There are various ways to paint or print on fabric. For example, you can use screen printing ink, thinned down acrylic paint or thickened fabric dye. There are advantages and disadvantages with all of them, but this post is about painting with dye.
Although this is quite difficult technically, the result is very rewarding if large areas need to be painted, because it leaves a soft hand just like any commercially printed fabric. Small block prints or stencils with screen printing ink are ok, but large stencilled areas feel hard and plasticky. So for those the thickened dye technique is much better.
When using dye to paint, technique is important and I owe a lot to the info on Paula Burch’s website. When I first attempted painting with dye I made a couple of errors, that resulted in a disappointing outcome. The tee below was painted with black dye on white. But as you can see, the black has faded completely to green as soon as I washed it, and the white fabric has turned slightly grey, although it is not noticeable in the photo.
The problems were as follows:
- I used xanthan as a thickening agent. Paula recommends sodium alginate, as starches and other seaweed agents can interfere with the dye bonding with the fibres
- I did not keep the dye on the fabric wet for long enough, tried to dry it too fast. The bonding process between dye and fabric takes place only as long as the dye is wet and stops when dry. This means a lot of the dye washes out if the bonding process was too short, and the colour will be much lighter, or even change completely if the dye was a mix of different colours, like black would be. I could never understand why the dye deactivates so quickly when in contact with Soda ash (1 hour), and you can’t use it anymore to paint, and yet the deactivated dye needs to stay wet to bond to the fabric. If you paint deactivated dye on fabric, most or all of it will wash out. All I can think is that if the the dye was put on the fabric in an active state, it still keeps bonding to the fabric, even though it is deactivated. Don’t ask me how or why, but it works. Proof of the pudding…
What to do when painting with dye
I have updated these instructions, because some of it was wrong in light of later tests and insights. The changes are in bold type.
- Make up thickening agent, sodium alginate 2-3 level teaspoons in 500ml of water, slug of metho, blend in blender. The metho is not strictly necessary, but it stops the mixture from going off and smelling bad due to bacterial growth. Do the blending well in advance, as the mixture frothes up and needs to settle to make a clear gel.
- Dissolve 1/4-1/2 cup of Soda ash in 2 litres of warm water, then soak fabric in Soda ash solution for at least 5 minutes and wring out. Dye does run when fabric is too wet. It should be damp only. Fabric can also be dried with Soda ash staying in the fabric, which gives much better control over painting with the dye. My test of stencilling with the dye worked really well with a clearly defined outline, which is impossible when the fabric is sopping wet.
- Mix alginate gel with dye powder to make paint. I use Drimarene K powder, but Procion MX is also good and cheaper.
- You might like to try what you want to paint out on sketch pad or butchers paper, and adjust the effect if necessary. Fabric is more expensive than paper for experimenting.
- After painting is finished I tried spraying more Soda ash on the fabric, fearing that not all of the thickened, gloopy dye would have been in contact with sufficient sod ash solution to deactivate it. You don’t want paint still active when the fabric is rinsed, because it will discolour the unpainted fabric. But spraying liquid onto the dye resulted in it running, so that is not a good idea. I am still experimenting with sod ash dried into the fabric and how dye will behave when it is washed.
- Keep painted areas wet for as long as possible, at least 8 hours, to keep the bonding process between dye and fabric going. Covering with plastic is recommended. I use a corflute sheet as a base to paint on and experimented with covering the painted fabric with another sheet to delay drying. Result is pending.
- Wash in cold, then hot water, finally with detergent
- This process needs patience, because you can’t use the fabric until the next day at the earliest
But when you do all the right things technically, the colour is amazing, true to the colour of the paint I mixed up and really strong. Here are some of my samples on scrap fabric trying out the technique. I just painted blobs, this was all about colour and the hand of the fabric after being painted, not about shape. So soft to the touch, you can’t feel the paint at all. Now just watch me using this to stencil !
Update:
Even if you don’t do all the right things technically and the outcome is disappointing, it is still almost impossible to make anything truly ugly with the brilliant colours of fibre-reactive dye. I painted these pillow slips, the dye ran because the fabric was too wet and I sprayed on even more sod ash solution afterwards. Also the fabric was heavily crinkled after I wrung it out and I did not try to smooth it before painting, so the paint pooled in the creases and the paint blobs look like wrinkled caterpillars. Not the effect I was going for!
But even though, sewn up into pillow slips it still looks pretty ok on my bed. Although the long, skinny pillows I covered with the fabric pictured above look much better. The reason the dye did not run as much on those although the fabric was just as wet is because it was much thicker and a denser weave.