HA. Just kidding. Obviously. This would be the doofus cat that still calls my house home. SOMEDAY his real mama will come to reclaim him (hint-hint christine…). He just likes to wait until I’m slaying trolls in the Etsy fora to take advantage of the most expensive fabric in the house. (Don’t worry- this gets washed on hot about a dozen times during dyeing.)

Here- thanks to my hubs, is my “discharging” get up. Sometimes you just gotta take the color OUT of something, and that throws off some really nasty fumes. I do it outside (hence the outdoor shot) with my hot plate and a “table” made of sawhorses and buckets and so on. Not something you want to dress up for. Generally- this would be done in one of the many multicolored (aka dyesplashed) shirts and crocs. and grubby pants or pjs. But we just amae back from a day out with the kids- so I threw the garb on for the modeling session in front of the hydrangea. FYI: That hydrangea is FULL of bumblebees…..

Scary eh? Maybe sometime I’ll actually do some REAL workspace pics. After I clean up my workspace.

Anyhoo- that’s me. Last time I was out doing this- in my driveway- every dog walker and kid walker happened to decide to go for a stroll by my house that day. Trust me- It wasn’t pretty and I secured my place as the nuttiest on the block.

Now that we’ve looked at that- let’s look at the cute…

Yes- that’s the asshat cat from above, looking cute so that I still feed him every day. There are two others in the house- but they are a little more camera shy.

“Yes Way!”  I say.

I did, and I have proof, that indeed, I spent the afternoon rocking out with Gaelic Storm’s new album, in my basement, mixing and concocting, and soaking and rinsing.

Behold, the wrinkled, not quite ready for primetime, but sort of pretty nonetheless, batch of scarves I did today.

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They may not be colors for everyone, but I am finding, as I usually do at this time of year, a yearning for the colors of autumn.

Subdued, warm, looking like the sound of crunching leaves, but light enough to still feel like summer heat.

They should be up in the shop by tomorrow.

(and for anyone keeping count, which is probably only me…. that was a seven week hiatus from dyeing things.  Let’s not let that happen again, shall we?)

a bunch of dyeing got done!

Silk Chameuse 12 and 19mm scarves, and a habatoi all were immersion dyed, the pink to be backgrounds for various designs. Probably going to do some monoprinting and shibori.

Printing and wrapping will most likely happen next weekend. Not enough time this week.

I was starting to pontificate over how I’ve come around to liking art that isn’t just the realist painters, and so on, but it was getting too heady and stuffy sounding. Dang it, I just like color. And sometimes it’s just fun to play with color in whatever way strikes you. Monday, I just wanted to play with the colors, and see what happened. The result is below.

There was a vague plan for this scarf. It’s a little lighter than what I wanted, but that’s because I accidentally baked it. Etsy friends….see thread here. And clearly- it didn’t burn. I think the smell was the wax. I also don’t think the oven was on as long as I thought. Anyhoo… here’s the blue version : (The light is not great, I haven’t really futzed around with color correction because I wasn’t shooting this for the shop. Just to share with you all.)

And all stretched out:

I had fun. There was ego soothing over my public goofing up my other scarf with such newbie type mistakes. This one didn’t get burnt to a crisp. (though it was pretty dark when I unwrapped it). Happy little dyer I am! Sometimes it’s just fun to throw some wax.

While I’m not a lifelong dyer, I have been doing this long enough and intensely enough over the last few years that the mistakes that are about to play out were pretty dumb. As much I’d like to blame it on the late night, which is the only time I can really work on these things, this really was more a combination of impatience, inattention to detail, and yeah, alot of fatigue.

Okay, that said…onward to the branch disaster… (if you haven’t- read the post that leads up to this here: )

The scarf was batiked, and the background sprayed with pale to deep rosey pink dye. Since it is silk, I’m sticking with acid processing. Sounds scary but it just means the PH of the dye is acidic -I use citric acid crystals. There were 2 colors of concentrated dye stock, and a big bottle of acidic water for me to mix them with. When steamed, it will render the colors permanent.

For the branches, I grab bottle of black silk dye. I have used this kind of dye with the other backgrounds before, and it has worked fine, since it is essentially an acid dye. I dilute the black, do a few test strokes on some other silk, and I’m good to go.

