Dyed Silk – Felting and Fiber Studio

Recycling and Upcycling silk kimono

August 21, 2021 heirloom51 Comments 15 comments

A few blogs ago Welshfelters posted about upcycling/recycling a chinese lantern. That got me thinking about the project I’ve been plonking away on for ages now – recycling silk. I really love silk in almost all its forms, not too crazy about silk noil, but everything else is just lovely, the texture, the colours, the gloss, the sound. I have ASMR, so even thinking about silk gives me a case of the shivers.

When one of our guild members was down sizing and offered some used kimono for sale at an excellent price, I was first in line and happily took home a box of bright red, blue, brown, and orange silky bits. The construction of these kimono was amazing, all hand sewn, all exquisitely designed and all in deplorable condition. The fabric has deteriorated along the fold lines and has some tears, so re-purposing is one of the best options for most of the fabric. Hand washing and disassembly followed, along with a bit of ironing, just to make life a little easier when cutting time came.

A few years ago another friend had gifted me fabric cutters; Bliss and Frazer. They are both vintage models and well loved. When they first came into my care, I really had no immediate purpose for them but knew that ‘someday’ they would be put to good use. Along with recycling fabric, good tools also need to be kept in useful condition, so they went for a spa treatment to a talented gentleman who fixed a damaged bearing, sharpened the blades, retooled the wheel plate and generally got them both up and running optimally.

Silk is brutal on fabric cutters.

The wheel is starting to show signs of wear after cutting silk

The blade is showing signs of becoming dull, so I will probably switch to a rotary blade and ruler, which seems to work just fine. The rotary cutter has the added benefit of replacement blades that can be recycled and replaced as needed. I’ll save the fabric cutters for wool and cotton. Using the ruler and rotary cutter to cut width doesn’t yield consistent results, or as consistent as the fabric cutter, but with silk I don’t think that’s a significant issue. There are a couple of ways I can make the strips of cut silk into a single piece of ‘yarn’.

I can spin it together and then hold it together a little more with a ply of silk thrums thread.

I can do a splice and spin it as a single which allows for the little tails to become a design element in the yarn.

or I can just weave it in as a rag technique and alternate with the silk thrums. In the end, I’m going to call it art yarn and who will challenge the inconsistency of the yarn!

All fabric that is used in our daily lives will wear out, but when it comes to a fiber that is so costly to make, so valuable and lovely I want to put the extra effort into keeping it out of the rag bag for as long as possible. Most, if not all fabrics can be given a second life before they can be purposed as rags. The ingenuity of our predecessors was impressive and there is no reason not to emulate them. Sheets, curtains, judo gis, towels, suits can all be remade into carpets, place-mats, cushion covers, dish rags, clothing material, blankets, quilts, scarves, the list goes on a long as your imagination permits. And yes rags, that’s a valid repurpose.

My plan for these red and orange silk kimonos and the red silk thrums is to weave material for a medium weight jacket for the winter. Something very simple in design, similar to a kimono but without any fitting or lining. My cousin in Japan is hunting an obi or two for me to use as trim. Hopefully this will be functional and attractive once I can solve the problem of the silk bleeding like crazy. But that is a challenge for another day.

Silk thrums easily dye wool and are difficult to control. Silk kimono also run their colour.

Not all the kimono could be cut, at least not by me. This is going to be a project for another day.

Dyeing Silk

January 4, 2017 zedster66 Comments 17 comments

Since the house was tidy for Christmas I used the opportunity to do some dyeing. I mostly did fibres, but I also wanted to dye some silk. I have lots of patterned silk scarves, but wanted some more ‘plain’. This first pices is some silk Karen (who used to do the blog with us) sent me years ago. It’s labelled ’tissue silk’, is similar to silk chiffon, but different more like crepe. I dipped it in darker blue first, then lighter blues at the other end.

These pieces are silk habotai. The photo doesn’t do them justice, they have such a gorgeous shine. I’m kicking myself I didn’t buy lots of silk from wollknoll when the exchange rate was in our favour!

These are some pieces of silk chiffon, there’s less colour variation in these than in the tissue silk and habotai pieces. They came out really nice though:

These strips are from a piece of silk I got in a charity shop, it was a green to white blended piece, so I tore it where the green was palest, and dyed strips from those parts with blues and greens, and the whitest part burgundy with some purple shades.

I also overdyed some printed silk I had. I can’t find any photos of it here, but I used it on a couple of notebook covers. It was nice in an unusual kind of way, but not so nice I didn’t mind completely changing it! This first piece was overdyed with blues and greens, it doesn’t look massively different, but it toned down the yellows:

And this isn’t the best photo, but the over-dyeing turned out better than I expected using oranges and reds over greens/blues:

And here’s a rolled up batt I made from multi scraps a while ago:

Completing Another UFO

May 21, 2016 ruthlane Comments 22 comments

I have been inspired by Ann’s 2nd quarter challenge to start working on the piles of fabric and UFO’s in my studio that haven’t been completed. I dyed this silk fabric in August of last year. You can read about the dyeing experience here and here. I decided to make some pillows for our living room to liven up the place a little. I had two yards of fabric and made three 18″ square pillows and one 16″ square pillow. The smaller pillow was a request from hubby to use in his chair. I didn’t think this through very well and almost ended up without enough fabric. But I squeaked by and covered the pillow forms I had.

I also didn’t pay enough attention to where my flowers were going to end up and which side should be front and which back but it all worked out OK in the end. I also don’t stitch silk very often. I forgot how slick, slippery, stretchy and generally uncooperative it can be. Fun was had by all including the sewing machine trying to eat the fabric several times and jamming itself up.

On the three larger ones, I made an envelope style back.

Here are all the pillows on one couch. Didn’t realize my Glacier Park painting was crooked until I looked at this photo. Better go straighten that.

The smaller pillow for hubby is on the left and here is one of the pillows in one of our other chair. I like the bright colors against the deeper green of the couch. They definitely brighten up the room.

But I still have a pile of strips of green and red silk that I can’t throw away. Now I have to think of another project for these. They are too heavy for nuno and I really don’t want to do any more sewing of this slippery fabric but perhaps I can add them to cards or collages??

Dyed Poppies

August 31, 2015 ruthlane Comments 14 comments

I recently wrote about this piece because I couldn’t get the blue dye to stay in my green mixtures for the leaves of the poppies. I solved that problem by adding Dye-Na-Flow paint.

This is what the piece looked like when the paint was first applied. I did add a bit more black paint to the centers after the green had dried. I heat set the paint with an iron and then washed the entire piece in the washing machined.