Joy of Surface Design

I recently watched my new DVD from Quilting Arts, DIY Surface Design: Printmaking Made Easy with Everyday Objects with Leslie Tucker Jenison.  I loved it!  I especially enjoyed the sections on screenprinting with thickened dyes, gelatin monoprinting, and soy wax resist.  These are techniques I already use; what was unique about Leslie's approach was her use of everyday and found objects.

A great DVD!

I pulled out some of my vintage kitchen utensils with red wooden handle(1930's?) .  I hesitated just for a moment, but realized that getting soy wax on the metal parts wouldn't damage them.  In fact, maybe it will prevent further rusting!  (Note:  Any tools used in surface design should be dedicated to that purpose and never used again for food preparation or eating.  Same goes for this electric skillet -- it's dedicated to melting wax for batik and for encaustic work.)

My vintage kitchen tools for soy wax batik!

I love using soy wax for batik!  It has a very light, pleasant smell, but doesn't give off any harmful fumes so there's no need to ventilate.  It also has a lower melting point than traditional batik wax, so it melts quickly.  The biggest plus, though, is that it's easy to remove when the next step (dyeing the fabric) is completed.

Wax applied to cotton cloth using potato masher.

I stamped several pieces of cotton with wax designs, and my final piece was my favorite.  It was randomly stamped with the bottom tines of the large fork:

Soy wax applied with this large vintage fork.

My other accomplishment was finishing the painting on my glue-resist piece.  I'll let the paint cure another day or so before I wash out the glue.  I'm excited to see the final result!

Painting finished on my blue glue gel resist project.

Spending time on surface design projects is very satisfying to me, almost equal to the sense of abundance I get from using my own surface-designed fabrics in a project.  There's still more to do: deciding what color to dye my soy wax-stamped fabric.