Too Much Information?

Yesterday, there was a Panty Raid at my house. Too much information? Let me back up and tell this story from the beginning, starting with a few words about evaluation and the creative process.

Research often divides the creative process into four major stages:

• Preparation (sometimes called "saturation")
• Incubation
• Illumination (sometimes called "inspiration")
• Verification (sometimes called "evaluation")

In workshops, I generally refer to an earlier model of the creative process that focuses on the first three items in that list. Item #4, Evaluation, is an important bridge between one idea and the next. But  I ask students to defer judgments until they have more information. In art (and in life), I find that when people jump to conclusions based on insufficient information, they very often don't like the results. And there's often a reason why those ideas are called "half-baked."

So yesterday I wanted to sample something that's been on my to-do list for longer than I care to admit. It relates to disperse dye transfer printing on fabric. Fabric Transfer Crayons are disperse dyes in a waxy carrier.You just color with a transfer crayon or paint a prepared dye solution onto regular paper, then transfer from the paper to a synthetic or synthetic-blend fabric using a household iron.Without going into the chemistry, let me just say that disperse dyes are really not intended for use on 100% cotton.

But a while back, I read somewhere that you can improve the fastness of disperse dyes on 100% cotton by first applying fabric paint to the area. Hmm. No way to evaluate that without sampling.

When I want to evaluate how well a fabric paint or image transfer technique will stand up in the wash, I use a sampling method I call Wonder Undies. As in, "I wonder what will happen if..." I like being able to sample an idea without having to buy something. And Wonder Undies don't lose their usefulness if they don't turn out to be Works Of Art.

For the record, I wear cotton undies. Perfect. I painted the seat of some of my granny panties with Dye-na-Flow fabric paint, let it dry, and heat set it with an iron. I will not be posting pictures of this.
Then it was time to apply the disperse dye. I'm testing a new creativity warm-up exercise, so I tried it both on type of fabric for which the product is intended and on my painted panties:

I cut a tree trunk-shaped resist element from paper, and lay it on the fabric. Then I cut paper confetti, letting it lie where it fell (don't try to cheat by blowing on it -- bad idea). Then I lay my prepainted disperse dye transfer paint paper dye-side-down over the confetti, and applied a hot iron to the back. The confetti resists the transfer.

To aid in my evaluation, I applied disperse dye to the unpainted front of my panties as well. I also applied fabric transfer crayons to painted and unpainted cotton undies. And I applied transfer paint and transfer crayon to painted and unpainted undies.

Off to the laundry room. After just one trip through the washer, most of the disperse dye applied to the unpainted parts of panties was gone. No surprise there. But I got better results than I expected on the Dye-na-Flow painted parts. We'll see how well they hold up to additional laundering. It will be a while before I have sufficient information to make a judgment. For now, though, I'm seeing possibilities.

Again, I ask: Too much information?