Printing, printing, and more printing

I spent some time in a workshop recently with Catherine Nicolls.  I'd not worked with thickened dye and it was amazing what was produced in the workshop.  Thickened dye is simply concentrated dye added to sodium alginate thickener.  You can read more about it  here.   Dharma Trading also has a good description of sodium alginate thickener.  Here is just a sampling of some of my results.

This one was created using a variety of colours and brushing the dye on with an old credit card.  I like the layering effect that was created by the mixing of the colours.

 This one was also done with an old credit card, but rather than scraping on the two colours, the edge of the credit card was also used to get linear marks.  This is one of my favorites.

We were asked to choose a simple shape, and create a stamp from that shape.  A "2" seemed simple enough and then using two different colours I got "Two for One" or maybe "Double Trouble".

Carrying on with the simple shape, by arranging and mirroring the shape, I used it as a resist for a silk screen. It was surprising what came out of that experiment.  I'm going to explore this some more.

There were many other prints made, and I have yet come up with things to do with all of the samples. The one that was most surprising is the one created with what is referred to as a "breakdown screen".  In this instance thickened dye is applied to your silk screen.  When the thickened dye has dried, you "draw" clear thickened sodium alginate over the screen.  Each draw releases the thickened dye to create print after print, until there is very little left to print.  I had one piece of fabric left, corner was missing, and "went for it".  Here's the result.

One of my friends said it reminded them of licence plates.  Hmmm, what do you think?