Silk – Hopefully Creative

Impromptu Dyeing

First batch of ecoprinted scarves this year, fresh leaves – fresh results.

I had a week of holiday recently and one day decided to go out for a short walk. Maybe to drop of plastic trash, maybe to post a letter, I can’t really remember. While out, I noticed all the green around, leaves are really returning to the trees and plants. So while walking along, I picked some leaves here and there. I came home with a hand full of greenery and a desire to do some ecoprinting. So I got all of my stuff from the dyeing cupboard, mixed up some additional iron water and got to work. The layout is fairly random with one scarf being less densely printed than the other. All leaves were placed with the top side up, which obviously gives a different effect on the mirrored bottom-up side.

Ecoprinting is still super interesting to me. I should probably take more extensive notes on what I’m doing because I can’t really predict what the outcome will be, but that has its charms too. You can see that most of the well printing leaves on the right scarf are at the top and then one in the middle. The left one is more uniform in what printed dark and what printed light. I like these results. Unfortunately, the source of my previous batches of silk no longer lists it on its website, so I’m going to have a more expensive time getting hold of something to print new projects on. Que sera sera.

Norah Waugh’s 1901 Corset

The first steps towards a 1902 Wedding Dress in the collection of the V&A. The Corsets and Crinolines 1901 corset pattern.

Sometimes I find an image and just think: I want to have it. That was the case with a 1902 Wedding Dress by Houghton & Dalton that I found in the collections of the V&A. Of course owning the original isn’t truly something I would want, but I have started thinking about how to replicate it based on the seven images from the V&A.

1902 Wedding dress by Houghton & Dalton, at the V&A.

The first steps included finding fabric and starting work on the underpinnings. Those underpinnings are the topic of today. I decided that I wanted another early Edwardian corset because the Black Snail one doesn’t really feel like it allows enough room for the displaced fleshy bits to go. I’d looked at Norah Waugh’s Corsets and Crinolines before, and the 1901 corset in there seemed like it would provide more space. Then I remembered that Ralph Pink had a free hip curve corset available that looked an awful lot like the Norah Waugh one, so I used their pattern pieces.

I’ve made a mock-up before and decided to lengthen the top by 2 cm and shorten the bottom by 2 cm, but those were the only changes I made. For the first attempt, I used a curtain fabric that was the later also used for the pouf. This stuff did not iron down well at all and with the ridiculous amount of seams going on in the corset, it made some weird bumps. So I tried again, cut out all the white coutil, and then found some off-white silk in the local fabric shop that I decided to splurge on. Having never used silk before, I was happily surprised by how much flatter it got than the original fabric I tried.

The boning channels were guessed at (that diagram in C&C makes very little sense.. there are some bones that are differently placed on the front vs the back view) and then created by sewing the two layers together. Next, I had a hell of a time putting the bones through because there were so many seamlines crossed. Some real curses were thrown out. Lastly some vaguely matching bias tape was sewn to the inside and whipped to the outside. From the last corset I learned that hand sewing through coutil is a real pain in the butt, so I did it in reverse.

This part, the corset stage, is now mostly finished. Couple of things that are still bugging me a bit. Should I have added the garter things to the front? Is the busk not stiff enough? It is a bit bendy now. And lastly, did I make it too big, it almost closes in the back, which I did not expect. It does definitely require some more wearing before it’s truly comfortable, I think. For now, I’m going to gather the courage to actually start making the pattern for that V&A wedding dress. Hopefully that’ll manifest soon!

Silk-dyeing Again

Getting some more scarves finished, I now have fifteen of the things.

I really, really enjoy eco printing silk scarves. Not sure why it’s so nice, I normally don’t gravitate towards projects with an element of surprise and these have been full of surprises. I never know how it’s going to turn out. So far I’ve dyed up around 8 meters of silk. I found a webshop that sold 3 meter lengths of ‘silk crepe for dyeing’ and I got 6 meters of it. I then cut that into 1.8 meter lengths and 35 cm widths to get 12 scarves out of 6 meters. Had some leftovers for some more experimentation and decided that I didn’t yet have enough of the silk dying experience, so I ordered 6 more meters and have since made four more scarves.

