Results from using Rice Paste Resist

I recently finished the last of three cotton panels I made to explore different types of resist for cool water batik. You can check out the original post here. The design on the final panel was made with rice paste resist. I found this process takes longer and is much more labor intensive. To create the resist, I boiled 1 cup of rice in 2 cups of water for 30 minutes adding more water as it was absorbed. When the rice reached a thick, starchy consistency, I used a blender to pulse it into a paste. This paste was too thick to apply with a brush, so I used my fingers to press it into the fabric. Since I was concerned about the paste breaking down as I rubbed coffee into the fabric, I reinforced larger areas with more rice. The resist was very thick and sticky and took a couple of days to dry completely. To my delight, the resist held up much better to the coffee application than I expected. I let it rest for overnight instead of the day and a half that I waited for the original 2 panels. 

The next afternoon I rinsed out the resist and ran into some issues. Either because of the shorter set time for the coffee or because I had to use warmer water to rinse out the (super wash-resistant) rice starch, the color of the coffee barely registers in some areas. Depending on how the light hits the panel, at times you can't even see the pattern at all. These presents some new problems. Out of the three types of resist; I think that rice has the most potential formally and content wise. It creates a line that is softer than the wax resist but more definitive than glue gel. I have to figure out how to apply the coffee so that the stain remains as I remove the resist. I'm currently working on a pattern that includes an encoded map of a particular path I walk every Tuesday and Thursday. I planned for this work to be much larger than the 12" x 36" panels. However, since I can foresee a lot of experimentation necessary to nail down the process for this work, I'm going to divide this pattern into smaller parts that will be assembled together later so that I can work faster.

The pattern on the top portion of the panel is barely discernible.

The color on the bottom portion of the pattern is more successful, though I'm not exactly sure why.