So yesterday everyone was out except for me ... but I had fabric. I had a design and paint and I had a screen. I had a big outdoor table, all to myself.
I hopped straight into it.
Luckily I had cooked a massive pot of soup in the morning because I was pooped by the end of the day!
So, this is a five colour design, with two sets of two and three quarters pattern repeats spread over two pieces of fabric.
The fabric is an ivory cotton from Homecraft Textiles. It is quite tightly woven, crisp and stiff, but it's not too bad with a quality like a coupla steps up from calico.I started out by cutting a roughish dress outline, using my tried and true sheath dress pattern Burda 8511, I did this mostly to gauge out the size of the design, how it would look proportionally on a dress.
The colours: I'm such a scrooge and was really economical here! I started out with the palest colour and then continued adding to it to make the subsequent colours. I only have a little bit of the last colour leftover so this approach really did make the most of my paint.
First colour, Mustard (yellow + teensiest touch of black):
I was totally in the zone and forgot to take a picture after the second colour! woops!
The second colour is Olive (the first colour mustard + teensiest touches of blue and black). I had overestimated quantities here and made a lot of Olive, so divided this to make both the third and fourth colours....
Caramel (the 2nd colour olive + mid red)
Dark Olive (the 2nd colour olive + a touch more black)
lastly Chocolate (the remains of the caramel and dark olive mixed together)
Thoughts:
Far from perfect, but I'm pretty happy with it. I like the late 60's/early 70's vibe it's giving me. These are my earliest years so I'm drawn to this time :)
Sometimes, my first print after a colour change is terrible and comes out scratchy no matter how carefully I try to flood the screen. This happened twice during this project, and also happened with my poppy print. Meaning that statistically speaking, I have a 50% chance of a good first print, subsequent prints seem to go on more easily, smoothly and cleanly. So to save myself tears, in the future I'm going to have a sacrificial scrap piece of fabric sitting on the side for that pesky first print.
The colours were supposed to be more transparent; I added what seemed to be heaps of transparency medium to the darker colours! but they are just NOT all that transparent. Disappointed! Some of the overlaps have masked the underneath colour completely. I'm going to check with my teacher a good transparency ratio, or maybe the future I should minimise overlapping of motifs.
So eventually this will be a dress, but not yet. I'm a-pondering it for a while.
...
With a pensive silence and furrowed brow.
...
It's funny how easily we can slice into shop-bought printed fabric without a second thought but when it is your very own precious print, cutting into it is terrifying!
For now I'm embarking on a couple of quickie wardrobe fixer-ups, plus now I've done this project at home I have to cut some more stencils before my next class... later, dudes! :)