Gelatin Plate Printing With MX Dyes

I have a swap that I participated in that involved the process of gelatin plate printing. Our fabric dyeing group works with MX dyes so that is the medium we use when we do our various swaps each month.

I have to admit that I know nothing about the process of print making but was game to try so after googling various youtube demos I started. I was going to explain the process but after a couple of paragraphs I realized that it’s just easier to google youtube and see what people have done there so if you’re interested I suggest you do that.

Here’s a couple of pictures of the process:

Gelatin plate, it was hard getting the plate out of the container. Even though I was careful it cracked.

Thickened sodium alginate.

Mixing dye into the thickened alginate.

Various coloured dyes.

Prints taken off of the plate. Of course I forgot to take pictures of the process.

Prints drying on table.

Gelatin print 1.

Gelatin print 2.

Gelatin print 3.

Vague outline of purple oak leaf.

What I found was that I couldn’t get the thickened dye to come off of the roller properly. The dye just tends to slide on top of the gelatin. I know from watching the videos that the people demonstrating the process didn’t use thickened dye they used ink dyes so I’m thinking I would have had better success with those.

I did take a couple of prints using leaves. I spread the dye on the gelatin using the back of a spoon but it was patchy at best. The abstracts were made by me getting frustrated so I thinned down the dyes and just dribbled them onto the gelatin and then pressed the fabric over top.

Out of 16 attempts this was the best of the lot. I couldn’t really see the point of using the gelatin as I’m thinking I could have gotten the same results just using a hard surface. Maybe if I had used inks instead I would have gotten a better idea. I don’t see much mentioned on the subject so maybe people don’t  use gelatin printing that often. Maybe it’s a technique that you try but don’t really use.

Anyhow I won’t try this again, I think I’d rather stencil instead. It was fun dabbling sort of like a kid and finger paints. Hmmm….maybe I should have used my fingers.

Karen

I’m off…

We’re off tomorrow to go on holiday out to British Columbia to visit my brother and his family in Vancouver and then John and I will be seeing my mom and dad who live on Vancouver Island in the town of Nanaimo.

We will arrive in Vancouver sleep overnight and then drive down with my brother and his wife to Seattle, sleep overnight there and then take a flight down to San Fransico for three days before heading back home to Vancouver. It should be an interesting trip, I’m hoping the knee holds up and I don’t slow people down with the sight-seeing. I bought new shoes so pray they will help.

Meanwhile I finished the quilt for my sister-in-law yesterday and Jen’s hubby Phil took a picture for me. He’s a camera buff and always brings the proper equipment and lighting so these turned out nice.

Chinese coin quilt.

Hand-dyed backing from 108″ PFD fabric.

Karen

Dr Seuss Cat in the Hat Quilt

Well I’ve finally finished the top to the Dr Seuss quilt and I also dyed the backing (plain navy blue) so all that is left is to quilt it and bind the edges, lol, not bad for having been a Christmas quilt.

Quilt on a double bed.

Another view from the foot of the bed, it was really hard to take a picture because there wasn’t room for me to back up as I have a ton of stuff in this room while I’m repainting the next room over.

I also dyed a parfait for a swap with the forum I belong too. It took forever for the dye to wash out as the turquoise in the marine green just ran and ran.

Berry, Eggplant and Marine green. This picture looks nicer than the actual piece. The image on my camera was a bit duller than reality but when I colour corrected the photo the editor put in more contrast so imagine this photo a bit duller and you have the real colours. I guess I should have used a green with more yellow in it and then colours would have looked nicer, live and learn I guess. Probably an olive green would have matched better.

Karen

Same Dye Different Effect….Snowdyeing

Well I finally got around to dyeing up a couple of pieces of material using snow. We have a swap coming up in March and since the weather has been all things weird I decided it’d probably be a good time to do it now while we still have some.

The material used was P&B dyer’s cloth and the size of the pieces were 1 yard each. I made up three different dyes using a strength ratio of 1 tablespoon of dye to 1 cup of water.

From Dharma:
1. Navy
2. Butterscotch
3. Burgundy

I used the same method of snow-dyeing that I always use – presoak material in soda ash, wring out and arrange tightly scrunched up on a rack in the sink. Layer about 4 inches of snow over top, apply dye and let melt. After the snow has melted I then put the material into a plastic shoebox container and float it in a sink of hot water for as many hours as I have patience to let it sit until I rinse and wash it out.

