Playing with dye

Last week a friend and I played with some new dye techniques. We were trying to create interesting and appealing designs on tissue silk that we could then later use in hard nuno felting. I will take these pieces to Canberra on the weekend to use them in a workshop with Catherine O'Leary. I am really looking forward to learning some new skills! I have included some photos of our dyeing efforts.

We tried using silk paints on the tissue silk that need steam to set them. We tired both wet and dry tissue silk. The effects were interesting as the tissue silk is so fine. We found it very difficult to control the "bleed" effect of the dye on the silk.

Next we carved some block prints and brushed the block prints with Textcraft dual purpose paints and placed them on the tissue silk. This was easy to control, but the final look was very predictable due to the prints we had cut.

We also tried some Lumin Arte polished pigments mixed with fibre fixative which we painted onto the tissue silk. The effect was beautiful. But we found that the first heat seal did not prevent all the colour from leaching out of the silk when washed! They needed to be heat treated and then washed before being heat treated again. This seemed to set the colour more effectively. It will be interesting to see if these colours stand the felting process!!