Silk: painting and tray dyeing

Is this watercoloured paper?

From Dyed Fabrics & Threads

No, it is silk painted with Procion dyes!

It is also part of the homework for the course "Silk Dyeing" given by Marjie McWilliams at Quilt University.
In "Dying experiment: silk" you can read more about this course.

First I painted some concentric circles with Anti-Fusant, a silk sizing also known as Stop-Flo, on a piece of pongé silk stretched in an embroidery hoop. After the sizing was dry I painted with dye solutions of Jacquard's Lemon Yellow, Medium Blue and Fire Engine Red on the stretched silk.

As you can see the Anti-Fusant works as a resist and provides a sharper separation between the colours. On places were there was no Anti-Fusant, the colours flowed more together.

While flowing together new colours were formed: orange from yellow and red, green from yellow and blue and violet from red and blue. Next picture also shows this flowing together:

This time some pre-wetted stretched silk without Anti-Fusant was painted. The result shows the same colours, but much softer.

After the homework was done there were some dye solutions left. I used them for an improvised tray-dyeing of a leftover piece of silk:

How to do the tray-dyeing is described in the practical and well illustrated book and on the accompanying DVD
"Tray Dyeing: Exploring Colour, Texture and Special Effects" by Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan from Committed to Cloth.

Thank you for your visit!
(click on the pictures for a better view)