Although I think this pair of pants has the honor of being the first item listed in this series, they're actually nearly the most recent thing I've done. Although I've done a little dying starting with plain fabric, my most successful experiments, thus far, have been altering clothes, usually pants purchased at the local resale shop for a dollar or two—how can one mess that up? (Well, I can, but that's for a future post.) The existing color means I can start with the discharging step, for which I use bleach. I soon concluded that I want to buy that special thickening agent for bleach (I have the seaweed based stuff for dye) but in the meantime, I put some in a squirt bottle and had at it.
Pants discharged and dyed using principles from Jane Dunnwald's book. October 2008.
I soon learned that if one was using a lot of bleach that, yes, you really do want to use a respirator. Even working outside. Even though the things I was discharging were all used, they still repelled the bleach, which actually sat in pools on the surface of the fabric. Even with those caveats, I like discharging, because I can go to right away, without the soda-ash soak (and then the subsequent drying).
Having learned from prior experience that dyes don't stamp very well without thickening agent added to the solution, this time I made up half my “chemical water” with thickener.[1]
So the quality of my stamping worked out reasonably well, as long as I was using fairly coarse stamps, such as the leaf, which I cut from that greyish foam stuff that computers and the like are often packed in.[2] The blue diagonals were also printed with one of these foam stamps, which actually I think I made a year or two ago, and thought too coarse to use...I'm glad I saved it, instead of just throwing it away. The red flowers are of course made with my favorite commerical stamp, which I've also used in my studio, my furniture, my closets...
Everyone tells you to keep meticulous records, so's you can duplicate your effects, but my problem is that I'm making dye in such small batches that I haven't got a good way to measure the tiny pinches of this and that I add to adjust my colors; and of course, all dye basically looks black in the jar, just as all glass looks red in the flame.
photo 20oct08, file 28oct08.
[1]You mix the dye in the regular stuff, then added the kind with thickener, because the dye and thickener don't really play nice.
[2]This foam is twenty years old: it was part of my very first display at that wretched Smetanka craft show at which I had no canopy and blinded myself with salt and suntan lotion after they ran into my eyes. There I sat, with earrings pinned to chunks of computer packing foam, which at the time I thought looked pretty cool and I now know was an absolutely hideous display, tears running down my face while I smiled and assured my customers that was nothing wrong. I sold $300 stuff at that show, I feat I would not again duplicate for quite some time. —Oddly enough, my first etsy sale, which came shortly after I made these pants using a stamp manufactured from that same grey foam, was for the same amount.
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
