Solar Dyed Silk

Thought I'd follow up the solar mordanting post with one on solar dyeing silk. The bottom photo shows pre-mordanted, tussah, silk top that has had natural dye extracts (mixed with water) poured onto the silk in a rainbow fashion (random). When you do this in Terry's tub, it's important to pour on enough to saturate what you want (ie. sometimes you want to leave some of the silk without dye - interestingly, it can make for "sparkle" when you spin it up). To saturate the dye into the silk, gently push the dye into the top with your gloved fingers. This way you'll know it has penetrated the top, inside and out. Afterwards, put on the plexiglass cover, c-clamp it down, put your rocks on the plexiglass to hold down the corners, and set in the sun. On a very hot, sunny day, the dyeing can be achieved in 1-3 days. If you're going away (ie. vacation, etc.) you can leave it longer. Silk doesn't like to be overdone, however, no more than a baked cake does. Use your discretion. You can do a Terry's tub in this same way with wool fleece, yarn or other protein fibers. You can also use chemical dyes that require heat. However, in that case, you wouldn't need to pre-mordant and instead, you'd follow the chemical dye package requirements. Once dyed - rinse, rinse, rinse, etc. Dry well. Note that the dried, silk top looks like something the cat dragged in. It's ugly and looks hopeless. This is why we pre-drafted all of the silk and silk blend tops prior to selling any of it (when I co-owned my natural dye business). To say that this huge amount of pre-drafting was ruining my hands would be an understatement!

Which brings me to the top photo of balls of pre-drafted, tussah, silk top. These are some of the colors that participants of the "Silken Class" at SOAR '06 will have to choose from to spin for their small, silk scarf. It'll be fun to see how all the scarves turn out. Once folks finish them, they can opt to send me a photo of the scarf and I'll post each photo on this blog.