For Val

After a comment I made recently, Val asked me how I had used instant mash potato as a resist after giving her a brief run down, in an e-mail I finally found my pictures and decided to share them here as well.
I only had one picture of the original fabric, and it has now been made up into a bag, so the smaller pictures are scans of portions of the bag.

I dyed an old cotton sheet orange in the washing machine with Dylon Machine dye,then over dyed it with Maroon Dylon Machine dye, this resulted in a warm brown shade.

I then laid out half a metre of the fabric on my work table,
I mixed up the instant mash potato, sorry don't remember what brand, to a smooth paste thick enough to hold itself when spread, but not too thick to spread easily.

Starting at the top, I lay stencils and smoothed the paste over the stencil, then carefully peeled it away.
I also spread the paste over the cloth and pressed stamps into the surface to reveal the fabric
The picture below shows
An Indian wooden block stamp
A commercial stencil
A cork pressed into the fabric



The next picture shows
a hand made polystyrene spiral stamp,
a hand made stencil



Another hand made stamp



For this section below I used torn newspaper strips to create a wavy edge, and in the area next to it, I used sequin waste and smoothed the paste through, I then peeled the sequin waste away and also the newspaper strips to reveal the fabric underneath.



once I had covered the length of the fabric, I let it set for a while, and then using a cheap thin bleach, I sprayed it over the whole piece,
I let this dry thouroughly and then washed out the whole thing.

I added a touch of turquoise acrylic paint and made a huge bag for carrying all my supplies to workshops. my friend Jenny said I looked like a paper boy, cheeky madam
as I don't go to many workshops these days, a few weeks ago I decided to revamp the bag into a smaller tote bag, great for days out.