Paint versus Dyed

Now this has been interesting. Horribly time consuming and is going to have to be shelved for a spell while I tie-up loose ends in real-life for the nonce.

Here you get an idea of where the dhoti stamping and experiment has actually gone in terms of production, success and the overall result.

It's very eerily "period".

Even the flaws are period. Perhaps not achieved in quite the same way, I must hasten to add. Not many fabric printers had a paint brush leap/roll out of their hands while working on the pieces but there is the odd dye blemish found on the extent examples too.

On the dhoti, I firstly stamped the motif section by section and "block" by "block". When dry I ironed the area to set it and then painted over it by hand to refine some of the edges, fill in the under colour and add more weight to the dye. Allowed that to dry over several hours or days, depending on my schedule and the design. Then moved onto the next area. I did decide to leave a couple of sections as single stamped sections with the minimum of over-painting to see what happened when the fabric was washed. Curiously enough this too resulted in an amazing echo of the period fabrics!

As I said.

Labour intensive and time devouring!

Am at the point that I have to make a decision regarding the elephants and the medium I'll use for those blocks. Am inclining to carving these from lino as is usual and will be popping those in over the following months.

The dhoti border as featured here will then have to be duplicated along the opposite edge and the motifs for the fields applied. I very much doubt that I'll get this all done for Ro's wedding in August but intend to go as far as I possibly can. Dylon has impressed me in this area. Not entirely and it certainly has not won back my shopping Pounds! But it's done it's job.

I did discover that the paint "thinned" slightly after it had been washed and softened the initial intensity of the applied colour/paint. Not unattractive but it's not a 100% convincing substitute for a dyed piece of work. It will however "work" from a six inch distance check. I was thrilled to see how little paint or dye washed out while the dhoti was being washed in the washing machine!

So absolutely a keeper concept for those idle times when I have nothing to do or more likely, want to hide away from reality.