Sunday, March 11, 2007

Tyvek Play Day

On Saturday, I went to Amy's house. She lives about 15 minutes away from me. Also there was a friend of Amy's named Jenny. We spent about 2 hours playing with tyvek. This was the first time for all of us. The first photo shows the pieces that Amy made. We mostly used the tyvek you get from envelopes from the post office. Amy mostly was painting her pieces with Lumiere metallic paints and Jacquard textile paints. The metallic ones turned out wonderful.


The next photo shows the pieces I made. I was painting mine with Dye-na-flow. I had watered down the dye-na-flow somewhat and on some of them I think I had watered too much as the colors were pretty pale. So then I started adding more layers of dye-na-flow to increase the color.


These pieces were made by Jenny. She was mostly using craft type acrylics. And she even tried some Shiva paintsticks (see the rainbow triangular piece). That piece didn't shrivel and bubble quite the same as some of the others, maybe the paintsticks did that, not sure.


We really enjoyed our play time. We had started out ironing the pieces, then moved on to using a heat gun. We found that the heat gun method really curled the pieces up and then they wouldn't lay flat....so to fix this, we started putting our tyvek under a teflon sheet so they would remain flat while applying the heat from the gun. One thing we like about this method, was that you could see better what was happening than when we used the iron. But we also noticed that we were burning more holes through our tyvek. Need to have more control over the heat and how close and long to hold it in one area.

On one piece, Amy tried laying out some angelina fibers under the tyvek piece before applying heat to see if they would bond together. They didn't, the angelina did become a flat sheet but it peeled right off.

Another thing we found is to be sure your paint is thoroughly dry before ironing. Those pieces were less than desirable. I came home with some ideas of things and products to try, so will try and show some more results over the next few days.

And I've also been doing quite good with doing a sketch every night before bed. Here are some of my drawings. Some of these I was looking at a magazine called Birds and Blooms. The first cat one, was from a photograph...and the rest are made up. You can see in the one with the girl holding the cat, I had trouble getting her head the right size...oh well.