Painting Fabric

After borrowing Mickey Lawler's book - Skydyes - from our Fibre Arts Group Library in February, I got inspired and  I decided to dye some fabric with Setacolours.   I had some motivation (besides playing) since I am starting a mermaid piece and wanted to use hand dyed skies and water.   Of course it required first purchasing more colours of dye and some good white cotton fabric.   A couple of weeks ago, I sat down and started painting.   I have done some dyeing before but tried to approach this as an experiment.   Over the week,  I had several sessions with the paints trying different brushes and colour combinations.  I dampened the fabric and used sponge brushes for broad strokes and some watercolour brushes for finer details.   I used coarse salt on some of them to create movement (sometimes got more than I bargained for).   One thing I learned is to keep the colours clean or the whole piece will end up looking muddy (this happened to me before!).  I loved the way colours ran into each other - as long as I was careful about which colours to place next to each other.    I think ML discusses this in her book.   BTW, I think ML's book is well worth purchasing.   I found it very informative with lots of practical suggestions.    Sometimes just looking and the beautiful results of someone's work can motivate us.


I hope to use one of these as a one-piece background for my mermaid.  Who knows where the others will turn up.  I tried experimenting with some darker colours for rocks as well with interesting results but haven't photographed them yet.