Flour Resist Revisited

It’s been two years since I played with flour resist. With all of the sun and heat, I thought this would be the perfect time to revisit this technique. If you’d like to read the 2018 tutorial, you can find it HERE.

 

The last time I did this it took a long time because I let the fabric dry indoors. This time I used the heat of the sun to dry it. That made the process go so much quicker.

Place a piece of plastic on the table, add newspaper, and then the fabric. (I soda soaked and then hung the fabric to dry, but since we are adding soda ash to the print paste you don’t need to take that step.)

To make the flour resist I started with mixing a cup of flour with a cup of water. We are looking to get the consistency of pancake batter. Then I spread it out on the fabric. I like to do this with my hands. Reminds me of finger painting as a child!

Since it was a warm and sunny day, I took the flour resist covered fabric to the driveway where I let it dry. The picture below shows how it starts to curl up when it is drying.

I thought I’d experiment a bit this time. On one of the pieces I used a couple tools to create patterns in the resist, before I set it out to dry.

I also added resist to one of my ice dyed pieces. I’ll show you that later in the post.

Once the flour resist was dry on the fabric, I mixed up the paste. Instead of mixing up print paste from scratch, I used Pro Chem’s PRO Print Paste. We used this in Pat Pauly’s class at QSDS last summer.  It’s so much easier.

Just mix it with water.

When it has thickened, add a teaspoon or so of soda ash.

Mix that completely, and then added a teaspoon of dye.

We’re about to start painting the fabric with this thickened dye, but first I need to scrunch up the fabric.

It ended up looking like this.

Now to straighten the fabric back out and start painting. I just placed the fabric over plastic this time.

Once they were painted, place them back in the sun to dry.

Since it was getting late in the day, even though they felt dry, I let them dry overnight.

The next morning I rinsed them in cold water in a bucket, scraping off all of the flour. I dumped the water in the yard, not down the drain. Once I had removed all of the flour off the fabric I rinsed them in warm water. When the water was clear, I let them soak with Blue Dawn in hot water for several hours. Then I washed them on hot, with two rinses like I do all of my dyeing. Then they were put in the dryer and ironed.

First is the piece with the markings.

Next is the ice dyeing piece before adding the flour resist. It was a pretty piece, but I wanted to add more texture.

I used Blue Violet as my dye on this piece. It’s funny how the background is lighter now as some of the dye creeped into the whole piece. That may have happened when I was washing it out. I do like it better, than the original piece.

And the last piece.

Lots more experimenting needs to be done. These would make great backgrounds or blocks for a piece.

I caught the kitties playing with the recycle wastebasket. They were surprised to see me. Usually we tend to blame Molly, but this time they both were guilty. This week also marked two years that we’ve had Ally. She was such a sick baby when we got her. She’s doing much better although we still have to give her medicine every two days.

Hope you have a great weekend. Check out Off The Wall Friday linkup for some great inspiration.