Working on cloth.

Two months ago I started by mixing up some dye paste, quite a dark greeny grey, almost black, and decided to have a go at sucking it into a pipette and then "drawing with it onto a metre of cotton sateen. I had previously scraped with an old credit card over the surface of this fabric using a dark brown dye paste which had given it a bit of background texture. The dye paste was a bit too runny, and the pipette had quite a large hole, so my results were a bit dissapointing and too splodgy. (Top left)

I decided to overdye the piece with an olive green which I quite liked, but the whole effect was rather dark. I was still unhappy with the heavy splodgy pattern, so decided to use some discharge paste over this area to see if I could improve it. You can see the results above.

   

Today, I have used even more discharge paste, and having washed it and hung it out to dry, (bottom photo) I think my next step will be to overdye the whole piece yet again. I may use lemon yellow, or maybe a light blue. Either way, the olive green shouldn't be affected too much, but the discharged areas should take up the colour. The fabric looks more yellow in the bottom photo, because I photographed it on the washing line with the sun shining through it!! I will keep working on this piece until I'm satisfied with it, which at the moment I'm not, but this is what makes it such an interesting challenge.