Drawing Ink & Dying Fabric

I got my prints out from last week and using my screen, I printed discharge on top of them via the plan I made at the end of last weeks session. As I left these to dry I did some more drawing on the screen to put a background onto my final six dyed samples which would then be discharged onto and then printed over the top.

I started like before and sectioned off my blank screen before drawing with the dye. Now, unfortunately, because I had just used the discharge paste on my previous samples, I made a mistake and used the discharge paste rather than the manutex paste to transfer my drawing onto my fabric samples. This resulted in a disaster.

The above left photo is my design done in drawing ink onto a blank screen. The above right photo should show my design perfectly transferred onto my fabric sample but instead it shows just a stripe and a feint pattern. The discharge paste is effectively bleach so it will not work in transferring the dye to my fabric. I thought about carrying on and printing over the top as I might get a nice effect but as it was a blank screen I’ve effectively just bleached the whole thing so there will be no patterns on there that could result in me getting a nice print if I printed over the top. I am not going to steam these samples just in case the feint patterns that are there happen to disappear, I am going to keep them as they are in my technical file so that I can refer back to them.

As I had just used my last six dyed fabric samples I couldn’t do anymore printing. I decided not to waste my day and so I cut up and dyed twenty two more samples so that I wouldn’t face running out again.