Wow Fabric in an Altered Book

Lesson 16 from Elizabeth's Altered Book tutorial is due.  It is all about adding fabric to the books and includes fabric dyeing, resists, cloth beads and other embellishments. This series has been way more work than I ever thought but I am happy I have done as much as I have and I'm even happier that I like this book. I think we are nearing the end and I'm looking forward to going through each page, adding the necessary continuity to the various pages and putting it all in place and fixing a nice cover for it.  A finished project!  shh, I mustn't jinx that motivation!

I have dyed and painted on fabrics before.

So for this project I mostly wanted to use fabric that was already available for the book.  I just freehand cut or sliced cotton fabric, most of which I have dyed.  I had a momentary thought of making a leaf stamp for a background layer but I'm realizing I like simple.

I gessoed the page remembering to incorporate the page beside it.  I just used acrylic folk paint which I watered down and kinda blended to try to match the green on the left hand page.  I dabbed the brush in and around the green areas.  Snoopy hasn't figured too prominently in the book but I have saved bits of the gang here and there.  The ducky ribbon did not work on the preceding page so I peeled it off and used the gel medium to try to get it on the tornado page. lol  hmm, I might have trimmed it this second time. ?  Dare I rip again???

I need to work on my tree shape but the beauty of using fabric or even paper strips is you can play, position and remove more effectively than you can with brush strokes!

This trunk needed more height but I ran out of page and I need to loose the hour glass shape!  lol  It is all glued down with gel medium and this one is Golden Soft Gel (Semi Gloss).

The idea for this came from a colour wheel made from pencil crayon points I saw during this past week.  I also have somewhere an old kindergarten art page master that uses a basic tree shape and you added construction paper leaves.  If I find it I think I'll clone it as it could be a stencil, a mask, a ???.  And it is not hour glass shaped but more vase shaped.  Now what if...

I'm sure my fellow Needle and Thread workers have lots more good ideas.

wow, what if...

Yesterday I was trying all my primary and secondary colours on plain sketchpad paper.  I wanted a reference for exact hues when I wanted to use say, red, which can be a blue red (cool) or an orange red (warm). When I got all my colours on the papers I had a what if moment!  What if I put the colours on cloth?   Then I remembered that I had bought dyes and paints for fabrics. 

Dying fabric is not the same as painting fabric.  The colours adhere differently.  I wanted to see what painting would show as I have dye samples already.  I have a couple of dye posts under my To Dye For page.

So I unearthed my Pebo Setacolours and a few odd jars of fabric paint.  I did try a few acrylic paints meant for paper.  I wish I had also got white in Setacolour as it would be very useful to have the lighter, clearer options.


Here is what I discovered.

My favorite colour.  I did try to get orange by mixing the 2 different reds with yellow. 

Red has more variations that I'd have thought possible!

Purple is tricky.  The light area on the fabric is watered down lots. I tried mixing blue and red watercolours to get a violet. I need to spend some time mixing colours because when I did get the setacolours it was with the idea of mixing other options. But it was recommended that purple be specifically bought.  I can see why.

I'm not a baby blue person but I'm gaining an appreciation for cobalt blue.  Aqua is another favorite colour.
I did a small area of dirty water.  lol  Even the dirty water is useful for backgrounds.  But straight craft acrylics are very stiff.  The fabric paints are much softer.

The inks tend to bleed a lot and they are very matt.  Hmm, I wonder if you added some glitzy stuff???

My biggest surprise was how well fabric paint stamped. These are very cheap kid's foam stamps.   I see no value in painting backgrounds when dyeing is softer and easier.  But dyes would probably bleed in making marks so paint is the way to go!  Even the craft acrylics would be useful for stamping, especially if one used a light hand on applying the acrylic and in pressing the stamp.

This seems like a lot of work but really it is helping me become more familiar with the various mediums and how they look and react.  I'd like to think these are warm up exercises before I take the plunge.  Perhaps it could also be stalling but I'm beginning to get the urge to actually try all these options out.  And that will be a good thing!

I'm linking up to TN&TN so if you'd like to see what my neighbours are doing, please click on the link.