Tuesday, February 6, 2018

The Great Fabric Medium Experiment, Part V

As you may recall, I spent some time this fall gathering different brands of fabric medium, different brands and qualities of acrylic paints, and testing them all at different dilution levels to find which would be the optimal combination for painting T-shirts.

The delay in posting the concluding part (parts?) to this experiment was a delay in heat-treating, curing, and washing the test T-shirts.

While the paint swatches were more flexible when warm, I'm not sure how much heat treating did for the preservation of the paint work.

More important is, how well did the samples survive the wash, and how wearable the paint/medium combinations are.

The yellow Liquitex acrylic ink pretty much disappeared into the red t-shirt, but it was fairly transparent to begin with. The more fabric medium in the mix, the less it seems to disappear into the fabric. It's fine on a lighter color fabric, such as the bleached areas on my Boo Christmas t-shirt, and no fabric medium was needed for that application.

The Golden High Flow paint//ink was soft enough without fabric medium, and looks like the Delta Ceramcoat and Americana fabric mediums have minimized what looks like a very minor amount of bleeding of the unadulterated paint.

Without fabric medium, the Golden Fluid and Liquitex Soft Body paints come out as similar textures to the various brands of craft paint, but with brighter color due to their higher concentrations of pigment — which is pretty much the same as before anything was heat-treated or washed. That said, neither is completely opaque.

In general, the thicker the paint, the stiffer the sample patch, even with fabric medium and washing. The thicker paints and applications (e.g., two coats) were also more likely to crack.

Of the craft paints, Folk Art gave the softest finish; it and Martha Stewart are the best for opacity.

The odd swatches of specifically-formulated "fabric paint" were a bit softer than their craft-paint equivalents, but not necessarily more opaque.

My patches of Elmer's "washable" School Glue did not wash out of the shirt, but I'm not sure if that's because I let it set in too long.

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