Thursday, April 12, 2007

Textile Painting

Look what we found in the garage during spring cleaning!

These are painted pants from my DH's high school days. His mother had saved them for all these years...look's like the 1960's to me! Quite remarkable.

They are a much more interesting result than the warp painting I did at the Visalia conference. I took a class on Painted Warp with Jannie Taylor.

I brought a warped loom to the class - warped with 20-2 perle cotton in a baby blue in a two shaft plain weave. Janie brought all sorts of textile paints, dyes, pens, markers, stencils etc. And we got to experiment on our warp.

We tried different techniques to acheive different looks, explored the difference in application and effect of different dyes vs. diferent paints. Tried different types of paints including a whole slew of metallic ones. I especially liked the Sunset Gold metallic with the purple paint.

It was great fun. To finish the piece, we had to iron it a bit then wait a week before washing. I was surprised when I took it out of the washing machine and it had not faded at all! All the colors including the dyes held fast.

2 comments:

Jackie said...

I have a pair of pants that are very similar except that they are from the late 80's. They are in a box in the shed so that I can pull them out when my daughter starts to think that she is the first person to rebel a bit.

Katherine said...

The silk--It might be that the serecin [sp?] wasn't removed properly from the silk, or that it was dyed with a fugitive dye for some kind of color coding purpose.

If your overdying isn't colorfast, you might want to try experimenting with scouring a sample to remove the serecin. Go to www.wormspit.com for a recipe--it involves washing soda if I remember correctly.

I would also suggest trying citric acid--it strikes faster and harder than vinegar.