Archive | October, 2024

Ghost printing yields pale, delicate results. Like this.

All you do is run clear printing paste through a dirty stencil. The paste picks up the color remaining in the crevices and dilutes it to a lovely pastel.

Isn’t it pretty?

Deconstructed screen printing (DSP) is quite different. Thickened print past, usually colored, is drawn onto a clean screen. (Or maybe stenciled on, or maybe applied evenly and then altered by lifting some of the paste  with various textured items.) Mine was drawn on: simple black lines. This was done at the tail end of my previous dying session and allowed to dry.

Once dry the paste will act as a resist. You can pull a color of paste through and the areas with the dried paste will act as a resist and will print as white. You can see this in the photo below, looking at the left side. My first pulls were with olive colored paste.

As you continue to pull, the pulled paste will break down (“deconstruct”) the dried paste design and it will begin to color the edge of the white lines, giving them halos, see above.

And then it will break down some more and print its original color. You can see that below in the dull gold areas. The lines primarily printed as black.

These will be fun fabrics to use!

Ellen Lindner

I sure do have fun dying and printing fabric!

As you can see, I make no attempt at keeping my clothing clean. (Usually around this point my stomach begins to look quite colorful, as well.)

It all starts by soaking my fabrics in a soda ash solution. Once they’re line dried they’re ready to react with the dye.

In addition to the plain white fabric you’d expect, I also soak some previously printed/dyed fabrics that need some over dying. Sometimes they just need a little something more, but at other times they need the “completely cover this ugliness with a dark color” treatment. No worries. It all becomes useful in the end.

I did something new with this dye session: I overdyed some commercial ombre fabrics. They turned out beautifully. I’ll definitely do this again, although the commercial fabric frayed much more than I’m used to, so I probably won’t ever use it in a raw-edged application. The top fabric below is one such fabric. I like it a lot. But, I also like some intentionally messy ombre, so that’s what I aimed for with the bottom fabric. I like it just as much.

In the photo below, the purple fabric on the right is a commercial ombre. The yellow one on the left I did completely. It has a few errors, but will still be very useful. I LOVE the way these two look together! I’m thinking they’ll end up in the same quilt.

I dyed this one myself. MAYBE it can be included too. (Although it may be too much of a good thing.)

I have many more results to show you in upcoming posts.

Which one of these is your favorite?

Ellen Lindner