Can't Resist Resists with DeColourant

The main reason I wanted to play with deColourant was because I thought it would be great to use it with the pantry resists I have been playing with.

I took some hand-dyed purple fabric -- this fabric was dyed with blue and magenta dyes and has a really mottled purple thing going on.  Alas, I didn't do a very good job of rinsing the dyes out (it's been on my shelf since I first started dyeing and I didn't know as much about color and getting the excess dye out of the fabric as I do now.  And yes, I did fix the piece it was cut from.)

I smeared on some rice flour paste, let it dry, then painted on a thin layer of orange deColourant.  There was purple colored goo all over the plastic underneath the fabric.  I'm wondering how much this affected the action of the deColourant.

This is the back side after I hit it with steam and before I removed all the rice paste and deColourant.

 And this is the finished piece.  It's a little darker than it looks in the photo.  And some of the areas that I thought would be orange, just look kind of turquoise. Again, that might be because all of the dye wasn't rinsed out initially.



The other piece I tried was an over-dyed orange bit of cloth.  It was initially a really ugly shade of pink and I overdyed it with golden yellow to get a shade of coral.

I used the same rice flour resist as in the top piece and painted on the purple deColourant.

I ironed it with the steam iron and got some nice purple marks.

So then I did three pieces with plain deColourant and three different uncooked resists.  I used glutinous rice flour, potato flakes and AP flour.

This is from the same fabric as the top piece above.  After I rinsed all the excess dye, I covered it with a mixture of glutinous rice flour mixed with cold water.  After it dried, I painted it with plain deColourant, let it dry, then hit it with steam.  The discharged areas are a gorgeous turquoise.  There are some pinkish areas where there was more magenta dye.

 For this one, I whisked potato flakes and a tablespoonful or so of liquid laundry starch into cold water, then spread it on pretty thickly with my putty knife.  No cooking this time, but it took forever to dry in the humid weather.  I wound up bringing it in the house and letting it sit for a couple of days before I painted it with plain deColourant.  I like the patterning, but the color is kind of cold looking.   I think it needs to be overdyed with orange.

This was some plain black Egyptian cotton I bought at Joann Fabrics a couple of years ago thinking I would use it for discharge experiments.  I covered it with AP flour whisked into an equal amount of cold water.  Then painted it with deColourant.  I love that it discharged to white.

All of the uncooked resists and deColourant came out of the fabric easily.  I let them soak in a bucket for a couple of hours, then ran them through my washing machine.  I really like the plain deColourant with resists, but I haven't figured out how to get the special patterning with the deColourant that I get with dye.  I think that's because the resists that I've used dissolve slightly with the dyes and because the deColourant is more of a gel, it doesn't get into the little cracks and crannies as well.  So I guess I need to experiment some more.

 I'm not sure I will bother using the colored deColourant with the resists again.  I think I could have gotten the same result with thickened dyes, paints, or inks and the deColourant is more expensive and more steps than either of those.  But I will use the plain deColourant.  I like that it doesn't change the hand of the fabric like paint would.  And it rinses out easily -- even on top of the resist paste.