printing in layers

On the left, you see my answer to Karoda's request from yesterday that I describe my print table setup. Since a picture is worth a lot of words, here's a closeup of the sandwich. It's one of those brown banquet tables. The first layer is pink styrofoam insulation board. Layer #2 is a sheet of foam 1/2" thick. Layer #3, which isn't visible here, is a clear plastic dropcloth. Normalment, I cover all of this with a twin bed contour sheet and that's it. However, since I have been doing batik and the hot wax has a way of melting the plastic sheet, I recently added a layer of carpet padding between the plastic and the cotton sheet. If you are not using hot wax, this is not necessary: I managed very nicely for 10 years without the carpet padding. I also recently got tired of bending over the table and bought those bed raiser thingies at Bed, Bath,and Beyond. Now you know all my secrets and I can tell you about my afternoon on the deck. I was going to work downstairs in my cleaned-up print studio, but after umpteen days of raging cloudbursts and humidity, today was San Diego weather: too beautiful to work inside. My friend Rachel came over this afternoon and we worked with Thiox. I set up my trusty hot plate and enamel pot and we experimented. This is a before (top) and after of a piece I had dyed/batik'd and overdyed because I didn't like it. It seemed too dark, so I ripped off a piece and threw it into the thiox bath. Oops - in the blink of an eye, more color came out than I would have liked. What happened to all the purple? But I find it very interesting to see what happened.

There was a lot of ugly stuff that was not improved by dunking, but I can't show it to you. It is late and I spent so much time on a consultation call with Ms. Closet tonight that it is past my bedtime. The next 4 days, I need to be at that print table.