Dy(e)ing for Scarves

Well well well, look at me doing stuff that doesn't require yarn or thread. Sometimes you have to branch out to other types of crafts! And those crafts include dyes and silk scarves:

(Pardon the bad photography. I have neither adequate lighting nor a real camera.)

Sadly, I don't have process pics for this, but the techniques I used is called marble dyeing. Basically, you float thinned acrylic paints on a thickened water mixture and swirl it around a bunch until you have a nice design. Then, take fabric that you've pretreated with alum (silk is best, but other fabrics or paper will also work) and lay it gently on the paint! The alum makes the paint bond to the fabric almost instantly, so all those nice swirls stay crisp and bright. Let's have a look at them again, shall we?

So pretty! This isn't a spur-of-the-moment project: you need to pretreat the silk and mix the thickening agent a day in advance. But the dyeing itself goes quite quickly, and it would make a great party activity. Though I might recommend getting bigger silk blanks! These are 24" long, and that's not quite enough to do much with. I couldn't really make a knot to tie it around my neck, but I came up with a creative solution!

Shawl pins to the rescue!

The next time I marble dye, I'll be sure to take some pictures of the setup for you guys. And I have to find more things to do with all the acrylic dye/paint I bought, too... oh the experiments we shall conduct! Stay tuned if you want to see me mess around more with pretty colors!