Dyes or inks?

Recently I have been playing with surface design by scraping and stamping onto cotton with screen printing inks. Inks, because that is what I had to hand when I decided to play one day and I liked the result. My 20/12 Metamorphosis and Vilakazi Street were both made that way. Last week I spent time with friends in a church hall playing with thickened procion dyes. The piece on the left is screen inks and on the right dyes. I deliberately put heavier stamping on the dyed one but otherwise in terms of colour brightness, nothing in it. The inked piece has a very slight stiffening to the hand of the fabric but nothing that troubles me or makes the slightest problem when handstitching. It is certainly not plasticised. Both media mix well and give the same transparancy. (I mix transparent extender into the inks, again straight from a jar, to further increase transparency if required.)

So which will I use in the future? Well, the screen ink process involves me pinning the fabric straight from the bolt onto my print surface, mixing the inks straight from a pot on a perspex sheet, scraping with a credit card and stamping ( I have been using stamps cut with an x- acto knife from a WH Smith eraser) and leaving it. It is dry in a couple of hours max and ready to use.

The dying involves making print paste and dye solutions and mixing them, then mixing the resulting paste colours. The fabric needs to be presoaked in soda ash. Both of those processes require the use of a mask. Then I pin scrape and stamp as with inks but then must wrap in plastic and cure for at least four hours, ideally overnight. Then there are several washings out by hand and by machine with synthropol and then it has to be either tumble dried or my preference is to drip dry overnight. Thats a lot more than two hours from jar to useage.

Screen inks for me then, at least for the fabrics which suit the background of my current series. I am currently using inks from Thermofax Screens. That said, the next 20/12 ( due for reveal on 12th July) will use the dyed fabric you can see above, but with a section scraped over with inks to give a colour closer to Metamorphosis.

Metamorphosis



Vilakazi Street