Spray dyeing

Now there's two words I never thought to put together! Yet Claire and I got together last week to do that very thing.

First we created some stencils with our hot glue guns. This was surprisingly easy, even though my fine motor skills are not what they were. 

I'd drawn a design as a guide, which I put underneath my silicon mat.

Part made stencil showing lines underneath

Then I "drew" on the mat with the glue gun. The best technique was to work steadily, allowing a 5mm bead on the tip of the glue gun to fall onto the mat where you wanted it. Dragging the gun along really didn't work.


Claire making her stencil

And here is my finished stencil.

 

We each took a spray print from this one. You can see that the first print was a lot more spatter as the bottle got going, while the second one is much more even.

So lesson learned - do some test sprays until the bottle is spraying properly!

This image shows how we set up to spray.  We masked against overspray with pieces of cartridge paper (any serendipitous effects can be saved and used!) and sprayed on a glass board angled up on wood blocks at the back. As soon as we finished spraying, we laid the board flat, to avoid runs.

 
This is Claire's stencil, sprayed with the wet stencil beside it.

I had some stencils I made for the Fibrecircle playday with Dala Sun Colors last week. The one on the top left is Claire's new one.

By sheer coincidence, it's the same size as the top right hand one of mine, so we thought we try them together.

 They actually work together really well!

The sprayed media built up on the stencils, so we wondered if we could print from that, so we turned them over onto paper after we'd finished spraying.

Kinda, sorta! Not a wonderful print but I've seen worse. I like this one better, as it went over other earlier prints.

We also found that wiping off the stencils generated another kind of print.


Wiped stencil

Result of wiped stencil



We never waste a skerrick of media around here!

Claire also brought along some beautiful stencils to try. Some were laser cut cardboard and came with small cut out pieces that fitted inside the  open spaces.  The black circles were made from laser cut thin wood. We thought they would turn into a soggy mess with the wet media we were using, so we spent some time sealing them first.

Here's some of my prints from the stencils. We didn't use any of the inserts this time.

We found we could print from them too.

I like the way the circle one fits with the honeycomb one.
You can see Claire's printing on her blog here.

Another interesting day!