It’s All In The Mordant!

Grab a cuppa Joe and come on in! I can’t possibly talk with you without mine!

You all probably know by now that it’s the process I love so much. In part, that’s because experimenting is a big part of that and surprise and/or serendipity are often the result. I decided to experiment with a different mordanting process that a friend told me about. This time I mordanted cotton in potassium alum acetate and sodium acetate.  I’ve used both of them before but not together. Added to this is some ferrous sulfate and some copper sulfate. Don’t ask me the proportions because I  blew it and will have to figure that out better than I did. After soaking overnight, I saw that I must have made it too strong so there were brownish marks here and there that looked like rust.  Not a big deal to me, but I added more water to my solution for the next batch. Now, I didn’t listen well enough to my friend and forgot that she told me to wait some time before washing. And below are the results of my deaf ear.

I won’t be washing out  the next rest of this batch for at least 3 weeks now!

Next, I wanted to achieve something extremely textural, so I opted to overprint some that I didn’t think much of (well, also because I’m out of plain white fabric – it’s on order.)

Same batch of mordant with some brown marks.  The bottom one has a huge splotch from the overly strong mordant. I also sprinkled some red seeds from a sumac seed head all over the fabrics.

These are excellent for textile collage! They’ll act as blenders and they remind me of batiks, that all-over textural print.

My next foray was into the more abstract where I met with some more pleasant surprises. The technique is actually a form of shibori with some folding and clamping.

 I love the combination of rust from the metals, which are all tin can lids. of which I now have a growing collection. And here’s a peek at something I’m working on now.

Linking up with Nina Marie for Off The Wall Friday.  I think she has a pot of coffee on too! Thanks for stopping by!

And thanks for stopping by!