In my first experiment with flour paste resist, I spread the paste all over the fabric, and then scraped off a pattern. The hardest part of the process was getting the dried paste off.

Logically, therefore, the next thing to try is putting less paste on. So my next idea was to pipe a pattern onto the fabric with an icing pump.

I wanted a bold pattern, so I began with a reasonably thick nozzel. The line spread rather a lot, so I changed to the smallest nozzel I had.

This turned out to be a very good move. In the first picture, you can see the two thicknesses of line.

You can also see how much water had been absorbed from the paste by the fabric in the time it took to pipe the pattern and reach for my camera.

The second picture was taken a couple of days later. The finer lines have dried, but you can see from the colour of the thicker lines that they are still wet.

It took over a week for the whole scarf to be ready to paint.

I was aim at splodgy impressionistic flowers, so I wanted to make sure the background blended in with the design rather than being a plain colour. As I painted the flowers with a variety of orange and yellow procion dyes, I spread the colour onto the background from time to time, where it could merge just like watercolour paint does on paper.

This time, the flour paste came off easily, in big chunks, leaving the basic design visible. All that was left was to refine the design by adding some lines in fabric crayon.