Light sensitive dying - Take 2!!!

As I said yesterday, today I decided that I must get some more work done, and I did. I had a great day working in the sun and achieved a great deal.

My light sensitive paper arrived today, so I was able to experiment with that which was really interesting. I enjoyed this and perhaps thing that I could think about adding to the paper once it the image has been developed. One main thing I did notice from my experimentations with the paper in its earliest stages was that the acetate stencils seemed to come out a lot better than the leaves which just turned out as block colours. The paper allowed me to create more detail, which is interesting as it was something I found it hard to achieve with the paint.

I think in the future, I can have a little system, that I try out a stencil/design onto the light sensitive paper, before transferring it onto the fabric.

My experimentations with the light sensitive paper made me want to experiment a little more with the dye again to try to achieve what I had been able to with the paper. I decided that, in order to do this, it might be a good idea to experiment with the dye on different fabrics, as I had only tried it on cotton, to see the different effects. I tried a variety of different materials and found that the dye does not work with felt at all, when I went to wash it after exposure, all of the dye just ran off! I did however find that the dye worked extremely well with silk and I was able to produce much more detailed images on the fabric.

One thing I do want to just experiment a little further with is the exposure time of the dye. When I left the dyed silk to be exposed for the same amount of time I had with the other fabrics, the design was a great deal lighter. Perhaps the exposure time is a little longer for different fabrics??