Category Archives: prefelt

Batik on Wool

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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.

A Less Successful Method for Ice Dyeing Wool Prefelts

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This is the other method I tried for ice-dyeing prefelts over the weekend, you might want to take a look at the results before giving this a go, I won’t bother with it again :o(

  • As before, I soaked my prefelts in water with 1/4 cup of vinegar and a drop of washing up liquid for every litre of water.
  • A wire cooling rack was suspended on some old glass jars in a washing up bowl and my wet prefelts were arranged on top.
  • Then a piece of nylon netting was stretched over the top using pegs to secure it.
  • Ice was tipped on top of the netting so that it covered the felt below.
  • Yellow, red and blue acid-fast dye powder was sprinkled over the ice, I used about twice as much yellow as red or blue.
  • I waited, and waited for the ice to melt, it looks really pretty at this stage:
  • The netting was removed and I put the icky brown mess into a zip lock bag.
  • Then I dropped it into my urn that was just bubbling and left it for 90 min.
These were the results, more than a bit disappointing…

Not one to waste anything I put another piece of prefelt into the dye run-off in the bottom of the washing up bowl and steamed that in its own zip-lock bag with the other piece, looks somewhat similar doesn’t it?

All is not lost though, one of the pieces from the ice dyeing did not receive much dye so I sprinkled some more dye powder directly onto the felt before putting it in a bag and steaming it. This was the result. I quite like this piece and it makes me want to try ice dyeing without the ice!

I also did another “jar of ice-dyeing” using the same primary colours used above, this is my favourite of the whole bunch… The jar method is definitely the winner! :o)

Linking up to nina-marie