Playing with Silk and Dyes

My husband thinks the kitchen and dining room are turning into a laboratory and I am a mad scientist. Every time he comes in the kitchen there are big metal pots with simmering colored liquids in them or large plastic containers with more colored liquids and fabrics tied around PVC pipes. When you move into the kitchen, every chair has freshly dyed silk scarves hanging over them to dry.

I am really getting into these shibori dyeing techniques. It's really amazing the different results you can get while using the same materials. For example, both of those scarves below were dyed with the exact three colors of dye from the same batch but one was left in hot steamy dyes for much longer and the other one was put in the same dyes that had cooled down and for less time. Cool!

The purple one is my favorite so far; I am going to have to keep one for myself for sure. Some of these I will leave plain silk scarves and some of them I will felt over and make nuno scarves. I will be selling these at a little pop up shop for Tacoma Art Walk next week and then putting them on my Etsy shop afterwards.

While I am at it, I have been throwing buttons randomly into the dye vats. It's funny how some buttons take the dye really well and others don't and you can't really tell ahead of time which will do what.