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Silk dyeing

Page history last edited by Lynette 10 years, 4 months ago Saved with comment


The background

Lady Petrona da Manciano taught a wonderful class on silk painting at the Arts and Sciences Fair at St. Carol on the Moor in March 2013, where I was part of the lucky crew who got to stand around a four foot high custom-built wood silk frame and paint on the banner shown to the right.

 

The sound I was making upon meeting back up with the Wurm Wald crew was so high pitched and squeaky it was mostly audible by dogs and dolphins, and largely consisted of "eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" and/or "cooooooooooooool!" So I promptly decided we needed to make a bunch of banners for decorating the feasthall at Maidens with.

 

Supply acquisition

 

Dharma Trading sells all the stuff you need to get started except for the frames:

  • 5 mil or 8 mil hand hemmed silk habotai scarves (the hand hemmed ones last better than the machine hemmed ones, and the fact that they're already hemmed means you don't have to spend hours doing it yourself after the fact). We used both the 15 x 60 versions and the 44 x 44 versions.
  • Jacquard Green Label Dye (which Lady Petrona recommends because it can be set either with steam or with a chemical fixative, though she's also started working with some other dyes too) ETA: Lady Petrona's changed to recommending Dye-Na-Flow instead, because the fixing process is easier. Whenever we need more supplies, we should probably switch over.
  • A bag of brushes and/or foam sponges (which we kinda lost on their first outing, but have since rediscovered)
  • Resist (both a clear water-based version that smells less heinous and an authentic gutta version that produces some astounding fumes - Dharma sells starter kits that include one type or the other, along with CMYK dyes and a bottle of fixative; we bought one of each type to be able to compare them).
  • Little squeeze bottles to use to apply the resist to the silk

 

We also needed some things we didn't get from Dharma:

  • Frames - the leading two options are wood frames that you can pin into, or plastic PVC frames that you can use rubber bands and either safety pins or binder clips to attach the silk to. I'm glad I thought of the binder clips option, because I was afraid the safety pins might tear the silk, and our struggles to get the silk attached to the frames without snapping the rubber bands make that option seem likely. The binder clips haven't torn the silk; if they pop off, a quick squeeze and stretch fastens them right back on.
  • Black gutta - While we could theoretically have dyed our clear gutta black, nobody we knew of had done it that way before, and we realized we needed the black lines to make the outline of the heraldry stand out. Lady Petrona kindly picked some up for us in St. Louis, along with extra gutta bottles and tips, because she knew from experience that there's a limit on the lifetime of used gutta bottles since the stuff will fossilize in place after a bit.
  • Chalk pencils came from JoAnn's, to be able to trace the patterns in a medium that would wash out. The quilt chalk pencils with changeable leads come highly recommended, because that way you can use different chalk colors to indicate different pieces -- the Wurm Wald's wurm's feet were sometimes difficult to distinguish from the tree roots, for example.
  • A large printout (to scale) of the heraldry we were going to use -  I have contacts with access to a drafting plotter, who produced Wurm Wald, Midrealm, and Midlands logos blown up to both 12" wide (for the narrow 15" banners) and 36" wide (for the 44" wide banners)

 

Step 0: Ordering the dyes and silks and building the frames

 

Lady Roana took charge of acquiring the PVC and cutting it to size.

 

A Google spreadsheet helped us coordinate who among the Shire wanted to order which sizes and shapes of banners and which extra colors of dye. (Red and green were a given because we'd be using quite a lot of them; brown and blue were also on the wish list.)

 

Step 0.5: Preparing the silk and tracing the patterns

 

Once all the supplies had arrived, I washed all the silks in warm water with a little dye-and-scent-free gentle soap on the Delicates setting and inside a delicates-washing mesh bag in order to try to remove the resists that tend to be put onto silk to keep it unstained during shipment. Following the Dharma guidelines, I also pressed each silk piece while it was still damp in order to try to prevent any wrinkles from becoming set in by drying.

