Wheat flour resist on fabric 1 (and given up resisting a self-portrait)

I realise I haven't got many photos of me on this blog - my excuse is that I'm the one behind the camera.  But I can hold the camera and take a photo of myself, it's not that hard.  And I figure I'm getting a bit old for the self-conscious, avoid photos at all cost act.    So that's me folks, getting ready for some surface design play!  

I was out for a walk this morning when Hubby drove by with the kids in the car - he was taking them off for a couple of hours - excellent!!  I almost ran back home because I'd had this surface design trial in mind, but I wanted to do it unassisted by children.  I'm a mess magnet at the best of times, and this promised to be a disaster if the midget mess-magnets helped too.

It's a sunny day so I decided to work outside to keep mess to a minimum.  I pinned out my bits of hand-dyed fabric out on a polystyrene sheet, and spread out my reference book.

Are you looking for an excellent surface design book?  Art Cloth:  A Guide to Surface Design for Fabric by Jane Dunnewold, you won't regret it.  There are soooo many things in here I want to try.

Today I was trying a wheat flour resist.  It's easy - mix up flour and water.  I started with a cup of plain white wheat flour.  I ended up using about 3/4 cup of cold water.  You want a batter-like consistency.

I don't own a squeegee so I used an old credit card!  Pin your fabric at one end, smooth a thin layer over the fabric and then pin down the other sides.  Lumps are a bit of a problem, so keep your batter as lump free as possible.

So when they are nicely covered you can get to work making marks in the resist.  I had plenty of resist left over after covering the fabric.  My fabric size is probably a bit more than a fat quarter.

Hubby owns an engineering shop - very convenient for pipe off cuts!

I wrote in it using the blunt end of a kebab stick.  I think my resist layer was a little thick - it wasn't as easy or as clear as I thought it would be.  I was going to wait and try more writing when it had dried a little more, but I forgot.

I learnt to have a rag handy for wiping your stamp off between stamps.  If you don't, the print gets bigger and more uneven as the goop layer on the stamp gets thicker and picks up more of the resist.  You can see that happening above with the row of circles stamped from left to right.

All stamped and done.  I left some blank areas to play with the 'crackle' effect where you scrunch it up once it's dry and then your dye/paint/discharge mix goes in the crackle lines.

Now it has to dry completely.  Tomorrow I'll be doing the next step.  Stay tuned!