Maybe you have seen these gorgeous fabrics Suzy made with a crayon resist batik technique she found in a vintage craft magazine;
She posted a great tutorial at the above link, which I attempted. I absolutely hated painting with crayons, and didn’t end up covering the entire fabric with melted crayon wax. This caused the spray dye to bleed and the final product was awful. I didn’t take a picture, cause it was just sad. I was bummed. You know how it goes. Anyway…
I let it go for a week or so. Then the thought occurred to me that I could design an image in photoshop, print it on inkjet printer fabric sheets, paint beeswax over the entire thing, and continue as Suzy did. The logic is that there would already be color on the fabric. Painting with beeswax would be way easier, I thought, since I could just melt it in my melting pot and keep it warm easily. And i would just have to brush over the entire print to cover it with the transparent wax, instead of trying to paint in the colors with individual melted crayons (that I kept having to reheat every couple of minutes or so).
I was right!!! It totally worked:
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| The design I printed onto the fabric |
I let prints dry for 15 minutes before handling, like the instructions said. Then I removed the backing paper and was left with the prints on fabric.
2. I melted beeswax
in my ranger melting pot
and painted the wax over the entire fabric sheets using a one inch gesso brush.
in my ranger melting pot and painted the wax over the entire fabric sheets using a one inch gesso brush. 3. Once the entire piece of fabric is coated and the wax dry, wad up the sheet to create a bunch of cracks in the wax.
4. Flatten the sheets back out and spray them with Black tulip fabric spray. Blot off the excess with paper towels and allow to dry for several hours (Suzy has some great pics of this – I didn’t think to photograph mine, but I did it just like she did; except she let it dry overnight, and I could only wait 2 hours).
5. Place the fabric between two sheets of newspaper and, using your iron on the highest setting, iron out the wax. This takes several sheets of newspaper.
This was soooo much easier than the crayon method. You can do whatever you want with the fabric. I adhered mine to some board I had lying around to make wall art!
