This week I wanted to try out some new products so I contacted Lisa Quintana and she contacted two of her friends, Susan Pickrell and Debra Bentley. We got together for two afternoons to explore various ways to use deColourant, deColourant Plus, and deColourant Spray. Ideas certainly start flying when four fiber artists start to play!
DeColourant is designed to remove color from natural fibers including fabric or paper. DeColourant Plus removes the color, but it also adds another color at the same time. We had a blast painting, squeezing, stamping, and stenciling. We tried screen printing and shibori techniques. It was fun to toss ideas back and forth, considering what-ifs.
In the spirit of experimentation we made mistakes, sometimes purposely and sometimes not, but we certainly learned a lot in the process. Experimenting is tricky business. Part of me wants to create a masterpiece the first time I try something new, so I often try to skip from step one straight to step five, and this often gets me into mischief! The other part of me knows how important it is to test ideas and products on a small scale before beginning something bigger.
What I learned: if you need to try something new, gather together a few others for inspiration and motivation. You’ll have a lot more fun, too. Thanks Lisa, Susan and Deb!
Comments
2 responses to “Four heads are better than one”
Looks like a lot of fun! I’ve been playing with decolourant recently as well and I’m now thinking I should invite some friends over to give it a try. Love the ruling pen idea. Did you have to thin the decolourant for that one? Did you try mixing colors? I was trying to make a certain color from mine to match something and haven’t been very successful. I think that may be more my issue than the paints though. 😉
I used the deColourant spray with the ruling pen. The spray nozzle didn’t seem to work well. Yes, we mixed colors too. I’m writing a synopsis for Quilting Arts magazine.