A Thousand Paper Cranes - Week 2

This week we tried tie-dying.
We started with natural cotton tote bags, a good strength that will give a good quality product.
The tables were pushed together to create 2 work stations – one for tie-ing, the other for dye-ing! The tie-ing table soon became covered in glass beads, buttons, wooden beads, poly-balls, pebbles, string, elastic bands and clothes pegs.
Then the tie-ing experiments began.

Some bags were folded in a concertina pattern, and pegged together. This would give a neat, straight line effect. Others were filled with buttons and beads and pebbles, each one tied into place with an elastic band. This would make the fabric crease and fold in a bunch, and give a starburst effect.

Some of the thin cotton fabric (left over from last week) was also tied, to see how the effects of the same techniques would vary when using a different type of material.

Once the bags and fabric pieces were tied they took on the appearance of weird little alien life-forms.

So, now to move over to the dye-ing table.

This table was covered in pots containing dyes in a variety of colours, and brushes of several different sizes. The dye was brushed onto the fabric, wherever it could reach. In the past, some of us have tried dipping the fabric into large bowls of dye. It was interesting to compare the 2 different methods. Dip dyeing covers large areas of the fabric more quickly, but is a less controlled method. Painting the dye on with brushes takes longer, and allows for more choice of which colour to put where. This can lead to more intricate designs.

Also, it’s a less messy technique, and the fabric dries much more quickly. Dip dyed fabric can take several days to dry out. Our brushed bags were dry before the end of the session.

And the results could be revealed!

The thin cotton fabric looked great and had the expected tie-dyed look. 

The fabric of the bags hadn’t absorbed the dye as much, so the colour had only taken exactly where it had been painted, and hadn’t soaked in to the folds.

One bag that had been tied with many buttons and beads had fantastic starburst effects spotted over the white background.

And another had dried quickly enough so that it could be worked into with fabric painting skills learnt last week.