I have a Flower Workshop coming up in September at a local museum. Just outside Ottawa, at Pinheys Point. If you’re interested, sign up here.

One of the flowers we make uses a silk hanky. I was running low on most of my colours, so it was time for a dye day.

New undyed silk hankies are hard to get wet. There is still a lot of sericin in the hankies. Particularly in the thicker edges. For those who don’t know, silk hankies are usually made from the cocoons of silk moths that hatch. The cocoons are stretched out into rectangles or caps. The cocoons are held together with sericin, it is like a glue that doesn’t easily dissolve in water.

In order to get them properly wet, I use a little soap in the water and let them soak overnight.

 

 

Here is what I had in my box of hankies

I had quite a few of the pink and grey. It’s not a popular pick for anyone in classes. I don’t know why I think it’s really pretty.  There is quite a bit of magenta the purple, and pink. I will over-dye some of those.

For silk dying, you can use either acid dye, like you use for wool or other animal fibres, or MX dye (fibre reactive dye), like you use for cotton or other plant fibres. I use a variation of low water immersion dying with MX dyes.  The site I like for dye information is Paula Burches’ All about Hand Dying

Then I added colour to the new ones.

This one, I added the kelly green first in a few spots, and then a mix of the amethyst and navy to get a blue-purple.

This one folded the hanky by pinching the middle and folding the edges down. I added the yellow where the point is.  and a little at the bottom. I mixed some red to the peach to get a more burnt orange colour and poured it over the rest. I elevated the pointy end a bit so the red-orange wouldn’t flow over it.

For this one again, an orangy red and ice blue.

And lastly, seafoam and plum blossom. I don’t use seafoam often; I always think it will be an icky pale green colour, but as you see, it is not. I need to find my dye chart and hang it up somewhere. I almost forgot to take a picture of this one.

 

I didn’t take pictures of rinsing.  So you don’t get to see where I forgot to put my gloves on and turned my hands blue. The one thing to note with MX dye is that the colours do not exhaust.

Then it was onto the drying racks.

Have you been dying lately?