Snow-dyed fabric using Navy, Burgundy and Butterscotch from Dharma applied in a blob pattern to cover snow.

Closeup of an area of the above fabric.

I had some left over dye so thought I would try applying it in a spatter pattern over the snow. I didn’t bother taking any photos of this because I’ve already blogged it before but basically for the first piece I squirted out big blobs of dye onto the snow whereas on the second piece I just squirted lines of dye criss-crossing each other back and forth over the snow.

Snowdyed using Navy, Butterscotch and Burgundy in a random line pattern. There was a bit more burgundy left than the navy and butterscotch but this piece is mostly purple probably because the dye blended together better than the bigger blobs of dye in the first piece.

Closeup of one section of above material.

Nice fabric it always looks so good when it’s been snowdyed. It’s always hard to cut one of these pieces up because they look like a painting and it’s always better seeing all the different colours in the one piece. Might be interesting to try and make a Ricky Tims quilt out of one of them and see how it turns out.

Karen

Cappuccino Bali Pop Quilt – Done!

Finally, with five days to go until the wedding, I finished the batik quilt I was working on. Brag pictures below, I used a matching dark brown thread and a meandering stitch to quilt it and a plain black homespun to bind the quilt.

Melissa’s wedding quilt. Pattern “Sparkling Gemstones” from the book Jelly Roll Quilts by Pam and Nancy Lintott, made using one Hoffman’s Cappuccino Bali Pop and co-ordinating batiks.

Back of quilt hand-dyed to match.

Front and back, not a bad match.

Meandering stitch, not the best but not bad either.

I’m so glad to get this done and out of the way. The finished quilt is roughly 60 x 80 inches give or take a few (too lazy to do a final measure). It is a nice size to cuddle up in to watch T.V. or it could be used on a twin or as a topper for a larger bed.

Karen

Dyeing a Quilt Backing – Part 3 The End.

I finally finished dyeing the quilt backing yesterday and thought I would post some pictures of some of the steps.

Fabric set-up – a clothes rack with a chicken wire frame set on top and ivory backing piece.

Piece of 70″x85″ fabric scrunched down to about a third that size.

Ivory over-dyed in a grid pattern using Black and Bark and dry soda ash applied.

Close-up of the over-dye. I ran out of dye and had to mix up some more brown. I decided to cover up the ivory that was showing so this photo isn’t quite accurate.

Covered in Saran Wrap with some empty flower containers to weigh it down. After a couple of hours I placed the fabric in a very large plastic Rubbermaid container and floated the whole thing in a bathtub of very hot water and left it to batch overnight.

Fabric after the wash-out hanging from the shower curtain rod in the bathroom.

I’m really pleased that this backing worked out so well. It was worth taking the time to do the third trial test piece. After having done the first two pieces I was ready to use a plain black homespun for backing and the only reason I didn’t was because I’d already torn my 108″ pfd white to size plus I would have had to seam the black homespun to fit the quilt and and the black homespun was expensive at $10 a metre.

Now on to quilting and binding.

Karen

P.S. Oh and yes I did for a second time…

Whatcha going to do?

Third Time’s the Charm.

Well I finished my third trial piece today and I’m going to go with it. Makes me wonder why I didn’t choose these colours in the first place since they are all in the quilt. I used ivory as the background and then went back to the Bark and Black as overdyes in a fairly heavy grid pattern squirted on scrunched ivory material.

Trial piece of Ivory, Bark and Black.

It’s hard to tell from the photos but this piece matched the quilt better plus since I’d been fairly heavy with the black and brown I had less contrast with the lighter ivory. When I did the chocolate milk piece I felt like it wasn’t dark enough so I’m happier with this piece.

Another difference between the two pieces is that instead of doing this piece outside in the sun I did it inside and left it on a rack in the laundry sink. I put some water in the sink (not touching the dyed fabric) and covered the top of the fabric with Saran Wrap. It seemed to work because I left the piece overnight and it didn’t dry out. So with the longer batch time and moister fabric I got darker blacks and browns. When I batched outside even with the top covered the piece dryed out.

