wasn't much there.  I don't know if I siphoned off to much?  I don't think so because I didn't see blue going down the sink.  See photo below to see what I ended up with.  There's a little bit of dark blue dye there that I could scrape off.


So I would say I learned a lot from this process but I'm not sure if I would repeat it because I got so little dye.   It makes me understand how much work went into making natural dyes in the past.  Thanks for stopping by!