Category Archives: batik

Batik on Wool

I was curious to see if a batik style dyeing could be employed for wool felt, here I have used liquid cold wax on a piece of rainbow dyed prefelt. I think you can see from the photo that the wax had a tendency to sit on the top of the wool so I tried to push it down using the nozzle on the bottle. Hot wax might work better.

I used some black  and magenta dyes over the batik and steamed for an hour. As you can see the wax has melted and spread across the wool.

This is the reverse side, no wax is visible and the dyes don’t appear to have been hindered from penetrating the wool.

This is what it looked like after removing the wax with a hot iron. Although the lines aren’t as distinct as what you get with cotton, I was surprised to see any lines at all given how the wax wanted to sit on the surface of the felt.

 It sort of worked but gives quite a delicate effect.

First Quarter Challenge 2014

The lovely ladies at Felting Fibre Studio have set another fab quarterly challenge, this time it is to interpret Jackson Pollock’s work into fibre. I confess I’m not a big fan of most abstract art but some of his more colourful pieces do intrigue me. Looking through images of his work, the following caught my attention the most:

I like the radial symmetry of this piece and think the white dotted lines might do well with some batik style dyeing.

I’m not so keen on the aesthetics of this piece but I like the concept of twisted ropes of felt and other fibres, this piece definitely lends itself towards interpretation in fibres… it reminds me of my attempts at knitting!

At the time the challenge was set I was working on some batik pieces and this seemed like an obvious place to start, effectively throwing the liquid wax at the cloth a la Pollock style and then dyeing and painting over the top of that. This is the first step towards that piece…

I am also hatching another idea I had was sparked by Annie’s birds at Rosiepink, she uses acrylic paint on felt after sketching with machine embroidery. More on that another time.