T-Shirt Art.

Cold , wet and windy today, I was quite happy to be working all day at school as working outside at home would not have been a lot of fun. My poor class spent the day doing a practice maths SATs paper in the morning and then going through the questions in the afternoon before 45mins of golden time. Having started to move towards Topic based teaching, seem to remember that when I first started teaching, everything is now on hold because if the Conservatives win the election they want to return to even more formal strictly segregated subject teaching. None of this namby pamby making education fun and exciting.New Acer leaves emerging like weird claws.

I got quite excited when I was down in the reception class earlier in the week because they were using fabric dyes to paint batik (using flour and water paste instead of wax) banners. I took the opportunity to bring in a couple of white t-shirts to have a little bit of an experiment.
For this experiment I simply flicked dye at a dry t-shirt. I like it a lot but I almost think it is too restrained and maybe could have been a bit more random.

For this one I wet the t-shirt first and then dropped blobs of dye onto it so that they ran together. If I had been able to let it dry flat and maybe not had it so wet, the dye wouldn't have run together so much. I do like it like this though the red does seem to have taken over. Never mind, this will satisfy my Bohemian streak. We are fairly sure that once it is dry the dye will be permanent and I might even run the iron over the t-shirts to make sure before I wash them by hand (don't want a machine load of pink clothes). Previously my t-shirt experiments have been done using extra thick bleach randomly squirted onto the fabric which can produce interesting results especially with black t-shirts as you never know what the base colour is going to be. One t-shirt turned out to be orange under the black.