Sunprinting with Dye Na Flo Saturday, Aug 2 2008

I gave sunprinting a go today, using Jacquard Dye Na Flo. (Cerulean — my favorite blue!) It’s really easy, but you must work fast. I was going to paint the dye on with a paint brush, but the color was intense, the painting was slow and I am cheap. So I poured a fair amount of the paint into water, dunked the fabric until it was covered (I like the low-immersion look, so there was variation in paint intensity).

Now the fast part. I had to get the fabric flat and toss on some objects to block the sun. I had these stencil fleur de lis that I’d found on the clearance shelf at Hobby Lobby, and I scattered them about. Because they were lightweight and the wind started to pick up, I put stones on top of the larger stencils. The smaller ones were on there own.

Next, I soaked another piece of fabric in the remaining paint solution (I told you I was cheap). That was scrunched up, spritzed down and left to dry.  I hope that it will have nice variegation in the color. (I’ll show you the results later.)

About two hours of sun later, I removed the stencils from the sunprint fabric and got a chance to see the results. I am pleased. Next time, I have a few other steps to improve the process:

Put the fabric on a nice flat surface (I lay it on concrete, which created some pocking in the dye. It might be good to lay it on newspaper, or perhaps watercolor paper that I could use on another project.

THINK about the layout instead of scattering. If I had actually thought about what I wanted this to look like (maybe enough space between the images to cut them out individually or something like that, I may have been happier with the results.

Remember that whatever you use to hold the fabric in place (I used rocks this time) will leave a mark — so choose something cool.

Below are a couple images of my attempt.

Notice the marks in the right corners. It's from a rock (top) and a spray bottle (bottom)

Close up of the sunprint