I hadn’t planned to do more katazome, but some little section of my brain whispered, “Didn’t John Marshall say you could screen print with katazome paste?” And I still had a cup or two of the katazome paste left, enough to do some experiments. So I did. Here are the results:
If you click on the photos for the larger versions, you’ll see that the katazome paste did fairly well, but there are blotches of paint in some of the resisted areas, especially in the versions where I applied paint with a stencil brush rather than dipping the piece into an indigo vat. I attributed that to insufficient coverage, either because the squeegee didn’t deposit enough paste through the screen or because the paste was too thick. This afternoon I tried again with thinner paste and a ball-nosed (rounded edge) squeegee, which is supposed to deposit a thicker layer of paint when screen printing. The results look promising so far, but the paste is still drying; I’ll know more later this afternoon, after I get a chance to play some more.
I’m super excited about the prospect of screen printing katazome paste, if I can get it to work reliably. Since I have a thermofax machine, I can create a screen in less than a minute, given a black and white starting image. This is much faster than spending hours carving and painting a stencil! And screen printing allows more design options than stenciling. So if I can get this to work reliably, I’ll be in dyer’s heaven.
Meanwhile, I have completed the second qiviut scarf and am rolling straight into the second sea-turtle scarf. 360 picks down, 3960 to go. I’m hoping to finish it next week, but since I am also studying two books on jacquard weaving and working on the book, not to mention pleasant katazome distractions, that may or may not happen.
And drawing? It has fallen by the wayside – well, with some assistance, that is. I had forgotten how things work in this house. As soon as I cleared enough space and started to draw, the inevitable happened:
I really would like to learn to draw, though, and I still have nine days left, so perhaps I’ll just trundle on outside and do my lessons there.
I see your cats are just like Gracie – she will inevitably plant her butt on whatever paper is in front of me – newspaper, magazine, notes I want to transfer to the computer, You name it, she parks there. BTW, congratulations on the new loom!
Thanks, Sandra! And yes, Fritz is like that – although I probably worsen his behavior by petting him when he does that. But I like it (most of the time) when the cats ask for attention – I’m so busy most of the time that if they didn’t, they’d never get any! So I try to encourage them to ask by saying “yes” when they do.
Fritz isn’t the only one. My Hermione is “helping” me with the computer and my knitting. And then I saw this cartoon:
http://www.robot-hugs.com/interference/
OMG, that’s adorable. And snuggly. 🙂