The first batch you’ve already seen, but I’ve now actually hemmed them with a ‘rolled hem’ on the serger. From that batch, I learned that the bramble and what I think is a maple worked really well. The second batch had less stellar results. Most came out so light that you could barely see them, this included some weeds from outside my house (my plant determination app thinks its Vinca major?), leaves from the tree outside my house – invisible and therefore destined to be overdyed, one unknown tree and something that I just completely forgot.

Roof Terrace Fruit
Strawberry, apple, pear, red currant & white currant

The third batch, however, had some really good ones. chestnut leaves from the tree at work, hazelnut leaves from my hometown, something from the road to work with thorns and a collage of fruit plants from my roof terrace. The only one that was slightly disappointing was the fruit collage as only the strawberry gave a very clear print and the rest was quite blobby.

Then there was some more experimenting but that didn’t turn out so well, so I only finished the one where I put flowers on (Common ragworth). This resulted in a bit of a polka dot effect, but much darker than I expected. Not sure it’s as lovely as I’d imagined, but at least I now know what it would do if you put this type of flower in an iron bath.

So at some point last week, I decided that it would be a lovely idea to actually know which plants all my scarves came from. So I set out to collect leaves from all the places that I’d harvested them from initially to determine the species and dry them. This also meant that I couldn’t help myself and I got more leaves. I opted for a few that worked the best (more chestnut!) and some that I found along the way.

*Aesculus hippocastanum* – Horse chestnut

I collected some chestnut leaves because they make the best print. Then while cycling around, I found some really cool looking leaves with five leaflets that turned out to be Virginia creeper close to the original Ginkgo. While passing another big tree next to my former home, the leaves from a Red maple were collected. The Black poplar was the last I took with me. This one has an alternating pattern of back/front of the leaves and you can sort of see that. This one is also a prime example of how folds leave blank spaces in the print.

Conclusion is that I’ve really enjoyed this dying process and with winter starting, I don’t have many more opportunities. The only problem with this hobby is that it produces way more items than I actually personally need. There’s only so much gifting I can do to get rid of them. Sometimes I wish that my hobbies didn’t amount to so much stuff… Ah well, at least these take up way less space than plushies.

Adventures in Dyeing

More adventures with different colours and natural materials.

Last June, I gifted my mother two ‘dye your own silk scarf’-kits. The plan was to get together some day and dye our scarves as a nice bonding moment (or something). Having brought to kits to my house in December, we didn’t get round to it, but last weekend we finally managed to get our dye on. The kit had a silk scarf, two packets of acid-dye (red/yellow or blue/yellow), latex gloves, a roasting bag, a tie and 0 instructions. Turned out in December that those kits were supposed to go with a webinar that I had completely missed. So in January I signed up for the new webinar, wrote down all the instructions and then we could get to work.

We wet our scarves, folded them some way that would make the dye go approximately where we wanted it to go and then sprinkled on the powder. Some kneading, some more water, some hopeful guesses later and we put our tied off roasting bags in boiling water. Once they’d steamed for a while, we rinsed our projects and finally got to see our still wet scarves. I used red & yellow, and my mum had the yellow and blue. She wanted to have some green in it, but that didn’t really work out it seemed. Still it’s cool to see what folding and dye can create. I wanted mine to have the same colour at each end, while my mum wanted the one end to be blue and the other end to be yellow.

While waiting for the scarves to steam, I also decided to dye one of my skeins of yarn that I bought during the first haul. This time, I chose green, turquoise and blue dye. Just randomly sprinkled it on and I’d see what it turn out as. Compared to the thin silk scarves that were dry in less than 2 hours, this skein had to hang for like a day and a half before it was dry. It reminds me a lot of the sea and I really like it. It’ll probably be a scarf or hat of some sort in the distant future. I enjoyed it though, even the uncertainty of not knowing how it will turn out.

Tag: Silk