giant fabric stretcher

As I mentioned yesterday, I built a giant fabric stretcher for my giant fabric painting project (a tablecloth).

The fabric has to be stretched taut, so that it's not wrinkly or collapsing in on itself, and has to be raised so that none of the fabric is pressing against anything, like a wall or a table or the floor, because then the resist and the pigment will smear and bleed against itself. My fabric is 108 inches wide (9 feet) and about  12 feet long. I am doing it in sections, but it made sense to me for the stretcher to allow my fabric to stretch to its full width, and then do the length in batches.

Above is my stretcher in the hallway by my studio, with my floral hammer as I was hammering in tiny nails for stretching my fabric on.

As usual, I couldn't get my camera do a good job of photographing something mostly white, but here's a couple shots of my giant fabric piece, stretched out on my stretcher, the extra length pooling at the bottom, with the pencil sketch of the outline I'll be making with the resist.

It took my about 2 full days of work to finish drawing in the entire outline with the resist, and today I hope to start going in with the fabric paint. After I have pictures of every step of the process, I'll do a post  about how it works. For now, the resist (or gutta) is a waxy and, well, resistive substance that I use to outline shapes on my fabric, like the black outlines on this scarf and the white outline on these scarves. Then, when I go in and paint with the very watery fabric paint, it doesn't bleed ridiculously, and instead pools within the shapes formed by the resist, which, if applied correctly, will have penetrated through the cloth and stopped the paint from spreading.