surprise results
plodding on with the eco-dyeing i am preparing a piece to use on a little cloth-weave bag i'm making - it's a piece of beige linen which i have 'shibori' dyed (posh word for tie-dyeing!) in apple bark dye, i only left it in the bath for one evening so it came out quite subtle - i wanted to emphasise the paler inner part of the diamond design so i spotted it with lemon juice and steam ironed it - this gave a neat pale circle ...... until i ironed it more and the circles turned darker! on the left of the photo
so i left some pale and played around with a few more drops on the dark circles which got more interesting, although that doesn't show up in the photo
even stranger ... when i ironed the whole thing the pale spots stayed the same but the background areas developed more detail - and the front is much darker than the back - i bet that if i try to do it again i won't manage!
anyway that's stages 1 & 2, i aim to add more to it but haven't decided what yet
PS - silly me remembered that we used to use lemon juice as invisible ink - it was invisible when applied then you heated it and it turned brown - so if i just want to use it as a bleach i have to remember not to use a hot iron afterwards
Comments
(now I'm going to have to try it:-)
'Sticky'-it was really interesting to see your piece, as I got a similar result last summer, only the reverse with the dots, from soaking a tshirt strewn with pre-'82 pennies in a tub of dilute walnut'n'vinegar water. It was in there for a good month (out on the picnic table, so it kept getting diluted!) I expected the copper of the pennies to leave a darker spot, but instead they seemed to act as resists. The whole shirt's kind of a pale, warm yellow/brown...not a lot of contrast but still pretty.
Isn't it funny how things sometimes just don't turn out anything like you think they will? :-)
Thanks for sharing!