Last minute convert

Today was going to be the last day I went to the clay printing class. I had not been happy with my experiments with cloth, so figured I wouldn't have much use for it.  To show you a bit of the process,  I have some photos from the last few classes.  The first photo shows you the matrix, which is the basis for painting your clay color on.

It's made with a frame of plywood, dammed up on the sides with door moulding, then painted to seal it.  You set it out in the sun to dry, which takes about 15 minutes on a hot California day.  The next step is to paint it with slip, which is a mixture of china clay and water. This dries, then you start mixing your colors,

in this case some sort of burnt orange.  The color you use is pigment, bought at a hardware store in the paint area,

or you can use this Akua Kolor, which I have no idea what it is.

After letting it dry, you put the raymee, or in my case fabric down on the matrix, and use a pizza roller to print the color onto your cloth. The picture below is my painted matrix before I put the cloth on top of it. The problem I ran into with this, is that by the time I got it home, it had faded tremendously.  I was really disappointed, and figured this wasn't something I could use.

I decided to go back this week and try one more time, this time with a sheer polyester.  As my grandpa would say, bloody hell!!, this turned out great!.  The teacher explained I could keep the deep colors by spraying this with Thompson's deck sealer.  Who knew.

I laid the sheer over my matrix, then laid a piece of the raymee over it absorb any extra print.  The photo above is the raymee,

and this one is the sheer.  The white area is some clay that came up with the print, which looks really cool in person. The photo below is the matrix after printing.  What happens now, is I will paint it with some more china clay slip, then paint a new design on it, and be ready to go again.

So cool.