Cracked: the secret sauce

Continuing with my flour paste resist experiments. I  tried both wheat flour and rice flour. They were different, and each had strong points and weak points. This time around I tried a mixture of both rice and wheat flours in equal quantities.

I pawed through my stash and found this lovely piece of fabric. I don't know where it came from—perhaps one of my dyeing or painting experiments, or perhaps something I bought.

It is laying on my painting board. I had a good feeling about this round.

I glooped on my mixture of half rice flour, half wheat flour, mixed with enough water to make it about the consistency of pancake batter.

Using my small squeegee, it spread nicely and did not pull up in sections like the rice flour paste did.

I let it dry for about ten minutes until it would hold a line when I marked into it with a bamboo skewer.

I let this dry well, cracked it a bit and then painted it and let it dry. It dried with some dimension as the all-rice paste had and was nearly as easy to remove as the rice paste. I removed most of the paste dry. Here it is with most of the paste removed. I really love it.

I will let it cure a bit, heat set the paint and then wash out the residue of the paste. This is my favorite. The combination of rice and wheat flour had the best properties of both—the spreadability and elasticity of the wheat flour paste and the bolder pattern and easier to remove qualities of the rice flour paste. I will take both kinds of flour to our retreat and let my friends choose. I will certainly recommend the mix.

Answering some comments:

1. In response to Gerrie, who commented that thickened dye might work better. (Unfortunately I deleted her comment accidentally—one of the hazards of moderating comments on my iPhone) Back in my batik days I used dyes with flour paste resist and they worked great! For this project I was looking for a way to achieve good results on our retreat without the mess and longer process of dyeing. With the exception of the paint that I diluted too much, I am pretty happy with what can be done with paint.

2.  Del wondered why I was using acrylic paint instead of dye or fabric paints. Regarding dye, see above. Regarding acrylic paint—fabric paints are acrylic paints. Fabric paints supposedly have some additives that keep them softer than traditional acrylics. I have both and mix and interchange them without noticeable differences. The paints I used for these experiments include both.

3. Jean S. suggested a bench scraper would be a larger working scraper than a credit card for removing the dried paste from the fabric. Since fabric is not a solid surface for scraping and dried paste is not as malleable as greasy goo, the scraping process is a little different. I found that even my credit card was a little too large to work very efficiently and the best tool that I finally settled on was a spoon, using the edge to scrape. It is a matter of finding something that will catch the edges of the cracked surface and pop those pieces off the fabric. Most tutorials and instructions I found recommended soaking the pasted fabric in water and scrubbing the softened paste off. I tried that and it was icky messy and difficult to get it out of the fabric once it was wet and sticky. The rice flour does not stick as tightly as the wheat flour, so it is relatively easy to crack off most of the dried paste, then scrape off the more persistent chunks.