Dyeing Silk Scarves
Saturday, October 13th, 2007I LOVE SILK! I love the feel, the drape, the versatility - and most of all, I love dyeing it. I get shivers just thinking about it.
Hey! I heard that - I’m not weird, I’m unique.
Last year I decided to dye a bunch of 14″ x 72″ Habotai 8mm silk scarves as holiday gifts.
There were several reasons for it:
- Nothing beats a hand-made gift, especially when it’s silk
- No two were the same, and you won’t find anything like it on a store shelf
- I got to play!
So about a month before Christmas, I got in my silk scarf blanks, new dyes, different kinds of salts (table, Kosher, rock), and Wintergreen rubbing alcohol.
I set up in the sewing room with saw-horses and a board. The board was covered in mid-weight plastic that could be either wiped down or easily removed and replaced as needed.
I could now only walk on one side of the room along the board. I have got to get a bigger sewing room!
The pictures you see here (nice and large) were my favorites. I ended up doing 15 scarves, and the biggest problem was keeping the fur-kids away as I worked. You would have thought I was depriving them of food and water the way they carried on! Gads they’re spoiled.
All my dyeing is done by hand; I don’t do vat dyeing. That means that every color is separately applied with ‘something’ and so are any additional effect like using the salts or alcohol.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with vat dyeing, I simply don’t enjoy doing it.
The dyes I use are non-toxic and come premixed in most cases. Some are concentrates, but I never use powders. Between my asthma, tons of allergies, and the fur-kids, I’m extremely careful - and that cancels out working with powders. I can even work without gloves as long as I don’t mind brightly colored hands. I don’t.
So here I dyed all these great looking scarves and included pictures of them in the December Wearable Update Newsletter. Next thing I knew, I had requests to buy them!
Yeah, I was flattered - I was also pretty speechless.
Every single one of them sold. I’d never-ever even tried to sell my dyed pieces! I’d used them for competition garments, samples, and gifts.
One of the women, Nancy, bought 4 of the them and sent a picture of the happy group at Christmas. Have I mentioned how much I love what I do?
Um, I had to remake all the Christmas gifts. Everyone got three different kinds of herbal bath soak. And I made sure that there was enough left over for me too!














