Dye-Na-Flow: Sun or Not

I decided to do a little experiment. I wanted to know what the difference would be to allow the sun to dry the paint via sun printing, as opposed to just painting the fabric with Jacquard Dye-Na-Flow, and letting it sit and dry. You know I’m always up for experiments!

I am using the same Dye-Na-Flow colors on all of these pieces. With the first two pieces I scrunch up the wet fabric on plastic, painted it, and then let it dry. This is the  piece I’m letting dry in the studio. The colors are so bright.

It took 24 hours for the fabric to dry. And here is what it looked like after dried, and then washed and ironed. As you can see, the colors are muted. The fabric felt sticky, even days later. And I didn’t like the smell. However, after washing, the fabric returned to normal – no sticky or smell!

And then let’s do the very same thing, with the same paints and take it out to the sun. Within an hour or so it was dry. I ironed it and here is the result. Quite a difference from letting it dry in the studio. The bright colors are retained.

So now I wanted to just paint dry fabric and let it dry. Here is what you get. You can’t get the peaks and valleys because the fabric is dry.

Before it was completely dry, I took it off the plastic, and hung it on my rack. What was left on the plastic was lots of paint.

I didn’t want to waste the paint, so I got a piece of dry fabric and placed it on top of the paint and smoothed it down with my hand. This is a great way to print fabric.

And here is that piece. I was pretty excited with the results. I see doing more of this.

After spending so much time over the years with dyes, it’s really fun to work with paint. And I really do love Jacquard  Dye-Na-Flow. I hope you have a creative and fun weekend. I’m linking to Off The Wall Friday.