Fabric Painting (Part Two)

The book Sky Dyes (Mickey Lawler) was the starting point for me as we began to paint fabric. Her first "recipe" was for a soft blue summer sky filled with white wispy clouds. I took my spray bottle and lightly misted the fabric and then mixed up my blues - a little Cobalt and a little ultramarine with a little water. I didn't really use enough water as my skies turned quite a bit darker than I intended. (See samples 1 and 2 in the photo!) Because the first sample was so dark, I added some $dollar store stars, but the wind blew them off, so the effect is not quite as sharp as it could be. I also added some opaque pearlescent pearl on sample 2 for the clouds and it gave a cool sparkly effect.
 Sample 3 was supposed to be a sunrise sky. The colours turned out ok and I sprinkled this sample with coarse salt before letting it dry.
Fabric printing with Knex
The fourth sample was mostly to see the effect of sunprinting - putting something on top of the fabric in the sun to make a print. The Knex pieces were heavy enough that they didn't blow away or move with the wind and made great prints.
Fabric printing with doilies
I've had this little doilies in my craft cupboard forever and thought they might make some cool prints - you can see a bit of an outline just to the left of the doilies to show the print they made. Wasn't quite as effective as I had hoped, maybe paper doilies would work better.
Fabric printing with leaves
These leaf prints turned out just fine, too bad the black didn't mix in very thoroughly with the green as it left some weird looking black spots on the fabric.

I really liked the effect of the salt on the painted fabric and made a couple pieces just to see what it did with the different colours.
Sky colours with salt sprinkled on
Sunset colours with salt effects
I think the wind blowing may have affected the salt effects as they did not look the same as the book samples.

There will be one more post with these fabrics and then I'll have to make something out of them.

--Ann

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