Dyeing experiment: silk

From Dyed Fabrics & Threads

Do you like what you see?
I certainly do!

These are the results after experimenting with different colors of the cold water fiber reactive Procion MX dye on pieces of the same kind pongé silk.

The Jacquard dyes, the chemical water and the soda fixative I used were from stock solutions made in August 2010. The dye stock solutions are stored in a refrigerator. My stock solutions are made from recipes described in "The Fabric Dyer's Dictionary". The techniques used for dyeing are (click the thumbnail for a bigger picture):

• full immersion:
  
  
  with Bright Golden Yellow
• partial immersion:
  
  
  
  Bright Golden Yellow
  overdyed by partial immersion with
  Cobalt Blue
  
  
  Bright Golden Yellow
  overdyed by partial immersion with
  Fire Engine Red
  
  
  first partial immersed with Purple
  and then overdyed by partial immersion with
  Cobalt Blue
• sprinkling:
  
  Bright Golden Yellow
  sprinkled with
  Fire Engine Red

To see the results of one dye color on several different kinds of silk I did a full immersion with Fire Engine Red:

overview and detail of
old pillow silk (dupion?)(l) and organza (r)

overview and detail of
bourette 34 (l) and 22 (r)

overview and detail of
chiffon straight(l) and crinkle (r)

overview and detail of
pongé 5 (l) and taffeta (r)

Part of the experiments were done as homework for Lesson Two of the online course "Silk Dyeing" given by Marjie McWilliams at the Quilt University.
To work with the recipes given by Marjie I had to do some math to dilute my stock solutions.
I wanted to know if my solutions were still good enough. If they were not, the alternative was overdyeing with freshly made solutions.

Marjie's wonderful website is Fabric Designs.com.
She shows many magnificant examples of her dyeing methods at her blog "Marjie's Dye Studio".

Thank you for your visit!