Batik & Dye

I've been mixing up procion dyes, to the correct colours in my colour palette, today. I think I've managed to get the yellow, pink and red pretty spot on but I am really struggling with the cobalt blue. It looks ok when it's still wet, but when it dries it is always to pale, I can't get it intense enough. The samples below were dyed cold, I tried using them on the heat too, but the results weren't that different.

Last tuesday we had a go at using batik with Charlie. It's something I haven't done since primary school, and to be honest I hadn't magically got much better than primary school standard!

These are the samples I ended up with. As you can see clearly with the pink sample, there was quite a lot of accidental dripping involved, so much in fact that I ended up trying to incorporate spots into the design! On the red sample, I tried to recreate a check design, inspired by the blankets worn by the Maasai tribe. I quite like the way it turned out, so I tried out again today on a larger scale.

image from here

I was a lot neater this time, I used a brush instead of the traditional Tjanting, and I used a piece of card as a guide for the lines, and to protect the fabric from drips.

I like the imperfect effect that the wax resist gives. I know I'll have to work into a bit more though, maybe I can use a reverse appliqué technique - cutting out the squares in between the checks and putting some cobalt blue fabric behind and stitching into it?