 

Then we turned an A&S day into a chalk-tracing day in order to be prepared for Lady Petrona's gutta-ing tutorial at May Day (below). After assembling the frames and rubber-banding clips onto them, we traced several of the large patterns onto the square banners in preparation for gutta-ing. The smaller banners were traced and gutta-ed at May Day.

 

Step 1: Tracing and gutta-ing at May Day with Lady Petrona

Lady Petrona had taught us the painting part of the process at St. Carol on the Moor, in part because that was the fun stuff and in part because the gutta-ing is the harder part and in many ways the more important part. I didn't feel confident enough to jump into the deep end and try gutta-ing without having seen a master in action, so Lady Petrona very kindly agreed to come teach us the beginning of the process at Lord Aleator's May Day event.

 

Among the things we learned at May Day:

 

About gutta

  • Gutta is powerfully smelly stuff. Lord Aleator's house's large patio window-door was a welcome architectural feature.
  • The water-based version is reported to be less fragrant, but we haven't needed clear lines yet.
  • A small plastic funnel is a really handy thing to have for getting gutta into a squeeze bottle. (Also, don't plan on using that funnel for anything else.)
  • The small and medium tips are more useful than the large one, which is pretty much too large.
  • You can use six plastic cups (turned upside down under the side bars of the frames) to introduce the necessary clearance between a silk frame and a flat surface. (If the silk touches something else, the gutta and/or silk dyes will smear and spread, so you need to paint them both 'midair' while held taut by the frame.)
  • Start with the center of your pattern and work outward; you don't want your hand or clothing to pass over an area with wet gutta on it.
  • Have a napkin handy for testing lines when you've needed to re-tighten a tip or re-fill a bottle.
  • Gutta should lie flat when drying, or else it can run.
  • Gutta also enjoys squirting blobs all over the place and/or escaping around the sides of its metal tip. Not much to do about it but sigh. 
  • Make sure all the gutta lines completely enclose whatever shape you're tracing, or else the dye will escape through the gaps.
  • Make sure the gutta lines are thick enough to have soaked into the silk well, or else the dye will escape underneath the line.

 

Step 2: More dyeing at Lynette's

Because the gutta needs to be thoroughly dry before silk painting can occur, the only silk that was dry enough to paint on May Day was our first one (the large square Wurm Wald banner). We learned a lot from this experience, and are pretty much calling that one our tester (it's got a lot of white paint covering places where the dye escaped).

 

We had another painting day in May at my place (at which we discovered that the red and black dyes, the brushes, and the plastic dye cups had escaped confinement at some point between Lord Aleator's garage and mine; they're still roaming the wilds).

 

About dyeing

  • If you have a windy day and an open garage door near your silk painting, the silk can strum like a sail -- with predictable results for bouncing your brush -- and you can end up with lots of extra areas dyed unintentionally.
  • Also don't wave silk dye-containing brushes around, because they drip.
  • If you're really fast with rubbing alcohol and  cotton swabs, you may be able to 'erase' some of the dye. Probably not all of it, though.
  • Tide laundry sticks work pretty well after the splashed dye has dried - sometimes too well; it might sneak under gutta to erase what you want to keep as well. Use with a paper towel balled behind it pressing up to keep it from erasing too far.
  • Dye your lightest colors first, so that if you have any escapes happening, your darker colors will cover it up.
  • Dye can also drip if the silk isn't stretched flat over a floating space, if it's applied thickly. However, it's also possible to lightly paint on dye while a frame is braced against a wall - Lady Roana discovered this at painting session #2 at my garage.
  • Large flat foam brushes are useful for covering wide areas.
  • When covering wide areas, make sure to move quickly enough to keep the edges wet, or else there'll be a noticeable line when it dries down.
  • Cotton swabs can be useful for getting into little areas if you've lost your brush kit.
  • If you need to mix your own colors, use grams for measuring out the parts of each color, because the CMYK bottles don't have droppers.
  • 10 g magenta + 10 g yellow makes a good heraldic red in a quantity that just about exactly matches the amount of red needed by three long-narrow banners containing  the Wurm Wald, Midlands, and Midrealm heraldry. (For the last few brushes full, I was scared it wouldn't make it.)
  • Keep track of your dye bottles; they like to escape! (We have a bottle of red and a bottle of black haunting the Shire and escaping into corners where none of us can find it. ETA: Found and reunited with the kit!)
  • Wooden laundry racks are wide enough that you can stack more than one of the narrow banners in them to dry.

