I have a Batik class coming up in a few weeks, and a dear friend of mine, Beth Bailey, offered to loan me her three gorgeous wooden tjaps for making Batik fabric, and of course I said, "I'd love it! Thank you!" Here's what they look like:
So, today I had some time to work in the studio and try these out for the first time. My experiences there was wonderful! Also, I should mention that Beth donated a bunch of dyed fabric that had been previously donated to her and her students that had not been used. So, I used the donated fabric with the offered for loan tjaps in the studio to play and see what I could come up with .
This piece was made using one of tjaps above. You can see that I started with a yellow piece of fabric and the more solid impressions from the tjap on the left side were straight from the melted wax with no buffer, then on the right you can see a more distinctive imprint which came from using a sponge down in the heated skillet that was saturated in wax.
Remember this fabric? I sunprinted it using ferns from the woods, and was wondering if it would overdye or not, since the sunprinting technique uses paint, instead of dye; so I pulled it out to experiment with the tjaps as well, look how it turned out.
This is probably my favorite piece out of the bunch. This picture on my screen does not do it justice.
Here's the second piece, if you look closely, you can still see the fern impressions under the top layer. These two are my favorites of the bunch. There was one more with the other tjap, but I really didn't like it, so into another dye bath it went, I'll post it another time.
Then, since I did not dye the fabric that was given to me, I wanted to see if I could use discharge paste with it, to pull out color, which is a technique that I love to use. So, I pulled out my paste and the tjaps and went to town on experimenting with it. Here's what happened:
dark brown discharged to creme
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dark taupe discharged to nearly white
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dark brown discharged to nearly yellow
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