The starting point for this piece was to dye some fabric. When you set out to dye there’s usually loads of chemicals around so you can easily do more than 1 piece, even if they’re large like these. So I had a complete day of fun and decided mess. I prepared the fabric by soaking in soda ash and drying. I then used squeezy bottles and old credit cards to scrape and layer the thickened procion dye onto the cloth (thickened with manutex). The first photo shows the initial shapes of the talking heads, together with patterning taken from one of the hats in the gallery collection.
The dye results were not as expected, and were rather lighter than I’d hoped. I used black, deep red, and dark blue. My aim was to lighten by various means after stitching and have the figures as lighter. I either have to overdye to make them darker, or to rethink – perhaps reversing the idea so that I have dark figures against a lighter background.
Be the first to comment