I am not thrilled with how the dye is flowing (I painted the areas with an anti-diffusant and let dry) but I figure I can live with it. I can retouch later if need be. It’s very dark, dispute more dilution. I’m remembering that it’s difficult to get the effect of the brush painting (which is a very strict way of holding your brush) on a silk frame since it’s like painting on a loose trampoline. I leave it to dry, and start to clean up. I pick up the black dye bottle and have the “Oh Crap” moment. It wasn’t the bottle I thought it was. It was a completely different kind of reactive dye, one that needs a more more alkaline environment to work. And I had never used this before. Didn’t even remember buying it. I do a frantic web search for this to see if I can find any indication that this can be used as an acid dye. I find none. So, I do some fast thinking, figuring- either way, I’ve probably toasted this scarf- and it is now just a learning exercise. So I try to carefully paint over the black with a baking soda solution to adjust the PH. There is some bleeding, but not much. At this point this scarf is pretty much destined for the scarp bin though.

It dries, and finally gets steamed for 2 hours. Then I rinse. And rinse. Usually, if you’ve done everything right, the initial washout lets alot of unreacted dye go, then the water should get more clear. It wasn’t. It was really really pink. After 3 bucket changes, it sits in hot water, to get the wax out. When I pull it out, I see that the black has faded to gray, and only the first 2 applications of pink stayed.

I like how the wax resist held it’s line against the dye, but clearly there’s a major uh-oh. When I go back down to finish cleaning up, I flash on the night before, and remember not only did I screw up the black, but when I was mixing the last pink to spray the whole scarf- I mixed the dyestock with plain, unacidified water. So, except for the properly mixed paint I basically just stained the silk.

The cool thing is I’d read about chemical resisting in a few places- and you can clearly see where the acidic pink was “chased away” by alkaline black. Problem is they also pretty much cancelled each other out.

So I’m left with a 14×60 inch “scrap”. I did play around with some metallic fabric paints. And I also figured I could embellish and so on and make a few ATC’s from it, or use the good spots somehow. I don’t like to use fabric paint on scarves, but for art cards, pillows and so on, it works fine.

Even though I basically wasted a weekend painting and trying to fix this, at least I got to learn a few things along the way.

Feel free to comment on you favorite “mistake”.

This weekend, with a need to use up some dyestock before it got too old, I started.

Starting with 16mm silk charmeuse scarf, it was stretched on the handy dandy frame.  Using soy wax and a cheap sumi brush I started dotting away.

On the right you can see the wax on white silk.  There is a light layer of pink that I put down.  Light is not great here, but you get the idea.

The left is the next layer of a deeper pink.  I stopped just to shoot a few “in progress” pics.

And finally…the rest of the deeper rose pink.

After a good night’s rest, “Part Two: Branches”.  But that’ll have to be tomorrow.

I played loose and fast with the rules. (time, temp and so on, wasn’t paying close attention.)

And I lost.

The silks were all in acid dye baths, small containers, and nuked for at high for 4 minutes, one minute intervals, then left in their closed containers, steaming happily for the next hour until I was ready to rinse. I used some older dyestocks that couldn’t really be used for alkaline processing, as I had read you can still use them, even if they’ve been sitting on the shelf a while. I had just used these the day before with not problem.

The velvets were also lwi, but alkaline processing, sitting in their containers. Fresh dyestocks.

I don’t know if it was the temperatures, wrong PH, or a combination, but the Blue in everything seems to be washing out. I’m guessing temps and not enough time. I got impatient and started rinsing after 3 hours.

Actually no “seems” about it. 3 Silks were a beautiful mottled deep teal (less pronounced patterning intentional) I wanted to then pole wrap and discharge. They are now the palest sage green.

The gorgeous plum scarves are on the violet side of fuschia. Kind of “barbie” fuschia.

The browns are less gorgeous and the mottles have a more pronounced fuschia and yellow lines. Not the deep earthy variations they were.

DANG DANG DANG.

I have been hot washing (after they all had preliminary rinses in cold water) all yesterday and today, and I still have “muddy water”.

Hopefully I can overdye the velvets. The silks are practically white so i know I can do those again.

I guess the “fun with shibori” will have to wait till tomorrow.