Silk paint is sort of supposed to spread on the silk, up to the special
'gutta' used for the outlines. A lot of silk painting techniques seem
to rely on this spreading. I don't think it will do it properly on
other fabrics - not on cotton anyway. I've tried the salt technique on
other fabrics with various paints and it's never as interesting as on
silk.
Just my thoughts, I don't claim to be an expert, I just do both silk
and other fabric painting sometimes.
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<*,*>
{'-'} The Crafty Owl
-"-"-
Hi Steph,
I have done quite a lot of silk painting and recently I decided to try
other fabrics, I wanted to use them as a background to embroidery,
ordinary silk does not hide ends very well, as you say, and heavy silk
is expensive. I have only tried 100% natural fabrics, cotton, cotton
Aida, and linen. I had read that the silk dye would "take" on these but
probably not so well as on silk. However, I found the intensity of
colour was still very good. I'm doing landscapes so it does not matter
if the colours merge into one another, I don't think you could use gutta
to get firm edges but I haven't tried. Maybe on thinner cotton you
could. I found I got a better effect if I wet the fabric first as this
helped the paint to spread more easily, you would have to experiment to
see what works best for you. If you have a hair-drier handy you can stop
the spreading when you think it's gone far enough. I am very happy with
the results. I use the iron setting water based type of dye, Deka-Silk
and silk paint from the "Painting on Silk Company".
Hope this helps, good luck and let us know how you get on!
All the best,
Liza Wright.
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ewr...@ealaghol.demon.co.uk
>If you are not using silk (and you can get heavy silks, you know) you
>might well be better with a fabric paint, not a specific silk paint.
A friend of mine sells Tri-Chem fabric paints, and she achieves some really
good effects with them (there are all sorts from basic paints to glittery
ones, pearly ones, stencil paints etc etc and they're all washable). They
work on just about anything except shiny plastic, including wood!
Lesley