Not a Good Day to Dye (pun!)

Today I tried my luck with printing the dyes. I had put it off too long. First I had to make the sodium alginate thickener, then I had to mix all the dye concentrates, then I had to make some thickened dye to print with. Okay all this prep is done. And yesterday I painted some screen and put the screen filler in and washed off the screen so I had a nice stencil.

Then I finally was able to print. And something terrible happened.


Somehow the dye reacted to the screen filler and it totally degraded the filler until it was gone. GONE. This was thickened PRO MX dyes with Speedball Screen Filler. (I hope somebody googles that combination and comes to my post so we can chat about previous experiences because so far I can't find anything on the internet about it).

So I scrapped my screens and just painted on the fabric with the rest of the thickened dye. The above picture was taken after I painted over it. And the below picture is just another piece of fabric that I painted on since I didn't want to waste dye.


I used a tape resist and it made some interesting patterns in my dyes. I will wash them out later to see what happens.

So then I was pretty disheartened. I decided to do some shirobi so the night wouldn't be a loss. I tied some fabric to some pvc I bought and stuck it in a bucket in the basement and it will stay there until JewishGuy and I get back from the movies tonight. Maybe some pictures tomorrow if the fabric turns out okay.


Here's hoping...

UPDATE

I have been talking about it with JewishGuy when it dawned on him that the isopropyl alcohol I added to the sodium alginate could be the reason for my dye disintegrating the screen filler. I tested it out and it does seem to pull the filler off. Also I googled this particular combination of words and came up with other people who (joyously) discovered the ease of using isopropyl alcohol to clean screens as opposed to harsher chemicals.

BOO!

I mean, yay, that is interesting. But boo, I have a whole tub of sodium alginate that has alcohol in it that I now can only use if I use contact paper on my screens. The directions for the alginate say to use alcohol if you plan to keep the alginate for a long time because it will prevent it from smelling (it already smells but it gets to smell really, really bad if you let it sit for a while). So this method proved my undoing. I feel like I wasted a lot of time and kind of a lot of urea pellets.

Oh well.