Experimental Jumpsuit - Dying Hemp and Painting with Ink

Well here is the continuation and completion of my jumpsuit.  I decided to write about dying and painting all in one blog.

So, I made my jumpsuit in an undyed hemp/cotton blend ... just because. The fabric is a bit stiff, wrinkles readily, but this was my extreme experimental project!  Mostly I wanted to work out combining patterns to make a jumpsuit for the Pattern Combining Class I've been teaching and will be teaching again and the American Sewing Expo in Novi, Michigan the last weekend in September. I wrote about this on Monday, read it HERE!

Anyway, this blog is about the fabric and what I did to it.  Here is my hemp/cotton just out of the package.

I serged the two cut ends so ...

I could wash it first.

Which made it horribly wrinkled!

Which required LOTS AND LOTS of ironing.

I wanted to dye it something in the green family, mixing dyes I had on hand and YUCK!! the color looks like a janitor's jumpsuit!

I had dyed at the same time a big swatch of the fabric so I could play around with my fabric ink to see how it worked and looked, which I did. It works great ... but I had to do something about the fabric color.

I used a box of RIT color remover. It works well.

And found this textile image on line that I liked a lot, so it became my inspiration.

I found some wooden buttons in my collection and decided to dye them, too.

So, into the pot everything went.

Now the fun part.  Since I am painting after the garment is finished I wanted to paint a design that would kind of wrap around my body, not just an overall print.

And because I am painting on colored fabric, it works best to paint certain places white first so the color will come out cleaner. Otherwise the color of the fabric, in this case green, will bleed and mix with the color you WANT.

I am lucky to have a dress form with legs because I could put my jumpsuit on the form and draw (with an erasable pen) the rough layout for my design.

The jumpsuit came on and off my form MANY times.

While painting, I put all sorts of plastic and vinyl things inside my garment to prevent the paint bleeding through to places I didn't want it.

It was lots of fun adding bits of color here and there for dimension.  OH and check out the viney decorative stitch I used for all my hems.  LOVE my new sewing machine!

Ink is GREAT to work with. It is super permanent after it is pressed and the fabric stays totally soft. BUT, I couldn't resist throwing in a bit of metallic gold regular acrylic paint for a little accent here and there.

A fun experiment and I learned a lot!  I really want to make something else I can paint.

Hope not TOO far in the future.