The Girl With the Tattoo Face or It’s All About Identity

Most of my eco dying has used a tradition potassium aluminium mordant on cotton with the use of Ferrous Sulphate as a modifier but ferrous sulphate itself can be used as a mordant to create prints that will have a bluish grey tone. If using white cotton, the substrate will be stained ecru.

In my exuberance to create these prints I overlooked a basic concept. To get clear leaf prints the bundle that is being steamed must not be too wet. I dipped my cotton sheeting into a weak solution of ferrous sulphate and hand wrung the fabric, laid it out on the table with a plastic drop sheet to prevent transfer of the prints , rolled the bundle and steamed for an hour and a half.

Even though some of the pieces were too wet they created wonderful textural pieces. One piece was obviously drier than the rest, or maybe it sat on the top layer in the steamer so did not get as much moisture. The image of the foliage is much more precise on that one. One piece ended up looking like it had eyes looking out at me and it was this piece I decided to take to the next xtep.

I had been browsing through a book by Jean Draper, a UK based textile artist and she had a few pages dedicated to replicating a tattoo face so I decided to take one piece and use the printing as a basis for the tattoo. I have titled this piece a Sense of Identity.