PATTERNS TO DISCHARGE

Lately I've been having lots of fun with pattern work (sketching and stitching) and discharging. Here is a pattern I put to paper and then later to cloth.

In this case I used Soft Scrub with bleach as my discharge agent, which takes out more color than Decolorant or Discharge Paste...so I was left with bright white circles that just invited colorful buttons.
I will soon turn this into a small shoulder bag...maybe this one will be a fun bag to hold my camera!
I've been making lots of bags lately and doing similar pattern stitching and discharging on them. Here are some examples of the process I go through.

I love to piece together different colors and visual textures to add interest to the finished product. After piecing, I stitched two different patterns I put into these pieced rectangles, one of flowers and the other of leaves.

Now it was time to discharge. On the leaf pieces I used Decolorant. On the flower pieces I used Soft Scrub with bleach, plus I wanted to try something different so I discharged a "positive" set of flowers and other I a "negative" set of flowers. Here are what they looked like after the discharging, but before I washed the out the reactive agents. Might I add that this was more discharging than I typically like to do, but curiosity got the best of me.

There was too much "bright" in the flower pieces so I tried to tone it down with one of my favorite dyeing tools - cheesecloth. I dipped my cheesecloth into straight dye (a very dark purple in this case), wrung it out and stretched it over my work surface. I then placed my soda ashed flower piece over the cheesecloth and proceeded to roll over it with a dowel to hopefully take on the delicate grid-like pattern of the cheesecloth.

I had never done this with a quilted piece before and I'm not sure I would try it again, as it left a few blobs. Maybe it was because of the fact that it was a thick, already quilted piece, or maybe because of the pressure of the dowel. OR maybe the piece should have been damp with soda ash instead of dry. Regardless, I am going to stick with just using soda-ashed cotton for this work like I have in the past. Here are the finished results.