The Story of the Stamped Tea Towel

This is the story of a lovely project from The Makers' Box which I thought I could customise to suit my rainbow heart but which all went interestingly wrong!

It started off with the best of intentions. I had my project supplies all ready, I had my instructions read, and I had ideas of how I wanted to change it up. The original project takes you through a lovely stamped triangle design on a linen tea towel. Great instructions with troubleshooting advice to boot. A fabulous quick and easy project if you like monochrome. Which I do. But I love ROYGBIV more.

So arming myself with an array of reinkers I dampened my tea towel and set to work dropping and smooshing a combination of yellow, orange and pale pink onto it. But after I hung it in the sunshine to dry the strangest thing happened. Pretty much all the colour except for the darkest of orange spots faded away to nothing and I was left with an almost white tea towel again!

Now lets be honest, I did no research into this. I didn't use fabric dye, it's not even a permanent dye. I don't know if the tea towel was treated with something and I should have washed it first. I don't know if it was the sun that did the fading. All I know is I experimented with something new and it didn't quite work out as I imagined! But that's ok. What is creativity if not to try, fail, try something different and succeed?

So moving right along I added some darker colours next. Blue, green and mint. I also dropped on more pink and a touch of yellow. Once again when it dried I was left with just the blue and pink. What a mystery! Still, it's a bit pretty and I decided that was enough - on with the stamping!

I'm not naive enough to think I can actually use this now to dry my dishes. I'm pretty confident that if I washed this now all the colour would come out completely apart from the stamped triangles and I'm back at square one. I've actually moved it into my craft room and hung it on the end of my Raskog. If nothing else I can use it to wipe my painty hands on it - that might do the trick to keep some colour on it!

Something I had much greater success using my reinkers for was this great little art-meets-science activity I did with my girls last holidays. I wrote an article about creating with kids which you can read in Issue One of the Makers' Magazine. It's free and it's out now!