Play Day

Last January, I began going through Pam Carriker's book, above, for a quick 30-day journaling experience.  In reality, I did the first few exercises, which included making my own little journal (which was more complicated than you might think and ended up being smaller than I would have liked) and a few experiments with design basics.  Honestly, the first few exercises were not very inspiring for me but since I had resolved to try this, I pushed myself to do it by the book.  But of course, I lost interest, got involved in other projects and things I was more interested in, and never got through the 30 days! 

So after all the Christmas wrapping paper, bows and New Year's eve party paraphernalia were stashed away and that worktable downstairs (which had become the wrapping station and party snack center) was all clean again, I dug the book out and started anew for the new year.

I recently saw a very cool tutorial on using resists with stamps and watercolor effects, so that was in the back of my mind when I started the next exercise, which was analogous colors, something I enjoy working with.  I tried not to overthink anything, but quickly drew some designs and words across the page with white crayon, then took some water-soluble crayons and drew some wavy lines across them, then blended them with water.  Here's the resulting journal page:

I was itching to do a few on fabric, so I pulled a couple of small pieces of washed white cotton fabric from my stash and got out my stamps and bottle of Batik-Ez.  For my first attempt, I tried a somewhat small, detailed stamp, painting the Batik-Ez on with a foam brush.  After it dried, I used the Caran D'Ache neo-color crayons to add blues and greens.  I blended these with water, let it dry, and heat-set it with an iron.

While that was drying, I started a second fabric piece below.  This time, I decided to put down a wash of yellow Setacolor paints before using the resist, so that the resisted areas would be yellow instead of white.  I also used a larger stamp, which I dipped directly into the resist.

After the resist dried, I sponged on blue paint.

Here's what the fabric looked like after all the paint was applied and dry.  I was going for more of a blue and yellow contrast look, but the Setacolor paints I used are transparent, so the yellow showed through and created shades of green.

After I washed out the resist, more of the yellow showed through to look like this:

The smaller, first piece looked like this:

I have some new fabrics with interesting textures now, but the results were not completely what I hoped.  The smaller, more detailed stamp did not leave a clear resisted impression on the fabric of the first piece, and the Caran D'Ache crayons are not as permanent as the paints, so a lot washed out, even after heat setting.  The results are a very subtle design.

With the larger stamp, the results were a little better, but the stamp still blurred in places (maybe because the resist was smudged by the sponge when I added the paint?) and the transparent colors blended, which was not really the look I was going for.

But I had a fun morning playing with my art supplies, I have some unique fabrics to use in new projects, and I have some additional experience to draw on when doing surface design resists in the future.