Rusting Fabric Technique

As I promised in the previous post, I am now going to reveal my top secret techniques on how to imprint rust onto fabric. The secret is that it is dead easy to do! 

1. Find yourself some very rusty iron objects - Nails by far work the best in my opinion, but you can play around with many other objects. 

2. Choose an absorbent material to use, preferably natural materials such as cotton or muslin. 

3. Wet the material fully with water and then lay it out on a surface (make sure to put old towels underneath to stop the rust imprinting on the actual surface) 

4. find yourself a bottle that you can spray liquid out of the nozzle and then fill half of it up with water and the other half with vinegar (malt vinegar works the best).

5. Place the objects on the wet material, and then at regular intervals spray the fabric with your homemade spray. This will speed up the process and also keep the material damp. 

6. It is now up to you, as to how long you want the objects to stay on the fabric. The longer you leave it the darker the rust will be!

So in 6 easy steps you can now imprint beautiful rusty patterns onto fabric :)

Three metres of rusty muslin

As seen in my last post, I have been very busy testing out different ways of ageing fabric. This was to understand which techniques were the most effective. Throughout this process I  fell in love with the way rust imprints onto wet fabric. As part of my All Saints project,I decided to take on the challenge and imprint a whole 3 metres of muslin fabric with rusty tools. The reason muslin was my first choice, is because its very absorbent and the perfect material to use if you want the rust to soak in quickly. Over many weeks I have been busy in attempting to finish the 3 metre stretch of transparent material. It has been difficult, as some objects indented their shape more than others, which depended on the types of object used. Rusty nails by far worked the best, and things such as spanners didn't work so well.I am however, very happy with the outcomes so far. Here are a few images below to show my progress so far. If you are interested in this process yourself, I will post the techniques in the next one :)