Painting on Fabric

Coreen gave a demonstration of painting on fabric to about 10 of us wanna be fibre artists. She recommends paint rather than dye which is carcinogenic when in powder form. She showed us how to blend the transparent colours and also to create effects with rock salt and other opaque paints. It was great fun. Similar to tie dying when I was a kid.

We each painted two fat quarter squares of cotton and two long quarter rectangles of polyester to make scarves. It was interesting to see what the end product would look like. Some of the paints, by SetaColor, are photo sensitive and change colours more rapidly in the sun. We also placed the wet fabrics on a slanted hill side that allowed the paint to run a bit. Adding rock salt causes the paint to migrate towards the salt chips causing small dot effects. Very pretty.

Coreen describing her cityscape quilt scene.  Notice the background sky fabric (pink/yellow) is hand painted fabric like what we learn to do.

Simple demo showing blending of paints.  Notice this piece has the primary colours (yellow, red - this one is a bit of a fushia, and blue - this one accidentally used the yellow brush so came out rather green.)

Now she blends the primary colours to get secondary colours.  (Yellow and red/pink makes orange, blue/green and red/pink makes purple.)

Now she adds some rock salt.

Then lay it in the sun on a slant so the colours will run together.

The results!

Some of scarf samples.  Some were folded and clothes pinned, others where tied together with elastics.

Background left to right:  

Darlene (Alberta), Coreen (Nanimo, BC) and Mary (Vancouver, Washington).