When the cloth, free from dressing and slightly dampened, is all ready, equal amounts are taken from each of the two tubes, and mixed together in a watch-glass or small glass or porcelain dish with, if necessary, a drop of water to soften them if they have dried up at all. This mixed paste is then brushed on to, and into, the cloth, and, as soon as dry, is steamed as before described. The black color will develop almost immediately, and, after a few minutes’ steaming, will be found fast to hard washing as well as to light.
Chapter XVI
RESIST AND DISCHARGE STENCILLING
Travelers in Japan inform us that, with their customary ingenuity, the natives there have developed the use of stencils to a point which quite matches the best achievements of our modern calico printers, even though backed by good dyeing chemists. When a young lady there wishes a new dress, she will draw, perhaps with the help of her best young man, and certainly with the advice and criticism of her family, her favorite design on a piece of brown paper, cut it out in stencil form, and send it to the local dyer, with the proper amount of calico or silk or what not, to be properly applied.
Now, in most cases the dyer is instructed to put the pattern on the cloth in colors, blue, black, red, yellow, or mixed shades, and this he does, much as my readers were taught to do in the last chapter, by painting on a stencil paste, to be fixed later by steaming.
The Japanese dyer, by the way, has a great advantage over the American craftsman in his steaming apparatus. No matter how small his place, or how poor his equipment, he always is provided with a neat and satisfactory steam chest, consisting of a copper pot set in a brick or stone fireplace, to hold the boiling water, and above it, a close-fitting box with sides made of lacquered paper, double jacketed to avoid condensation in cold weather, which can be kept full of dry steam for hours at a time, and in which the stencilled goods can be steamed thoroughly and well without fear of spoiling them.
Sometimes, however, the color is to be applied in another way; the cloth itself is to be colored blue or red or black, and the pattern is to be light, either pure white or some light color on a dark background.
The Japanese dyer, from time immemorial, has known how to do this properly, by means of a “Resist.” He prepares a resist paste which he carefully applies to the cloth through the stencil. This is allowed to dry, the cloth is then dyed, and, after the color is properly fixed, it is all thoroughly scrubbed, and the paste, washing off, leaves the cloth, underneath, in its original color.
Resist Stencil Paste.—This process of resist, ancient as it is, is used in Japan to this day, and many, indeed most, of the stencilled towels and piece goods that come from there are done in this way. It has the advantages, especially for the craftsman, over the Direct Color process, in that the color, being applied in a dye-bath, can be fixed readily and uniformly, without the bother and uncertainty of a steaming process. Through a friend, a well-known dyeing chemist, who has travelled in Japan, I learned the composition of the Japanese Resist Paste. They mix rice flour, wheat bran, and a little quicklime (the calcium oxide of the chemist) with water and boil it to make a paste. This they strain, and then they stir in some powdered carbonate of lime (powdered chalk), which thickens and gives some body to the mixture. The paste thus formed is applied, as a rule, not with a brush but with a flat wooden instrument or spatula, with which the paste is laid on as with a trowel, and further, to get the dead white effects so commonly noticed, the paste is put on the back of the cloth as well as on the front.
My friend also explained to me how the Japanese were able to get irregular shaded effects with their stencil work, and at the same time to furnish such beautiful and intricate hand-made work, at such absurdly low prices. These goods are made of very thin porous materials, and the dyer applies with his trowel the thick resist paste, through the stencil, to one piece after another, laying each one, as fast as it is stencilled, carefully on top of the previous one, until a pile has been formed of ten or more separate pieces. This pile is pressed very tightly together, and then the dyestuff, as, for instance, Indigo in solution and thoroughly reduced, is poured on to this mass of goods, soaking through from one to the other, but always kept out of the white parts by the double coating of thick paste.
After a few minutes these pieces are carefully taken off, one by one, exposed to the air until oxidized, and then thoroughly washed until the paste and loose color have all disappeared. For an example of Japanese resist stencil work, dyed in an iron spring, see Plate [III].