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!