In the last couple of days of my summer holidays way back in September I decided that I wanted to make a
Papercut Patterns Waver jacket. And it had to be purple. I didn't have any purple fabric in the stash so I decided that it would be cheaper to dye some white fabric that I already had. And then I thought, why not make this extremely complicated, but also 100 times more interesting? So I did some research on different dyeing techniques and
this tutorial on how to make a flour paste crackle effect caught my eye. It looked very cool and I decided to give it a try on a much larger scale, doing it with 1.5m of fabric, rather than 20cm.
I did make a small sample first just to check that it worked. I used fabric paint instead of dye, because it was on a much smaller scale. It looked pretty cool so I went full steam ahead with the real fabric.
I laid the fabric out on top of a ground sheet and some plastic sheeting and held it down with various things that were lying around. I then made a huge bowl of flour and water paste and set to it. It took quite a few bowls of flour paste to cover all of the fabric. Then I left it to dry.
When it was dry, I crushed it into a ball and started stamping all over it to get it to crack. The more cracks you have, the more dye you will be able to see. I did try using sandpaper but that was a bad idea because it wore holes in the fabric.
When you are done, it should look something like this:
Then it was time for dyeing. I used 2 sachets of purple dye from Harrison and Dunn. The colour in the end turned out to be a pretty light purple, so perhaps I should have left it in for longer. After dying it's time to rinse all of the excess dye out and all of the flour paste off. I had a friend over at this point and it took FOREVER. Mind you, there was a lot of fabric to be de-pasted. After we were sure that all of the paste was gone, we stuck it in the washing machine, hung it on the washing line and it was done!
I think it turned out so well! I'm super happy, and can't wait to make a Waver jacket with it. I had so much fun dyeing the fabric, and I can't wait to do more experiments in the future!
Thanks so much for reading, and to Meghan for standing in front of the sink with me for hours trying to get all of that paste out!
Lauren xx
