Printmaking to the Rescue

This is a story with a happy ending, but it begins with stepping in dog shit.

I didn’t realize I stepped in dog shit until I saw the smear on the tile floor. It was just a tiny blob, but I got the bleach bottle and sprayed the floor to clean it up. Not thinking, I also sprayed the bottom of the shoe, which was a pair of canvas Toms.

The colour immediately started draining from the canvas, turning the back of the shoe a light reddish-brown. The Toms were still wearable in the sense that the bleach didn’t eat a hole through the fabric, but they looked really weird. It had been a hard morning overall, and I walked upstairs to meditate instead of dealing with the ruined shoes.

But when I finished meditating, I realized that I could dye the canvas with silkscreen ink. This was the second time printmaking supplies had come to the rescue that morning. A friend had a broken plastic box top for a large bin she keeps outside, and I told her not to get a new bin because the old one could be resealed with screen tape. (It’s a waterproof tape you use to protect your screens.) Not the most conventional use of screen tape, but I use it for everything that goes outside in addition to protecting my silkscreen frames.

So printmaking was on my mind, and I realized I could dilute some black ink and use it like a dye. I painted it onto the canvas and voila–my shoe is black again.

The kids needed to hold the shoe to the light to see where the colour changed and said it was impossible to see just from wearing them out and about. So… printmaking to the rescue. Twice.