A bit of hand dyed fabric before a day out and about

Before I show my latest fabric design attempt, I wanted to show what my friend who lives in a town about 50 miles from me, and I did yesterday. We visited her granddaughter, who was in the Spine Hospital here in Wichita, KS. I have been here before, so didn't even think to take photos until we were inside. I showed Kathy the gorgeous wall art we had to pass to get to her granddaughter's room. I failed to take more than two photos during our outing.


I even missed taking photos of our wonderful meal afterward.There were many more of these lovely works of art, one of which I thought was copper, but again, failed to photograph it. Aren't these spectacular? You can see the size because I left the door in the photo, rather than cropping it.


Switching gears, way back on December 10 of last year, I started this project. In case you don't remember, or are a new visitor to my blog, I used Karo Corn Syrup (known as Beehive or Crown Corn Syrups in Canada, Crown being preferred in Quebec) as a resist on this fabric. I applied the syrup to the fabric, then immediately applied three shades of green Staz-on reinkers to two pieces and allowed the dye and syrup to dry.

In the background of the above photo, I applied more syrup and for these two pieces, I allowed the syrup to dry before I applied any dye. At the time, I had hoped to buy some fabric paint I could use for this technique, but circumstances beyond my control (like Christmas, loss of my video card, and a rather nasty water leak) prohibited me from buying any. And since I really didn't NEED fabric paint, I didn't even think about it after I decided to only buy things I truly needed this year.


A week or so ago, I decided to color these two pieces of fabric because I was tired of them sitting on my basement roll around table. Once again, I opted for Staz-on reinkers, this time using two colors of red (actually one was pink). I'm not sure you can tell there are freezer paper hearts I ironed onto the fabric right before I applied the syrup.


Here you can see the hearts I removed after the fabric was dry and before I


pulled the two pieces of fabric apart. Unlike the green fabric, this time the syrup set a long time and soaked into both pieces. Then the syrup dried and held the two fabrics together over the course of at least two months.


It took some doing, but I finally got the two pieces apart. You can really see the heart shapes in the fabric farthest from the camera.


Because the lighting is not the best in my basement studio, I thought you might like to see the piece before I removed the resist. It appears the dye has seeped under the ironed on hearts.


This is an easy technique when it comes to removing the syrup, but I was less than impressed with the outcome after I washed the syrup resist out. What happened to the hearts? I guess, because Valentine's Day had passed by the time I washed the dye out, the hearts went on hiatus! Although I didn't dye this fabric for any specific reason or event, I would have liked to see the hearts I had carefully ironed to the fabric. Of course, fabric is fabric and I will never be disappointed with any outcome I get when I experiment like this. It was fun playing with ingredients from the kitchen. I hope to do more of this one of these days, especially when I can take the fabric and kitchen ingredients outside in the heat of the summer.

BTW, the shower curtain I removed from my upstairs work table is folded under the fabric in the above photo. It does not have as much "white space" as I had hoped for. I fear this curtain is ready to be recycled into something new.