Disperse Dyeing Results

Disperse dyeing is full of surprises. It is so exciting when you peel back the freshly pressed paper and see how the dye and fabric sublimated. The purple paper was in fact a brilliant blue. The dull red was fuschia and the mustard yellow was bright lemon. Very alarming! I was forever looking for my paper of ‘mud’ colours to iron over the whole works to tone it all down. My mud ran out and I just had to deal with it.
I tried several fabrics and loved the intensity of a 100% polyester ‘satin-like’ shirt with a heavy drape. My favourite is the last one, shown here, printed on the same polyester fabric. Very pale and pleasant. Too bad there was so much red dye left in the top left ginkgo. At this point I had learned there would be no fixing the bright pink with another layer. More than 3 layers proved more disastrous than not.
I stumbled onto Barbara McKie’s disperse dye work at http://mckieart.com/... again. She must use disperse dye in a large format printer to get her images. What is with these fibre art studios that don’t have a thread out of place?!

Disperse Dyes and Ginkgo Leaves

Yesterday I got my new painting area organized enough to paint computer paper with disperse dye. I read Linda Kemshall’s book ‘Color Moves, Transfer Paints on Fabric’ quite thoroughly before starting. I have been looking forward to doing this final Module 2 activity since July. I really liked the transparent effects when the paper was ironed onto the various synthetic fibres. But first…I had to get the paint on the paper.
The disperse dyes are very watery so the first few papers were drenched and runny. The cute little paint palette was too small and the watery paint spilled every where- not at all like the tidy pictures in Linda’s book! I thought it wasn’t working out very well so I added some thickener. This seemed to control the liquid much better.
I laid plastic wrap on the red, yellow and blue (looks purple to me). This made for great texture. After I had these basic colour sheets I started painting the positive and negative ginkgos that I had cut out. Freezer paper would have made sharper images but these will still be useful. I started mixing the primaries but did not get oranges like I was expecting and green was not going to happen. I must have contaminated the blue with red somewhere along the line.
This morning I checked out the dried pieces and was thrilled with the colours and did not miss the blue. The runny watercolour-like pages are actually very interesting when I lay the ginkgos on top. I think I have enough painted papers and possibilities to entertain myself this dreary October afternoon. Now to heat up the iron, thanks Doreen, and see what colours I really get.