Saturday, April 10, 2010

Painting yardage for skirts

Lately I've been using up my really old bottles of Pebeo Setacolor transparent fabric paints. This stuff is at least 8 years old. They've been in a box in my garage/studio waiting patiently, as all my art supplies do, for me to get back to using them.
I have a love/hate relationship with them.
I started out coloring fabric using Dupont Silk dyes when I had my prayer shawl business back in the 90's. That meant I had to stretch silk on big home made wood frames, paint the silk, steam it, rinse it out hoping there would be no back staining, and go from there.
The results of dye on silk were always, always beautiful, but I found, after hanging up some marriage canopies on my wall, the colors began to fade all too quickly.
Annoying after all the work done. And stretching silk by putting pins into the wood frame really, really hurt my fingers. I grew to hate it.
I was tempted by silk paint (paint not dye) because all one had to do to set the color was iron your fabric. However, there was always the matter of "hand". The "hand" of the fabric changed and became a little stiff. I didn't like it. At all.

I put all of those things away when I went to work as the office manager for my husband.
And, now I am back.
This time I am using bleached muslin on a plastic bag surface and am letting the paint, which had to be mixed with a lot of water because it had thickened out so much, just do its' thing. This is a lot of fun! I am using slightly damp fabric, a foam brush and five colors. I like fabric with a lot of white in the background. Being summer 10 months of the year here makes wearing all kinds of white things OK everyday.
Fixing the color is just a matter of 20 minutes in a hot dryer and my iron. One thing I've noticed though. The fumes from the heated paint make me a little nauseous. I moved a big fan to the left of my ironing board, so now that isn't such a problem.
This stack of fabrics with lines, flowers, stripes, drips, splotches and journaling with a black fabric marker, will make a wonderful multi-tiered skirt.
So now I love the paint and don't hate the "hand". This stuff just doesn't make any difference at all on how the muslin feels.
Hey, does anybody know where I can find out how to post using more photos? Maybe it's this version of Blogger, but it won't let me put in more than five photos per post. Time to learn more. Time for an upgrade.

1 comment:

Julie Fillo said...

Hi Adrian,
Your portrait on Sharon's ning site was my favorite of all of them. It is so soft and I love the look in her eyes. Thanks for visiting my blog and for liking my embroidery. I need to finish those squares, I only hae 2 left, but i've been in a painting mood.

Julie Fillo