Sunday, September 17, 2006

Discharge results

Here's what a bleach pen did on 2 pieces of commerecially dyed black fabric.
Here the bleach pen has been applied to a fat quarter of my overdyed fabric. Note that although I overdyed with double strength black dye, the fabric has not come out black as such.
And here is the lattice piece when dry, along with another fat quarter. While you can see that there are other colours in the background, the discharged areas are predominantly red, orange and pale yellow shades. No blues, greens or purples, even those those colours were present. Hmmm. An interesting exercise, but it's not something I plan to do much of. Regrettably, there is not much bleach in a bleach pen, so this is not a very economical way to discharge colour either. Posted by Picasa

2 comments:

Deb R said...

Very nice! They look very batik-y.

LynnS said...

These turned out nicely! I love the 'fence'. Isn't discharge a weird process? Unless I work with my own fabrics, I can't second-guess the results!

If you don't want to keep buying the bleach pens, make your own drawing utensil. You can simulate one with a small plastic bottle with a screw-on lid with a tipped end (mostly found as equipment for paints). Keep your tip-end fairly small to control the amount of bleach flowing out of the bottle. This will also help to minimize the wicking onto your fabric.