 

Step 3: Steam and/or chemical fixing

 

According to all reports, steam fixing results in brighter colors than chemical fixing, but chemical fixing is easier to manage.

 

They were right that steam fixing results in brighter colors, but both steam fixing and chemical fixing produced noticeable flaws in our silks.


 

Green Label Fixing Attempt #1: Steam fixing the large test banner

 

Full of enthusiasm and ambition, we assembled a steamer rig following Dharma's instructions:

  • Wrap the silk in newsprint and make sure it doesn't get wet
  • Roll it carefully so that it won't steam-set creases in place
  • Build a drip catcher to keep the drips from the lid away from the newsprint-rolled silk
  • Steam for 2-3 hours

 


The steaming rig:

The newsprint-wrapped silk:

The drip catcher:

The finished assembly for steaming:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Unfortunately, everything that could have gone wrong according to their warning list did in fact go wrong, and we even found a few new problems that we hadn't been warned about.

 

The laundry list of problems with our first steam attempt:

 

  • Somehow, a corner got wet. Where the corner got wet, the dye soaked through all the layers of newsprint and all the layers of silk and left black splotches everywhere.
  • Even in spots where the paper wasn't wet, there hadn't been enough layers of newsprint to keep the dye from migrating.
  • The gutta stuck to the newsprint and left our outlines looking like shaggy gingerbread hobos.
  • Somehow, the gutta managed to 'print' itself onto other layers of the silk despite the intervention of the newsprint. This was one we hadn't been warned about.
  • Because it was a full size banner, there was a lot of material to manage. We couldn't have added another layer of newsprint and still produced a roll small enough to fit into the steamer.
  • CONCLUSION: Steaming 45 inch square banners using the size of pots owned by ordinary mortals is not likely to be successful.

 

Green Label Fixing Attempt #2: Chemical fixing a narrow banner

 

Relieved that we'd only ruined the one that was our test example (and already splotch-ful), we used half the kit's supply of fixative to make a chemical bath that would theoretically have fixed all three of the completed skinny banners -- 3 oz. fixative to 3 quarts water.

 

From the moment the first banner touched the water, we knew this wasn't going to go well.

 

  • The red dye rushed out into the water and re-deposited itself liberally all over our white background areas.
  • We fished it out after the required five minutes, threw it into the kiddie pool to try to rinse it, and realized it was pretty hopeless.
  • CONCLUSION: Chemical fixing isn't a good solution for banners with a lot of white space either.

 

Detour through the Valley of What The Frag Do We Do Now

 

Since both of the recommended processes had produced unfortunately irreparable results, we brainstormed on what to try next.

 

We've turned our remaining three items into a test of the scientific method.

 

  • Two of the items (the skinny banner and the large red dragon-ring banner) got a spray-rinsing from the hose in order to try to reduce the extra dye before any additional fixing attempts.
  • The green dragon promptly vanished from the skinny banner, to the point where I had to re-dye it. The red was slightly lightened by the rinsing, and the black turned to dark gray.
  • CONCLUSION: Pre-rinsing will reduce the vibrance of your colors.
  • CONCLUSION: The red and black dyes like going everywhere and sticking to everything. The green likes vanishing.

