weekend batik

I spent a little time yesterday and again tonight playing around with some ugly fabric, my new electric skillet, and soy wax. I love doing batik with fiber reactive dyes but since I was going to a wedding last night, I thought I should try it with paint so as not to go with blue and green hands. I added lots of water to some fluid acrylics and to some textile paints and used them both with the wax to see what the possibilities were for using them in my no-brainer batik classes instead of dyes. This piece started as a hideous acid green mistake. I put wax on it and then painted with the diluted paint. I put it between newspapers and went to work with the iron. Now it's beginning to look interesting. You can see the photos better if you click to enlarge them. What I like is that each side of the fabric looks slightly different and sometimes it's the underside that is better. I used my new tjap, which made the big blob you see. I have to work with it - I must have done something wrong. The hatch marks are made with a rusty wire grid I found and I love the effect. Here's another, totally different piece I also did yesterday. A washed out blue was the base fabric. I dipped a household utensil into the wax and stamped, then went in with the diluted paint. Then, I ironed. This is possibly my favorite part of the process: there is something comforting and zen about ironing. Here it is post-ironing. And finally, a look at the whole piece. It's pretty but I like it anyway.