Progress

Looking at my past blog posts, it appears that I have been stuck in the same place for months! But, I am moving forwards, slowly and steadily. This past weekend I hand-mixed all the colors that I would like to use for production. The coating resin is blue, olive green, grey and black. Therefore, I am painting the underlying fabric close to these exact colors (the colors shifted right in the image), while also painting a contrasting or different color to see how that looks (colors shifted left). So the contrasting ones are going to be red painted fabric with blue resin on top, yellow painted fabric with olive green resin, deep purple painted fabric with grey resin, and dark brown painted fabric with black resin.This yellow with olive green resin mock-up was from an old test on a different fabric; I thought it was visually interesting, but I will have to see how these types of contrasting colors turn out on the woven herringbone fabric.

The larger swatches of these painted fabrics are being sent for abrasion resistance testing to make sure that the coated fabric is superior to the non-coated. Then, I will be painting very large production swatches for the coating to be tested one last time using production machinery.

After these tests, I may die of exhaustion because I will be hand-painting 100 yards of fabric in the various colors, sending it off to be coated, and then using the finished fabric to FINALLY make bags. Almost there!

Paints

Today, I am focused on selecting paints. It's turning out to be a small dilemma because the non-toxic dyes I am using come in primary colors and some pre-mixed custom colors. Should I mix all the colors from scratch using just the primary colors or buy pre-mixed and then tweak with primary? The colors should turn out pretty much the same either way.

However, with eight different colors I want to create and a non-white base fabric, trying to figure out the minimum number of bulk paints to buy and mix is a little confusing. Also, although I do not mind slight variation in color from batch to batch since these bags are painted by hand, the more colors I have to mix myself, the greater chance of variation. Downside of being human. :)

I have small cans of the primaries so checking those on the base fabric first.

what? it worked?

i received the second round coating tests, and the fabric looks beautiful. the coating makes the rough herringbone hemp look like it's beaded. i'm so shocked that i'm finally ready to run production that i'm slightly paralyzed... apparently, i stress if the fabric does not work and stress if it does. :) time to order the fabric in bulk, the non-toxic paints, and move along my productive way!

details

further finalizing details of the bag and creating mini-mockups while waiting for second round testing on the coating of the fabric. happy friday!

colors

painted larger hemp swatches over the new years weekend for 2nd round coating testing. tried different shades as the base for the blue, olive, grey, and black coatings to see how they turn out. will be interesting to see the results...