Sun Printing Continued

Last Friday started out cloudy and cool but by 3:00 pm the sun was intermittently shining between fluffy white clouds. So I decided to try the sun printing. Working quickly, I saturated a few pieces of fabric with dye solution and brought them outside. Because it was windy, I had to utilize a couple of pieces of glass to sandwich my fabric and toppings in between so they wouldn't blow away.

As I was beginning on the second piece of fabric, the sun was already starting to develop the dye in the first one. It had begun to turn pink and then purple and the longer the fabric was exposed to the sun the darker it became. It was really neat to watch.

On the first piece I placed buttons and safety pins, the second piece was covered with feathers and the third with plant material.

You can see that the top left was placed first by the
different grades of colour on each piece.

 I did three sets of fabric that took me about 1.5 hours to develop.

Plant material

Lace, stencils, string

Once the fabric was developed well enough the glass top was removed as well as the toppings of plant material, lace, buttons etc. The fabric was taken out of the sun and placed in the washer and washed to remove the left over unexposed dye and set the dye in the fibers. As you can see below the finished colour is blue.

Most of the toppings worked well. The feathers didn't work.
I think this was due to the fact that the feathers were not flat
against the fabric and didn't block the sun's rays effectively.

 I love the designs the plants left behind. I learned that if the plants are moved during the development stage you get little shadow-like shapes. I kind of like that effect. I will most certainly try this technique again.