Akua Inks on Fabric

Last Monday, I did another Monotype Monday session at Wingtip Press.  It was my third time working with the Akua inks. The first was learning about them in a workshop with Melanie Yazzie.  The second was a Monotype Monday session where I decided to try printing on fabric.  And the third, was last week.

I did not bring any fabric to print on this last week.  But I did get out my previous mono-printed fabrics to try "fixing" the ink.  I had heat set them with an iron, but on a few I had gone back and added some color with colored pencils that needed to be fixed.

I thought I would try mixing matte medium with water and coating the fabric with that.  I mixed quite a bit of water with the medium.  When I put it on the first piece, I realized I could not brush it across as the ink smeared somewhat.  So, I pounced the mixture on.  Thinking the mixture was too runny, I added some more medium.  But the next piece was about the same.

After a while, I decided to try straight acrylic medium on the fabric.  It seemed a little better.  Eventually, I decided to get a piece of mono-printed fabric, cut it into sections and test different fixatives on the pieces.  Yes, I should have done this at the very beginning (maybe even before printing a whole bunch of fabric), but I am still learning.

Here is a photo of the cut up piece.



This fabric was heat set with the iron before I cut it up.  The skinny strip is the original fabric with nothing else done to it.  The first section on the left was sprayed with a fixative that you use for drawings, pastels, etc.  Then I rinsed it under water with my hands agitating it.  Some of the color was removed (and it actually is a little lighter on the fabric than what it looks like in the picture).

The second large section was just rinsed under water the same way with no fixative added.  Some color was also removed.  The smaller section in the upper right corner had matte medium mixed with water applied to it and then rinsed.  There is a little bit more of the color removed.  The bottom right section had matte medium directly applied to it (with no water added) and some of the color still came off, although not as much.

My conclusion is that some of the ink gets absorbed by the fabric, but then some of the ink might just "sit" on top of the fabric and that is what gets removed when adding any kind of liquid to the fabric.  How much the particles bond to the fabric, I have no idea.  I don't know if more ink would come off with continual washing as I have not tried that yet.  Also, I do not know how light fast it is on the fabric as I have not done any testing of that either.

The other thing I could try is to soak the fabric in soda-ash water and let dry before printing on it.  The soda-ash helps dye bond with the fibers of the fabric, maybe it would help the ink bond.  However, the dyeing is a chemical reaction and the Akua inks are water-based (which makes them so nice to use), so it may not make a difference.

Therefore, I think I will only use paper for the Akua ink mono-printing for now.  I will add stitching to the fabric pieces on which I added colored pencil and finish them. (By the way, it didn't seem like any of the colored pencil came off after fixing and washing, but it is a little hard to tell).  They still have quite a bit of color and the thread will add more.  The pieces where I just created patterns on the fabric, I'm going to try running through the washing machine and see what happens.

Has anyone else tried the Akua inks on fabrics?