The Urge to Resist

Way up on the list of things I wanted to accomplish this summer was experimenting with resists, which create pattern and/or texture by blocking the dye from contacting the fabric.  I had bought Lisa Kerpoe's book, Visual Texture on Fabric, in July and had been inspired.  But being inspired did not mean that I actually had the time to do much dyeing at all. And so the warm weather slipped away.

But now I have received a gift from the weather gods: warm weather in October and I am trying to make up for at least a portion of lost time--as well as overseeing the chaos of the dining room being demo-ed to the studs so we can start over, but that's another story.

The end of last week saw me hard at work spreading oatmeal goo on fabric:

Actually there were two kinds of goo: the one above was made by adding oats to boiling water; the one on the right by microwaving oats and water.  The boiled water method creates a much denser cover with the oats still rather solidly formed, while the microwaved was less dense with the oats a bit mushier, and was more spreadable.  I did a third piece of fabric with a mixture: leftover boiled oats in the middle and microwaved spread around the rest, but I'm leaving that one to your imagination.







And here, after four(!) days of drying, they are ready to dye.  I have done this before and the big challenge is getting the oats to dry.  Sunshine helps, but as soon as I decided to begin, the weather report changed and we got a couple of days of rain and dampness.

You will notice that some mold took advantage of the ideal conditions on the microwaved oats on the yellow, which isn't a problem as I have found from experience, and the curling of the fabric is also usual when it dries, but this is the first time I used the boiled oats and they seemed to clump together and rise up off the fabric as they dried.  Not sure how this will affect the result.

Next step: painting on the dye! And if you've stayed with me this far, thanks for the company.