Natural Dyes: Tea and Coreopsis

Oh, man! I forgot to mordant the silk first! The colors won't be as deep, but hopefully, there will still be enough color to make a difference.

Suni's sister from Korea is visiting. She came over to do some dyeing with me this morning. I showed her how to measure the aluminum sulfate for mordant and to bring the water to a boil before adding the mordant and the cloth.

the tea from Yunan province in China
comes as a compacted disc

We soaked the silk de Chine and the antique Japanese silk in this water while we made a dye bath from tea from my trip to China in 2009  and from the coreopsis flowers I got from Laurel Boyajian.

silk in the tea bath
the tea leaves have been strained out

We folded the still wet cloth and clamped it with   plexiglass disks to block the dye. Then we submerged the cloth in the hot dye baths. We will leave it overnight and take it out tomorrow.

silk in the coreopsis bath

When I took Suni's sister back to the green houses where Suni works, Suni showed us some iris's we can try for dyeing tomorrow!


It was only after I got home that I realized I had forgotten to add the mordant to the boiling water before adding the cloth!

Tea With My Friend, a silk painting

Tea With My Friend

This silk painting, Tea with my Friend,  is about those intimate conversations with a close friend over a cup of tea. It is hanging in the Tea Shop with several of my newest paintings.

I'm planning to get a gallery on line of the Tea Shop paintings and other painting that go with the theme Stories of Loving.

silk painting class

What fun teaching silk painting yesterday! Here is some of my student's work before steaming. We used a few techniques here. We used embroidery hoops from the thrift store to stretch the silk tight enough to paint.

This demo piece shows butterflies done in two ways. The top one is contained with lines of resist, the one on the bottom is outlined with resist then coated with No-Flow. Notice how the color in the top butterfly is difused where there is no resist line separating the yellow and red (in the middle), while you can see the brush strokes on the bottom butterfly.

The background was painted with dye and water to give the soft edges on the blue. Then it was coated with No-Flow and the red, yellow, and purple were painted on. Notice how these brush strokes kept their shape.

Ann's ginko leaves were done with resists (pebeo water based gutta in tubes), then painted with Jaquard dyes. She textured the green by sprinkling rock salt on it while still wet and letting it dry.

Brem painted her birds on silk coated with Jaquard No-Flow resist. No need for gutta lines, and a very different effect!


Next step is to let the dyes dry and set for 24 hours, then steam the silk to bring out the color.

Shibori Technique

Sunday I taught two very creative ladies to do shibori dying on silk. The class didn't fill through the local Allied Arts, so I taught it in my studio. We had such fun!
Here is how we did it:
1. We used silk satin scarves about 8" x 54" .

2. We wound them around a dowel:

3. We put on gloves to keep from dying our hands, and placed the scarf and dowel in a pie pan to catch drips.






4. Using eye droppers, we dripped dye onto the silk, holding the dropper in place to let the dye soak in.

5. Once the dye covers the silk, we let it set to soak in throughly .

6. We can't wait until it dries on the dowel (takes days!) to see what it looks like, so we carefully unrolled the silk and hung it up to dry. TaDa!!


7. The next step is to steam them. That will be next week when the class meets.

Silk painting update

Nov 23 --The black resist holds a fairly good line, as does the gold; I am still having trouble with the clear. It doesn't come out evenly, and it spreads so that the line you see when it first lays on the fabric gets much wider. In this case it picked up the marker on the line drawing below the silk. 

Nov 30--The black and gold resists looked good--but they did not hold up as resists at all! They worked well on two previous pieces, but when I applied dye on this one, it went right through the line!! The gold bird now has splotches of red and green, and the dark blue of the "Hundred Family Coat" bled right through into the fields and pathway the boy is standing on! The only thing I can figure is that it was cooler the day I put it on, and that meant the resist didn't go through the cloth but sat on top. I am using a heavy silk....can't remember the name right off...19 mm wieght...but it is the same weight cloth I used for the previous pieces.