Tuesday 12 March 2013

Acrylic Wax - what is that?

Hindsight is a great thing. Frances Pickering advises that you apply acrylic wax to the fabric and paper pages (to provide a seal and enhance the colour of the fabric) BEFORE you stitch on it. I'm a bit late!
What is this acrylic wax and and where do you get it? Google to the rescue - I read a bit about it on Kim Izenman's blog.
I've seen it before when I was at college, like liquid gold, it was off limits to us greedy students.
I've looked around for it -- you can never get anything in NI-- and to order from England, it's the postage that's more than the product. So with the info I'd gleaned from Kim's blog it was off to BandQ.
I bought a bottle of wood floor polish containing polyacrylate polymer and waxes. It's milky like the stuff I remember and it cost £5.48 for 500ml.
That should do it! Worth a try.

 I wrote on the fabric first with my uni jetstream pen. It's supposed to be permanent ink.



Then I tried out the 'floor polish.' It made the ink run a bit. 
 I realised I should have left the ink to dry completely before I brushed the polish on. 


After the fabric had dried I tried writing on it again and found the ink flowed much more easily over the waxy surface. The fabric definitely has a firmer feel to it and I think it's improved the colour.

 I'm quite pleased with  my wood floor polish. Maybe a product bought as 'Acrylic Wax' would give a better result, I don't know. I get a bit fed up of Art and Craft supplies where normal things are generally sold in tiny amounts and are overpriced.
So now I'm going to wax the other fabric pages that I haven't done anything on yet.

I painted these papers with Acrylic inks, let them dry, then brushed the floor polish over. Nice. I'm thinking of leaves and trees for these.

******


I've done the couching for the daisy chain.
 I'm going to do some seed stitching over this to represent the blades of grass.
right side
wrong side
Primroses next.

7 comments:

crazydazy said...

hi, thats interesting about the wax.....does it make the fabric very stiff. Love your daisy chain,
Very chilly isnt it, ali

snoopysgranny said...

Hey Ali, You're too quick for me. I'm correcting grammatical errors! It's not stiff at all but just feels a bit firmer for when you turn the pages. Maybe more coats would firm it up....it is chilly.

kim said...

Thank you for looking at my blog. I hadn't realized it was so prominent when you google acrylic wax varnish. I use a product made by the Polyvine company, which I think is based in the UK. I do not order from an art supply stockist, but from one that caters to wood finishers. I think if you look at the Polyvine website, they can tell you who carries the product in your area.

snoopysgranny said...

Thanks for the info Kim, I looked up Polyvine and we do have a local stockist in my area so that's good to know. I love that stuff!

FranOnTheEdge said...

Oooh, lovely. This information is great, and just what I was looking for. I bought a bottle of 'Acrylic Wax' about a year ago from a local craft store 150ml for £4.99 and I've only useen it once. I wasn't all that happy with the result as I'd painted it over some sprayed water based paints with mica in it. The end result looked quite nice but only if you didn't know how much nicer it looked before the acrylic wax was brushed on. It now had streaks and directional brush marks. Very nice to know that there IS a use for it after all. Thank you for posting this.

FranOnTheEdge said...

Oooh, lovely. This information is great, and just what I was looking for. I bought a bottle of 'Acrylic Wax' about a year ago from a local craft store 150ml for £4.99 and I've only useen it once. I wasn't all that happy with the result as I'd painted it over some sprayed water based paints with mica in it. The end result looked quite nice but only if you didn't know how much nicer it looked before the acrylic wax was brushed on. It now had streaks and directional brush marks. Very nice to know that there IS a use for it after all. Thank you for posting this.

FranOnTheEdge said...

Oooh, lovely. This information is great, and just what I was looking for. I bought a bottle of 'Acrylic Wax' about a year ago from a local craft store 150ml for £4.99 and I've only useen it once. I wasn't all that happy with the result as I'd painted it over some sprayed water based paints with mica in it. The end result looked quite nice but only if you didn't know how much nicer it looked before the acrylic wax was brushed on. It now had streaks and directional brush marks. Very nice to know that there IS a use for it after all. Thank you for posting this.