Sun Printing out on the deck

The past few days have been so sunny here in Snohomish that I decided to do some sun printing with a Setacolor Soleil kit I'd found at Dharma Trading a few years ago. I wasn't sure if the paint was still any good, but thought I'd give it a shot.
What prompted all of this was about the same time I picked up the sun printing kit, I found 6 ultra-cool stencils in the shape of hands on the clearance table at Zenith Supplies in the Roosevelt district. If you have never been to Zenith Supplies, your life is incomplete. They have all sorts of essentail oils, incenses, new-agey foldarol that you will find you cannot live without. Same goes for visiting the Dharma Trading website. I have been buying art supplies from them for over 30 years.

Anyhoo, the stencils were originally meant for using with henna, but I thought they would work just fine for sun printing some panels of fabric.

I slipped a garbage bag over a long piece of cardboard and laid it out on my ironing board. I placed a piece of 12 inch by 45 inch white cotton (or linen - I can't remember what it is...) fabric on top of that and wetted the fabric down with a water mister.

Then I chose three paints to work with - the blue, yellow and fuschia and mixed them up 1 part paint to 2 parts water.

I slathered the paint onto the fabric sort of higgledy-piggledy, then placed the stencils on the paint.

I set the whole shebang out in the very bright sunshine on the deck and waited about 45 minutes for the fabric to dry.






Here's the result of the first try:

Not too bad, all considering. For my next piece I mixed the hand stencils up to see what that would look like; I actually like this design much better.

So here are my four sun-drenched panels!

I plan on incorporating at least one of them into the border of a sleeveless blouse. Maybe the yellow/pinkish one...