mono printing

My friend Diane (aka yarngoddess) is having great fun doing deconstructed screen printing and has inspired me to get back into the studio. I made up my thickened dye print paste but decided to mono print with it instead. My print surface is an A4 sheet of thin acrylic which I cleaned with a baby wipe. When I rolled my paste, the surface resisted and dots started to appear. The longer I waited, the more dots. The vertical stripes in the greenish piece are from my folding the wet print in plastic. Next time I will roll instead.

Iused cotton soaked in soda ash and wrapped the printed fabric in black plastic, then left it for 48 hours. That was the hardest part.

Of course not everything went swimmingly. I normally print with acrylic paint (mixed with a fabric medium) and so don't need to use gloves. I forgot that procion dyes skin and had lovely bright red finger tips. Then I put the pasted acrylic sheet down, dye side up and pressed with my hand. I had a lovely red print on the palm of my hand. Tried to wash it out with soap but no luck. There was a bottle of synthapol on the sink so I tried that. The dye washed right out of my hand. I don't know whether it only worked because there was no soda ash in my dye paste or maybe synthrapol just works, but either way it was much kinder to my skin than the stuff I normally use.