Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Silk Rainbow

Like many of you, I've been busy with making Christmas gifts.  Each year I face the dilema: what to make for my co-workers?  By now, they must be pretty tired of getting scarves from me, and this year is no exception. But I did put away my knitting needles and got out the paint brushes. 

For my striped silk scarves, I mixed up fiber reactive dyes and mixed two colors in varing percentages (20/80, 40/60, 60/40 and 80/20) to give a color gradient. I then painted repeating stripes on wet silk, letting the colors blend at the edges.  I wrapped each scarf in plastic wrap and let them sit for 24 hours to set the dye.  Any wrinkles in the plastic wrap add addition interesting texture to the scarf.

Fortunately, each of my co-workers have different color preferences, so I have a veritable rainbow of silk: