On 20th February I took a 2 day course in experimental textile printing using Procion dyes. I’d not heard of them before, and where the blurb mentioned screen printing I was really interested because I have screen printed with textiles and paper many times in the past.
We started day 1 with soaking some pre-scoured cotton fabric in soda ash for 20 minutes, wringing it and then twisting it into what the tutor referred to as ‘chelsea buns’. A dye solution that was mixed with salt solution was then dripped onto the fabric and left for 3 hours to set.
The other piece above was concertina folded. I had carried out a little research on procion dyes before doing the course, and had found many exciting tutorials on YouTube about ice dyeing. One of the tutorials I had watched talked about dyeing on the top of the folds and then turning the whole piece over to dye on the base of the folds, they did this in a different colour so that was what I too tried.
When we had dyed with the salt solution dyes we moved onto screen printing, the medium used was derived from seaweed and called manutex. We used stencils made of a4 photocopy paper which worked really well. I really loved the transparency you could achieve using the manutex, it is a far cry from the very opaque screen printing inks I have used before. I’m a big fan of psychadellic concert poster art and I could see how I’d like to play with this medium.
The tutor also mentioned a Japanese art called Shibori which involves folding fabric and then placing it all into a bucket. She showed us some examples which were beautiful. Since then I have read many Shibori books and been inspired to try some. I started by making a scarf with a couple of triangular shaped blocks of wood.
I did the 2 day course and was full of energy to try some dyeing at home. I have a great friend called Karen and she had her daughter Izzy came over for the day. I sometimes find it a little daunting to try something completely new on my own for the first time. And besides, I hadn’t seen Karen for ages so naturally we had a great day of it. Here are some photos of the fun we had.
The day was a lot of fun and I felt more confident to do some more at home. I especially enjoyed overprinting and resist printing techniques, overprinting gave me confidence to play which is something I am gradually learning more and more to do.
Figures 1 – 11. Hutchison, J (2017) [Photographs] In: possession of: Julie Hutchison: Isle of Wight
Learning log of Julie Hutchison 