My screen printing developments have been really exciting this week! My previous screen prints had used naturally dyed fabrics but relied on traditional printing inks. However, I have been exploring using mordants to screen printing.

This has been quite a long and complex process and the support and collaboration from Kate in the university print room has been really amazing. I feel like I’m learning a lot with this process and it's giving me new challenges in the world of natural dyes. I have experimented with silk and cotton that is all pre-scoured and washed but not mordanted. Then, I create a printing paste with an aluminium or copper mordant and guar gum. It’s interesting as the aluminium paste prints are completely clear, so you can actually see what you have printed. Next, the print sits in the fabric for a week and then I set it in a bran bath. This replicates traditional textile techniques that would normally use a ‘dung’ bath, but instead it uses wheat bran which creates a porridge-like consistency. After this stage, I create the dye bath and dye the whole fabric. The hope is that the dye sticks to the mordanted screen print and will wash out of the other parts of the fabric, leaving a colour print.

The washing out of the fabric to clear the background has been a real mix of successes and failures- not of all have made logical sense. I still need to further test more colours and I would like to test dyeing the fabric for as long as I have found that a lot of the colour has washed out of the prints too. The logwood and the onion skins have been most successful, but I have already had results from cochineal.

I think style wise this would work well with some hand painted designs rather than digital drawings so that will be my next steps within this area of my practice.
Overall, I’m still learning and trying with this method and I hope I can add to the Wild Chroma portfolio with more experiments with screen printing with natural dyes- a really exciting potential for the future of sustainable printmaking.

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