After trying my hand with my first two-screen print, I was ready for another challenge but didn’t feel like starting from scratch, so I cast though our vast catalogue of designs and grabbed the moon out of this pattern. It is called “The Countess contemplates another long distance voyage.” It is one of a few designs that I did using the same tile layout.
I printed the bottom layer in a light yellow on another piece of recycled linen-ish fabric from Scrap. The only difficulty in using mystery pieces of fabric is that I don’t exactly know what the fiber content is. I could only tell that this was not 100% cotton.
I tried a couple of different colors for the top layer, and I don’t know – I wasn’t in love with the results. This pattern is not as charming when it is out of registration. And I wasn’t sure if I liked it better with or without the top layer. But is the bottom layer interesting enough on its own?
After heat setting with the iron, I sent this through the wash on the hand-wash setting with really disasterous results. Most of the yellow ink (that I had thinned and extended with wallpaper paste) washed out, taking the top layer with it. It also got all over whatever else was in the washer with it. So I sent it all back through the wash again – this time on a regular cycle.
And behold the resulting fabric! Whatever parts of the top dark layer that had been out of registration with the yellow didn’t wash out, and because of that, it looks like it moved to the back of the yellow image, becoming a drop shadow. This was so much better than my intended design, and I never would have come up with this if I hadn’t printed with my improvisational ink mix onto mystery fabric and then nearly washed the whole thing out.
And here is my digital version of that design, which I had printed on Linen Cotton Canvas at Spoonflower.
I’ve tried to duplicate that process to achieve a similar effect with different patterns and colors and fabric, but none have washed out in quite the same way. I guess I can’t be too sad when I accidentally wash a print out completely. It’s part of the process of experimentation that sometimes leads to great discoveries.