Friday, March 11, 2011

Experiments in Dyeing Silk for Nuno Felting

The silk I use for nuno felting comes in white and I don't like how it looks when combined with dark wool. I know I will eventually use commercial dyes for silk but I don't know what color I want and you have to use all sorts of chemicals to make the dye fix to the fabric and I just didn't want to deal with that yesterday so I played around with some things you can find in your kitchen. Above from left to right we have onion skins, coffee grounds, and red food coloring. I simmered the silk in them for about an hour. And I pre-wet the silk before I submerged it.

This is onion skins. (I made a fantastic pasta dish for lunch yesterday that I will report on later that used three onions. Sigh, the sacrifices I must make for my art.)

I am very pleased with the outcome. The left is the onion skin. The center is the food coloring. It looks white but is actually a very nice shade of pink. And on the right is the coffee. The may not be light resistant, but I am not too worried for now.
I want to play with putting yellow, orange, red, and brown wool over the onion skin and coffee silk and put pink and fuchsia wool over the pink.

3 comments:

  1. I'm surprised that the onion skin dyed silk looks darker than the coffee dyed silk!

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  2. Yay! Great colors! I did this too after our class last weekend, but I used onion skins for one, and black tea for the other silk scarf. I soaked them for three days, and they turned out not so "bright white" anymore, which was what I was going for.

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  3. I think next I am going to buy those finished scarves from Thai Silks and then whip out the Jacquard dyes for some really bright colors!

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