Quilt next to trial piece.

I’ve got the backing piece out batching in a bucket in the sun using ivory dye. Hopefully I can get this done today so I can start quilting tomorrow or the next day.

Bucket with ivory dye and backing material.

And because they were there…

Orange begonias.

Pink begonias.

Assorted coleus.

Orange Gerber daisy.

It’ll be nice to get this piece finished. Of course I’ll be heart-broken to give it away, I always am when it comes to something like a project like this.

Karen

Quilt Backing Part 2…

I have a couple of pictures to post. The first is the piece of fabric that I test-dyed yesterday using the Bark, Chocolate Milk and Black. This was the piece with the soda ash sprinkled on it.

Chocolate milk, Bark and Black with dry soda ash sprinkles.

The soda ash did concentrate the colour on the fabric so you do get a bit of a pattern, very fine. I have to admit that I didn’t like this piece because of the Chocolate Milk. I had my misgivings about it but figured that the chocolate milk colour would be mostly covered up by the other two but I was wrong. It also doesn’t really match the quilt.

For some reason my camera didn’t like taking photos of the backing so it looks washed out and the Chocolate Milk colour doesn’t really show on this screen. I didn’t like the mottled look of it so decided to try another piece just with black and a darker brown hoping to get a more solid colour. This time I just did it in a vase – parfait style.

Black and Tobacco.

The black looks more like a blue next to the white areas on the fabric. I’m wondering if I’d be better off using a black that’s more reddish based. I get a feeling I could be doing up a lot of samples before I’m satisfied but I think I’ll just go ahead and do the Black and Tobacco but use a Better Black and hope for the best. These one yard test pieces cost me about $5 a pop.

Quilt next to tobacco and Black. Again the parfait piece looks washed out, it’s not quite that bad.

Karen

Dyeing a Quilt Backing – Part 1

I am dyeing a backing for the batik quilt that I just finished sewing. I’ve decided to go with chocolate milk, bark and black in an attempt to copy one of the fabrics used in the quilt.

Initially I am doing a test piece just to see how the colours blend and thought I’d try using a method that the bali dyers use, throwing dry soda ash on the fabric outside and letting it sit in the sun. I’m not quite sure how they do this whether or not they first soak the whole piece in soda ash solution and then just throw on the extra dry soda ash once it’s outside but I thought I’d try the dry soda ash.

First I dyed up a one metre piece of fabric in the chocolate milk colourway. Then we went on vacation for four days so it dried out and today I re-soaked it in some water with a bit of urea in it. Urea helps to keep the fabric moist so the dye can bond to the cotton.

Next I mixed up my black and bark (darker brown than the chocolate milk) got my supplies and headed outside. It’s pretty hot today in the 80′s so the material should batch well. I crinkled up the fabric on a rack and placed it on the grass. This way the dye wouldn’t pool under the fabric and it would just drip down onto the grass and who cares if the grass gets dyed?

Next I sprinkled on the black and fawn dyes and dry soda ash. I had a piece of plastic that I decided to put over the fabric so it wouldn’t dry out too quickly although they don’t do this in bali that I can see. I was working in the shade so I very carefully crept forward moving my piece into the sun.

Perfect except for one thing:

Seeing that I was so careful about not touching the dye on the rack when I was moving it, I forgot that some of the dye dripped down into the grass and I crawled through it, lol. Live and learn.

I’ll have to see if applying dry soda ash gives me any of the patterns I see on the batik material.

Karen

Make A Colour

I have a swap this month that is a “make colour” swap. In others words we take three dyes and mix them together to get a new colour and then send off the original dyes plus a fat eighth of the new created colour.

I decided that I wanted to make a green and I wanted it to be a chartreuse type of green. When I try to make my own colours I turn to a really neat application on the web that is know as the Dye Mixer Applet. I play around with the ratios until I get a colour I like and then I try to match them.

I wanted to use basic pure dyes to create my colour so I used golden yellow, cobalt blue and black. The colour I wanted to create only took the blue and yellow but since we were supposed to use a third colour I threw in the black to shade the colour. The result is sort of what I was looking for but darker as you’d expect from the black.

Make colour using Prochem’s Golden Yellow and Dharma’s Cobalt and Better Black.

Karen