Studio Notes 08/08/20 - It's been a long time coming but I finally got another sunny day to try testing Jacquard Solarfast dyes.
It’s been a long time coming but I finally got another sunny day to try testing Jacquard Solarfast dyes.* I started these tests way back in June but wanted to see if they could be improved.
When some good weather finally arrived back in June, I hustled to try out my Solarfast dyes as it had been a really long time since I’d bought them and I hadn’t done as much as I wanted to with them.
I really didn’t have anything planned for this, and that week I was busy casting my 250 pewter coin.
I scrambled to find something to use as a stencil, and found a cut paper stencil I made back in February.
So to get a bit of variety, I used the negative pieces of the stencil on an old white t-shirt and used the positive piece of the stencil on an old grey t-shirt, and I really wanted to see what the avocado dye would look like. In short, it was a massive disappointment!
The black, yellow and green dyes developed beautifully, but avocado was a weird mess.
Stencil with avocado and yellow Solarfast. Out in the sun. Darkening. Second print with yellow and black on grey cotton. Darkening.
The grey cotton piece was the better of the two – so much so that I tried to go back in with dilute black dye to improve it, but it looked like a lost cause and I didn’t get any photographs of the finished result. Then, when I saw the sun come out (over a month later!) I thought I’d give it another last-minute, poorly-thought out attempt at filling it in with dilute green mixed with black applied with a squeeze bottle.
Basically, I ended up with something that looks like the Ecaf Mammy. So that’s not getting to see the light of the internet. Although it wasn’t a great improvement from what I did earlier, I worked out some new ways of applying the dye that I hadn’t tried before, and at least I’ve added some techniques since my first shot with Lumi Inkodye.
Oh, and now I can say with certainty that you shouldn’t buy that avocado dye.
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