alisaburke: creating with Jules- faux batik fabric

Tuesday, May 05, 2020

creating with Jules- faux batik fabric

I’ve seen lots of tutorials making faux batik fabric using pva glue, but in the interests of being a little more environmental I wondered if I could make fabric with the batik look but without all the polymer glue, using a flour and water mix instead.

You will need:

-white cotton fabric

-fabric paints OR acrylic paints with fabric medium

-plain flour

-squeezy bottle

I started with pre-washed plain white cotton fabric around 20” square.

Protect your workspace with a piece of plastic. Loosely draw a design onto your fabric. You can copy my design or come up with your own. Big, bold shapes work well.

You then paint pale colors with either fabric paints, or I used a fabric medium which you mix into acrylic paints and heat set when dry with an iron. I used my acrylic medium + acrylic paints watered down quite a bit to help the paint spread. You need to find the right consistency if using acrylic paints, too thick and the painting will take forever, too thin and the colors will spread too much. Paint and let dry.

Once dry, make a mix of flour and water that is not too runny nor too thick. You want to make sure it’s nice and smooth too so you don’t get blobs squirting out when you squeeze it onto the fabric. Press through a sieve or mix with a blender.

Using your squeezy bottle, cover all your lines with the flour mix, then let dry completely overnight.

Once the outlines are dry, paint over your shapes in darker colours. I used variants of shades rather than flat colours, but that’s up to you!

After all that was dry I sat down and peeled all of the flour lines off. Kind of satisfying.

I decided it needed something more so I went back in and added some darker outlines and extra dots.

Make sure to heat set your fabric according to the instructions either on your fabric paint or medium. Hand wash to remove any last little bits of flour and then use as you wish!