T-Shirt Printing With Inkodye

I posted before about using Inkodye to ‘sun print’; using photo sensitive dye on fabric and then exposing it to sunlight.  I tried before to print using a film negative (blown up and printed on acetate) but the acetate curled up and let the light in, but the dye underneath also didn’t dry properly.

This time I printed a quote onto the acetate and then cut the words out and placed them over the dye, then exposed it all to light.  The individual words didn’t curl up and were easier to work with than the large sheet of acetate, although I did pin a couple of them down.

I had put the inkodye into spray bottles and so just spritzed on some blue and purple dye, then placed the words on top.  I left it by my window for about 30mins, it was an overcast day at about 5pm but on a bright day it should take about 10mins.  I ended up leaving it overnight because I didn’t want to move it and ruin it.

In the morning I put it in the wash with the Inkodye detergent which sets the dye so it continue to react in the light, however it did seem to react slightly and the text went a little blue as it dried. But this is a significant

Sun Printing with Inkodye

So I did my little post about sun printing using the Sunography set, I’ve now moved on to Inkodye. This is a light sensitive dye which changes the colour of the fabric in light (preferably direct sunlight).

One of the fun things you can do is print a negative, so I found a black and white photo I had taken in LA.  I was planning to invert the colours which would make it like a negative, however I couldn’t figure out how to do this!  So for my practice go I just printed out the photo onto a sheet of acetate.

I then laid the t-shirt out and painted blue inkodye onto a square in the middle and placed the acetate on top- the dark bits would be protected from the sun and shouldn’t change colour which the clear areas would.  I also put some of the Inkodye in a spray bottle and sprayed the t-shirt.  I left the t-shirt in front of my window and the sunlight did change the colour of the dye.

But patch under the acetate didn’t dry properly, the acetate seemed to be uneven and the image didn’t transfer very much.  Then I left the shirt out and all the dye changed to be blue, what you’re supposed to do is wash it with the special detergent to stop the process but by this point I had already declared this a fail! But the dye does work I just need to figure out how to use it better.