Fabric Dye Experiments

Did you ever just have a vision in your head and wonder how you could make that work? Well I did. It involved trees and making them overlap in different colors and sizes. Seemed easy enough but wasn't sure how to do it without making the dye bleed and using only the materials I had on hand.
First I begged my husband to bring home some mylar sheets (acetate - mylar was a term we used in printing to differentiate between different materials) I used the mylar as a stencil and cut a tree design from it. Then I took setacolor dye and added it to aloe vera gel to make it more of a paste.




This was created using 3 different sized tree stencils.




I was trying to create visual distance and made the blue trees first.



The yellow trees were done with neopaque yellow and aloe vera gel. Then the reds were painted on top of them.



Here I used the trees cut out from the mylar (acetate) and I painted around the edges of the trees. After I had a few trees, I painted the background around them with the orange and aloe vera gel mixture. Gave me some ideas to noodle over. I think my next series of experiments will be on lightly colored backgrounds and then stenciling the trees.



Here is the start of an art piece. I am going to do a water lily and pads. I started by sketching the design out on white cotton fabric and using the neocolor watercolor crayons. I added water to blend the design and let it dry. I wanted the water to be darker, so I decided to add the setacolor and aloe vera gel mixture on top. Here is what it looks like halfway done. After they were all dry, I ironed to heat set. The water still wasn't dark enough, so I added another layer of the aloe vera gel and setacolor mixture. I also added more green to the leaves using this technique. I don't have a picture of it yet. I am going to use dye pens on the lily pads to bring out there designs. Once that is done, I will post another in progress picture.