Painting and Dyeing Fabric

Another of my goals for this year was to experiment with painting and dyeing fabric. I have been doing that for the last couple of weeks. I still have lots of stuff I want to try to get the type of fabric I like to use in my art quilts but here are the results of my first experiments.

First of all I worked with an environmentally friendly paint system that leaves the fabric pliable instead of stiff as some acrylic paints will do. The system is called Colour Vie and it uses a pasty base to which I add pure pigments to get various colours. Because I am mixing up my own paint colours, I have been keeping a journal of the colour recipes and a swatch of the resulting colour in case I want to replicate that colour.

To this white yogurt consistent base I add colour pigments.

These are the bottles of pigment.

Colour swatches and recipes

The resulting colours painted on a natural muslin.

While the snow was still on the ground I wanted to try some snow dyeing which is done with powdered dye pigments. I lay my fabric on a rack in a tub, cover it with snow and sprinkle dye pigment on the snow. As the snow melts the pigment sinks into the fabric. I left it to sit overnight and then rinsed the fabric and washed it. Due to the amount of water from the snow, the colours are very pastel-looking. Some fabric I just scrunched together and others I folded and tied elastics around to see if I could get some patterning. I used this technique twice once with blue and red pigment and once with red and yellow pigment.

Snow covering the fabric in the tub.

It's important to always where a mask when mixing or sprinkling dye as it's toxic to breath in.

Snow covered with dye powder.

Fabric after the snow has melted away.

Next I mixed dye pigment with water and just squirted it over fabric that I scrunched and folded and tied elastics around. Here I used blue and yellow dye. The colour in these samples is darker and you can see the patterns left by the folding and elastics.

I will definitely use these fabrics in my art, however, the jury is still out on whether I will rely only on my own hand dyed or painted fabric for my art. I still really like commercial fabric designs and they have been working well in my art quilts.