During my Tracks4Crafts Residency at the Textile Lab at Waag Amsterdam, I experimented with making soy resist dye using the open-source Hapticolor printer hacked and developed by the lab.

I wanted to explore whether Hapticolor and code could help me skip the stencil-making process altogether. Instead of cutting stencils, I sent my digital designs directly to the printer, which deposited soy resist paste onto fabric to create the negative image before dyeing. This would also open up possibilities for creating forms and patterns beyond the traditional visual vocabulary.

The process had failures, surprises, clogged nozzles, and many, many spirals. Towards the end of the two weeks, I developed a simple protocol: diluting the soy resist paste to a specific ratio so it could flow through a 3D-printed nozzle, attaching the nozzle to the printer, and then adjusting printing speed, soy viscosity, and code to move a design from computer to printer then to fabrics.

Technical support: Waag Textile Lab, Waag Fab Lab.
Residency co-funded by the European Union.