May 2012 – chrisse textile stitcher

Yesterday, Mandi came to play for the day. She doesn’t usually work in black so discharging was mostly new for her.

We had thick and thin bleach, Jacquard Discharge paste and thick and thin formosul. The thin bleach was very cheap bleach – I think mostly water as the results were not good. Lesson – don’t buy cheap bleach for discharging fabric!! Mandi was good and sampled all five with a number of different fabrics – I just played with some larger pieces and credit carded one in formosul and one in thick bleach, both on linen. Here are the results with some small cut offs:

Hopefully, Mandi will blog her samples – here is her address – www.mandijbainbridge.blogspot.com

Now for some sewing!

Having seen a friend’s family dyeing, I have been itching to get back in the studio and trial it. The technique is a little complicated, but basically, you use two different colours get dark, medium and light mixes for the two colours. I decided that I needed to have a go at three colours, so I have a set of three control hues of each colour and then 3 sets of 9 mixes of two colours – they look like this when photo’d (better colours in reality):

Scarlet and lemon with the control reds at the bottom and lemons down the right