Ruth’s Printing and Stenciling with Thickened Dye class has come to an end, but I’ve been continuing to experiment on felt and paper. This week I’ve had some interesting results I wanted to share.
For this project on felted merino, I used several different colors and objects to try.
The lower left is a type of silver netting used at Christmas for wreaths and other projects. a dried Maple leaf, a plastic bottle sleeve and a tree stencil. I used a combination of thick and thin dyes. And the red did bleed again when setting the dye.
The gray/silver color is the mesh, the red is the plastic bottle wrap. The leaf is the green but not very distinguishable. I used a brayer for all of them. The stencil didn’t do well at all. You can only see a few lines here and there. I didn’t have a plan, just wanted to see how each would print.
Then I decided to try acrylic on commercial felt. For this I used a roller type stencil with different textures I made in class with purple metallic paint for a background. It didn’t print very clearly so I didn’t take a pic. Then I used handmade leaf stamps in metallic green and a commercial leaf stamp in the corners and a couple of metallic gold accents.
I thought the metallic paint would pop more on the dull smooth felt surface.
Cathy (Luvswool) loaned me a geometric stencil I wanted to try. She had done some nice stenciling with acrylic on cloth. I wanted to try it with dye on felt. Here is the stencil on the felt. You can see the one rectangle that is solid. This is what I thought I wanted to do, make each shape solid, but it took a lot of dye and time. When I just started stippling with an old brush, I liked it better. I also added extra colors in a couple of places.
Here it is with the stencil removed and the dye set.
I couldn’t undo the solid teal area, but I did add a couple other solid areas just for balance. What do you think?
I had fun learning these techniques and as with anything it takes practice. I’ll have a few more projects to share later.