Today I spent $72.00 at Hobby Lobby on art supplies. I have more art supplies than anyone in the known universe. It’s time I started doing something with the supplies. Today’s purchases are as follows:
- Pearl Ex powdered mica pigments, in metallic & neutral colors. 12-jar “gift set” with instructional booklet. This stuff is cool. The store also had another 12-jar set in “fashion colors,” which I might go back and buy.
- 15 Pentel Fabric Fun pastel dye sticks. Basically dye crayons, which are heat-set. I need to buy one of those rubber stamp heating guns to do all this setting with.
- Four fluorescent-colored Fabric BloPens. Silly, but I couldn’t resist. Now I want to buy some neon fabric dye. I’m envisioning neon eggs with stencils.
- Four-piece Bead Stacker set, for holding dyes in.
- One package of paper circles made from banana leaf paper. I want to decoupage some eggs with cutouts.
- One package skeleton leaves. The leaves themselves are very nice, but I want to use them as resists on eggs.
- One bottle Florentine Gold Liquid Leaf. My old liquid leaf has dried up.
- Five tie-dyed bandanas to use as backdrops when photographing eggs.
- An “easy batik kit”, 1/3 off the regular price. This uses Proicorn dyes, which I’ve wanted to try on eggs for quite a while. It also has a nice spray bottle for dye application, something else I’ve wanted to play with, and a bottle of batik resist, which I’m hoping works like wax.
I’ve decided that from now on I’m going to design eggs in series of twelve. I’m not just going to practice one technique per egg. Instead I’m going to work on getting an entire dozen that share technique & color family. Tonight I’m going to go buy a dozen eggs to clean out, and pick which technique play with first.
Wait a sec – I can’t do that tonight. Tonight I have children coming over, and if I played with eggs around them I’d have to let them dye some. Oh well. Maybe I can content them with the child’s BloPen set I bought.
This is a list of the egg series I want to make:
- Striped eggs a la Martha Stewart
- Pearl Ex series
- Mary Englebirgt-ish eggs
- Rock Salt eggs
- Sun print eggs
- Polaroid transfer eggs (Light Impressions has a book on Polaroid transfers!)
- Neon BloPen eggs – this might not be a full dozen. We’ll have to see how they go.
- Marbleized acrylic eggs
BloPen Review:
Fabric BloPens, produced by Color Workshop, come in five standard colors (red, blue, yellow, green, brown) and a four neon colors (pink, yellow, orange, and green). BloPens started as a children’s art activity, heavily advertised on TV. Unlike traditional BloPens, the Fabric BloPens are aimed at the adult crafting market. A special Fabric BloPen Kit includes fourteen pens (two each of the standard colors plus one each of the neons), stencils, a foot pump, a video, a project book, and a carrying case.
During my BloPen trial I used the neon four-pack ($5.99 at Hobby Lobby) to decorate some eggs with my niece (age 6) and nephew (age 4). This isn’t really a kid-centered review, so I’ll just say that the kids enjoyed decorating eggs with the BloPens. I’ll probably buy a basic set to use with them next Easter.
We experimented with plain eggs, solid-color dyed eggs, and a few waxed-for-pysanky eggs.
BloPens are easy to use. All a person has to do is blow on one end, and watch color comes out the other end. The fabric BloPens require heat setting -- a warm iron or a few minutes in the clothes dryer are recommended on the package. Since eggshells aren’t really iron or dryer compatible, I hit the eggs with a hair dryer on high heat for a few minutes. (Let the egg dry several hours before trying this – moisture in the eggshell can cause the egg to crack when the shell gets too hot.)
We decorated the eggs in halves. We colored on half of the shell, and set it aside to dry. Later we decorated the other half.
BloPens on plain eggs were very nice. The colors went on smoothly, and if we changed pens while the colors were wet they would blend together and make new shades. I felt it took a lot of blowing to get decent coverage.
Using the BloPens on already-dyed eggs was a special treat. I had a yellow egg and a light blue egg. Each of them took the color well, and the resulting colors were very nice and eye-catching. This is my favorite way to use BloPens.
The eggs with waxed-on pysanky lines had mixed results. For some eggs, my half-baked plan was to BloPen the eggs, then add more wax and dye. The heat set requirement messed up my plans. Blow-drying the eggs removes the wax, which ruined my plans.
Using BloPens as a final step in pysanky, though, proved quite satisfying. The neon colors blended unexpectedly with the egg’s pre-existing dye, resulting in beautiful, unexpected flowing colors. Note that the wax on these eggs must be removed by scraping. When I tried removing the wax with a hair dryer large patches of BloPen would rub off with the wax. Scraping the wax and then heat sealing the egg worked best.
Based on this trial, in the future I’m going to have to use BloPens as either the first step or last step in pysanky.
BloPens are designed to be used with stencils, but I’ve never had much luck with stencils and tiny eggshells. I tried, but the colors crept underneath the stencil, and the stencil buckled on the egg. I had more fun ignoring stencils and playing with color.
After experimenting with BloPens I wish I had invested in the foot pump. My niece and nephew saliva’d my set nicely, making me unwilling to use the pens myself without washing the blowing caps thoroughly.
I liked the BloPens enough to consider buying a second set. The only thing holding me back is the dismal color selection. I don’t find the standard colors appealing. Hopefully Color Workshop will develop a set of pastel Fabric BloPens in the future.
