Dyeing, Printing and Colour With Gunnel Hag
Review by Doreen Meyer
Two days on a hot and sunny September weekend in the beautiful park-like setting of the Richelieu-Vanier Community Centre was a wonderful backdrop for OOTB’s Colouring fabric workshop with textile designer Gunnel Hag.
Gunnel’s vibrant energetic style combined with her wealth of knowledge from decades of instructing and producing printed and dyed fabrics for film and theatre companies across North America made for a fabulous learning opportunity. Tips, tricks, techniques were demonstrated again and again as she showed OOTB members how easy it was to make a wild variety of marks and colours on fabric in achieving very personal and pleasing designs.
Originally from Sweden, Gunnel studied Textiles in Stockholm and later at the Royal College of Art in London, England. When she came to Canada, Gunnel started tie-dyeing T-shirts and screen-printing. When she found she was allergic to the Varsol solvent in printing inks, she worked with a company in developing a water-based pigment system that was eco-friendly called Colour Vie.
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Dyeing, Printing and Colour With Gunnel Hag
She has actively promoted the system for the past thirty years out of her concern for health and safety in the studio and in the classroom.
Colour Vie is not paint or a dye, it’s a liquid pure fabric pigment system. You mix concentrated pigments into a colourless base (which looks a little like yogurt). The base binds the pigment colours to the fabrics and Resfix (a clear fixative added at the same time to the base as the pigments) improves washability. Once printed, fabrics need to be heat set for colours to become permanent. I had taken a workshop on screen-printing a decade earlier at a class led by Gunnel at Algonquin Community College and wore a T-shirt printed back then to the OOTB workshop. (That white Tee still sports good colours after a hundred or so washings and is an example of how long Colour Vie pigments can last.)
Gunnel showed members how the system can be used to create a large palette of hues and shades that can be applied to cloth in endless ways. She stressed the importance of doing test samples — “always test, test and test again when mixing specific colours” she says in her Creating Textures instructional guides.
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Dyeing, Printing and Colour With Gunnel Hag
The booklets and Colour Vie products are available separately or as a starter kit directly from Gunnel, who offers a variety of classes at her home workshop in Toronto.
The two-day workshop was an experience of pure play as Gunnel took us through using ordinary and unconventional items to mark and design fabric. Layering, dry brushing, using resists such as butcher paper cutouts, flour paste and soy wax were just a few of techniques Gunnel demonstrated. I especially liked her way of creating soy wax ‘crayons’ by pouring the hot wax into tiny-shape flexible ice cube trays and then popping the more portable soy wax bits out once set. Her ideas on how to achieve unique designs were well thought out and endless and members spent a busy two days creating. The Colour Vie pigment system works best on natural fabrics and blends, which are white or pale coloured.
For more on Colour Vie products as well as Gunnel’s blog and workshop information, check out www.colourvie.com
Dyeing, Printing and Colour With Gunnel Hag
Dyeing, Printing and Colour With Gunnel Hag
Dyeing, Printing and Colour With Gunnel Hag
Dyeing, Printing and Colour With Gunnel Hag
