Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Botancial Dyes again

The hollyhock silk scarf changed with washing!  I'll need to check out the ph of the Bronner's soap!

Here is what happened with the textured silk scarf/shawl that I redyed with sunflowers, marigolds, some hollyhocks and the daylilies can still be seen a little as blue.  I used alum to set the color with this one.


Will had some molded hollyhocks so I boiled them up and got the brown at the bottom of the scarf....this is where they dye bath penetrated.  I think it would have looked nice all the way through.  You can see where the strings were that I tied it to the pvc pipe....they resisted as did some of the willow leaves.


Saturday, August 9, 2014

Botanical Printing

Well...I'm learning.  I think I need to process them longer for better color and I have a few things to learn.  These are silk scarves using the "black" or dark pink hollyhocks and I tried using willow leaves.  The hollyhocks leave a lot of color! The yellow is the pollen from the center of the flower.  The willow leaves really didn't do anything...need to learn how to get them to release their color.


Here are the bundles wrapped and in the steamer