Play Date with Beth

Beth and I got together on Saturday for a wax and dye day.  Beth wanted to try a technique she found here on Edwina Mackinnon's blog.  Beth had fallen in love with the brush marks on the finished fabric. 

 She read and re-read the blog to figure out how it was done, prepared the brushes, mixed the dyes, and sent me the instructions.  I showed up. What a slacker! Beth will post her own results but here is my process and result.

I started out with a yard of white cotton fabric, pinned it on Beth's dye board, and spritzed it with soda water.

 I brushed the fabric with lemon yellow, golden yellow, turquoise, and basic blue.  I tried to leave white spaces and brush with a light stroke to leave brush marks.  I added some blue splatters for interest.

Here is a close up.
There are no pictures for the next couple of steps. We wrapped our dyed fabric in plastic and let it batch for hour.  Then we draped the batched fabric over a drying rack, turned on multiple fans, and let the fabric completely dry.

If you look really, really close, you can see the wax stripes that I have brushed on the dyed, batched, dried fabric.  I used a foam brush that Beth had notched.

Next step was to coat the dyed, batched, dried and waxed fabric with thickened dye.  I was going to only use Fuchsia but I ran out and Beth had leftover Navy Blue so I used some of it too.  I thought it would add some lovely depth.

Once again we wrapped the fabric in plastic and batched.  And there are no pictures of my washing and washing out all of that dye, hot-water rinsing to get the wax out, washing it in the washing machine, drying it in the dyer, and ironing it.

But here are the finished results--one large and several small detail shots showing all the brush stokes.  I am in love!  I think it is the best fabricI have ever done.