Saturday 18 September 2010

Penguin (part four)

Not got quite as far with this as I wanted to today, mostly because there is a queue for my washing machine at the moment of different coloured items that can't be washed together for the first wash!
He has moved on slightly though.
Now that it's dry, the next stage is to fix the dyes and remove the wax. The dyes are partially fixed just from being allowed to dry on the fabric, but to make sure they retain as much of their colour as possible, they need ironing too. Ironing also helps to remove some of the wax.
First the motif is ironed under a sheet of absorbent paper and a sheet of greaseproof paper (to protect the iron!)
The absorbent paper lifts out some of the wax as it melts...
That is then removed and the greaseproof replaced and the whole thing ironed again
As you can see in this next picture, there is still quite a lot of wax left in the fabric...
The dark areas around the penguin, and most of the penguin itself, are full of wax, so tomorrow I will be removing the rest of that :)

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