After my dotty shirt I thought I would like to try a large area design. You don’t see these often in RTW fashion because fabric with very large repeats is hideously uneconomical to cut with a commercial process or it has to be pieced which is tricky to sew and therefore expensive. When you do see large area prints it is usually in the $$$ price bracket to allow for this. Here is an linen vest designed by Cynthia Ashby for the Artful Home, for the cool crowd at a cool $288.
Of course hand painting is ideal for these types of designs, so here is my first go at this.
I drew the outlines of the coloured shapes onto the fabric with an ordinary pencil and then coloured them in with thickened dye. I didn’t quite get the waves to meet perfectly at centre front and at the shoulder seams, although I tried. Next time I will need to measure and put in a couple of reference points instead of doing it freehand.
Then there was the painting. I used linen fabric which has quite a rough surface and painting the hard outlines of my shapes with a brush was slow and frustrating. You tend to get broken outlines which I didn’t want, so I used a very small, hard brush to get a hard edged line. It was painstaking work, load the brush, paint a cm or two before the line peters out, reload the brush. Next time I will cut a guide out of stencil material which will allow me to use a larger brush, which will make this much easier and quicker. I know that stencils give a nice clear outline with thickened dye on dry fabric, but don’t think that I need a stencil for the whole shape, just for the edge. This uses less of the stencil material, which is a consideration because I am down to my last sheet and getting more during lockdown is difficult. I could use sticky tape, but that is very geometrically straight, not a nice organic hand drawn line. Or maybe I could use a permanent marker??? — Radical, but worth trying. Not sure how it will wash but then there are special markers for fabric which are supposed to last.
Once you have done the outlines, you can use a large brush to slap on dye in between them which is ridiculously fast and easy. I used two different blues for a little extra interest. At the end I brushed over the colour blend areas with water to get them to flow into each other. I should have used soda ash solution to fix more of the paint as a lot washed out. Still, it looks ok and the colours won’t wash out any further.
When the painting of all the garment pieces was finished I covered the wet fabric and left it overnight, then washed it out,and dried it before sewing it up. With the medium weight linen there was some fraying at the edges, so sewing it up before washing it might have been better.
The fabric used was more of the Ikea linen curtain I used for the spotty shirt. It is 2.5m x 150 wide and there is still enough left for a boxy top, so 2 shirts and a top is not bad for an outlay of $24. Great for my experimentations when I don’t want to risk expensive material. The pattern was again the Cap Sleeve Shirt from the Assembly Line, slightly modified this time. The details are as usual on PatternReview.
https://sewing.patternreview.com/review/pattern/177527
Painting Notes
- Fabric was medium weight, 100% linen from an Ikea curtain.
- Soaked the linen in soda ash solution (1/2 to 1 cup per 4L water), hung up to dry leaving the soda ash in the fabric. I left if for more than a week, which makes the linen beautifully soft and drapey.
- Painted with Drimarene K (you could use Procion MX if easier obtainable) thickened with sodium alginate gel. Mix 1-2 teaspoons of sodium alginate powder per 250ml of water in a blender. Leave overnight for bubbles to subside.
- Pour enough gel for painting job into a bowl, add Drimarene K powder and mix. Brush onto the fabric.
- Cover to keep dye wet and leave overnight to cure, then wash out and sew up.