Now that your flour paste resist is dry, you are ready to begin cracking!  This is SO satisfying!

STEP ONE: CRACKING THE FLOUR RESIST

Start cracking the flour resist by crunching the fabric with both hands. Do this as much or as little as you like.  The more you crack the flour resist the more areas for your color to seep through.  Don’t worry if you cannot see all of the cracks. They are there, trust me!

Get creative with this step, you can make concentrated cracks on particular spots of your fabric. You can even do one mass of cracks and leave the rest of the fabric solid to dye over later. There are many possibilities!

 

 

STEP TWO:  PAINT THE FLOUR RESIST

For this step you will need your chosen color of acrylic paint, water, small bucket, paint brush and gloves.  Hopefully you found some fun paints to try – I went with black!

Add 1 part paint to 1 part water in a small bucket, and stir with a wooden paint stirrer.  Once the acylic paint and water are mixed thoroughly, using your paint brush, begin to paint the on top of the flour paste resist.  You want to be generous with the paint, it needs to seep through the the cracks in the resist to get to the fabric.  

*Note: if you cracked the resist in specific areas, you’ll only need to paint those areas.

 

To check if your paint is saturating, gently lift up a corner of the fabric where you added paint and look underneath.  If you didn’t squeal with excitement, you didn’t add enough paint!

After applying your color onto the resist, let the paint dry.  Use any of the 3 methods in Part Two, to dry the paint.  When the paint is fully dry it should be the same color where ever you applied it.  No dark wet spots!  If you notice some cracked areas are lacking color, re-apply paint to those spots and repeat the drying process.

> > > Part Four : Removing the Resist

> > Part Two: Preparing and Applying the Flour Paste Resist

> Part One:  Fabric Preparation