While I do have a lot of patience for fussy jobs like this, I tend to get distracted easily, and also hungry and tired, so it all takes a while. However, all done now! Turns out it's hard to photograph velvet with my pea-shooter camera, but I'm very happy with the results. The color stayed very true and rich-looking, I thought.
Not so happy with my attempt at creating a resist with blue school glue gel. I didn't give it much thought when it came to laying down a design and so I just sort of scribbled on some lines just to see what would happen (this had to dry out completely overnight first).
Then I painted on a rainbow of color.
After the washout - the resist certainly worked well, leaving very white lines, but the glue spread more than I expected so I'm not sure what I'll be able to do with this piece. I may try painting in some of the white with various colors and I might be able to use some of it in small applique or something. The other length looks like camo doesn't it! I'm kind of mad at myself for fooling around with this splotching technique - I don't really like it.
Too many colors going, but what will be useful are the spots where the blending occurred - I'll be able to fussy-cut flower petals and such, I'm sure.
These, however, are just down-right ugly. Oh well, nothing ventured, blah blah blah.....
Silk ribbon, though! Happy.
This strange bit is dyed cheesecloth. One never knows when one might require some pretty purple cheesecloth.
As you might notice I also dyed a few stray cotton doilies.
I'm going to bore you here with a long string of photos of the bulk of half-yard solid color results. Not exactly solid because a great deal of mottling and marbling occurred, but that is exactly what I was looking for anyway. So let's start with yellow:
Hard to tell the difference between photos of red and pink, isn't it. Geez, I need a photography lesson.
My one disappointment was that I could not get the dark blue I was looking for. These are nice, but my Sapphire Blue dye didn't give me the rich blue I wanted.
I wish you could see this bright green in person - it almost hurts my eyes - a lot of yellow pops out and will be nice for leaves and stems and aliens.
This Periwinkle piece is interesting.
Look! A person! Freaky, huh?
I believe I will be doing some overpaintng on some of these to make the light backgrounds a little more interesting.
Had better luck with the black this time around. Despite these dumb photos, the dark parts really are pretty black.
So much fun. All this makes me feel as excited as when I was a kid and we received a brand-new box of 64 Crayola crayons. Ummmm, Magenta..... --cds
