I tried some resist printing with different pastes using flour, starch, wax and oil. I was inpired from the following articles: Indian resist printing with wax, African mud cloth (bogolanfini) made with starch resist, soy wax printing, different wax resist instructions, and flour paste resist printing. All, except the starch-water-solution, couldn’t be applied with my Indian wooden print stamps.

The fabric color has to be ironed for 5 minutes on the hottest setting, before I could wet the fabric to wash out the starch and flour. But after ironing the starch and fabric color has combined thoroughly with the fabric, and the starch couldn’t be dissolved in water anymore. It looks like a black 3D fabric print, but that’s not what I wanted. 😉

I also tried resist printing with melted paraffin, beeswax, and carnauba wax. I thought the paraffin would work best but the paraffin had spread in the fabric; however, the back of the fabric shows also white dots. The beeswax and carnauba wax were difficult to apply because the waxes hardened too soon, so it couldn’t penetrate the fabric thoroughly and the dots and lines are just light blue (not white), whereas the back of the fabric doesn’t show the pattern.

I’ve read about resist pastes using clay or gum arabic, but I couldn’t find a recipe. Have you tried resist printing? What resist paste did you use?