Favorite Background Technique

Now THIS is fun! Scoop up some thickened dye with a stiff squeegee (think large credit card,) and smear it onto some fabric. It spreads into glorious color and makes a very satisfying swishing noise at the same time.

I started with yellow and then added yellow-orange,(which looks dark orange when it’s this thick.)

But, it DID look mighty orange.  Next, I added orange. Hmm, there was no color change. Then, I realized that my yellow-orange had been contaminated with deep orange.  Oops.  This is going to be very orange!

Finally, I added red and got this, (still wet.)

When dry it looked like this, which was more orange than I really wanted. (No surprise.)

No worries. I over dyed it and got some very useful fabric. (I took a photo, but it doesn’t really show the difference.  You’ll have to trust me on this one.)

So, my overly orange fabric isn’t a very good example of this great technique.  Here’s another one I did the same way.  Can you see how I just swept the color on?  And that became the “pattern” for the piece.

See the finished fabric – one of my favorites.

If you’re a dyer you’ll definitely want to try this technique when creating a background.

Ellen Lindner