Green Label Fixing Attempt #3: Steam setting the small narrow banner that didn't get rinsed

 

  • The third skinny banner didn't get rinsed, in order to check the level of difference in the color results.
  • I wrapped it in two layers of newsprint and steamed it for 2 hours.
  • The gutta did stick to the newsprint again.
  • The dye didn't bleed through this time, because of the multiple layers of newsprint and because it stayed dry.
  • The silk got a couple of permanent-looking creases steamed into it where the 'cinnamon roll' crinkled.
  • The color was much more vibrant than the rinsed version and the chemical fixed version.
  • CONCLUSION: While it's technically possible to steam a banner in the size of pot owned by ordinary mortals, it's still not a good solution.
  • CONCLUSION: Since the full size steamer rig on Dharma's site also requires the use of newsprint, and the newsprint always stuck to the gutta, there isn't much likely value in trying to assemble a larger steam rig.

 

Green Label Fixing Attempt #4: Spraying fixative onto still-stretched banners (Best so far)

So far, this has been the best of the available options, though still not perfect.

 

Successes:

  • The big Midrealm banner (red and yellow) took to it fantastically, and seems perfectly dye-set. (I diluted the dye set stuff to the recommended proportion, put it in a spray bottle, and misted the banner carefully and thoroughly while keeping it suspended. I also watched carefully to make sure I was ready to catch any drips that were ready to jump the gutta line, but this one was really well behaved.)
  • Aleator's green and brown banner: The green just doesn't behave itself as well as the red and the gold; it still isn't perfectly dye-set after 2 1/2 applications.
  • One of the skinny banners is showing the same results as above: red and yellow dye set fine, green not so reliably.

 

Lessons learned:

  • A Tide dye stick does pretty well getting rid of any accidental splashes before dye fixing takes place, though you can't get into too fine a set of erasure because it'll jump under the gutta and start taking out dye where you wanted to keep it.
  • I spot tested all of the greens on the to-be-removed scrap edges of Aleator's banner, and none of them dye-fix perfectly. I hope they dye-fix well enough to be not too troublesome in rainstorms.
  • I dye-fixed the white areas as well as the colored areas, both because the dye fix will leave splotchmarks where it stops and because I hope that might offer some protection to the white areas if they do get rained on in the future.
  • Don't tilt the banners when dye set spraying them, because the dye will try to take off downhill just like it does during the original dye process.
  • Painting on the dye fixative doesn't work well; it makes it splotchy and weird. Misting gives much more even coverage. 
  • Keep moving around the banner as you spray the fixative on, to be able to see the difference in sheen of where you've got it saturated and where you don't.

 

Where we are now

  • None of the recommended methods worked perfectly with the Jacquard Green Label dyes.

  • The best of the available options appears to be leaving the banners on their frames, keeping them flat, and misting them with suitably diluted (and or slightly on the strong side) dye set solution.
  • Since the time of our original purchase, Lady Petrona has discovered that she prefers the bakeable Dye-na-flow dyes over the originally recommended Green Label version.
  • Petrona's gotten us more gutta and I've been working on the second batch of banners on the weekends to try to get the core group ones (kingdom, region, and shire) finished by Maidens.
  • It might be worth a group discussion to consider whether we want to buy different dye for future green banners.

 

The grid of which banners are in which states

Banner ID
Gutta-ed?
Dyed?
Fixed?
Fix method
Notes
Wurm Wald test 1, 45 x 45
yes
yes
yes
3 hour steam
Bad results with dye leakage and splotches
Narrow banner 1, 15 x 60
yes yes
yes
chemical fix
Bad results with dye redepositing
Narrow banner 2, 15 x 60
yes
yes
yes
2 hour steam
Better results than first steam, but gutta still stuck. Would not recommend steaming a larger banner than this with a home steam rig. Not sure of alternatives yet. More tests needed with irons and ovens.
Narrow banner 3, 15 x 60 yes yes, with rinse before fix yes
misting with diluted fixative Attempting to paint on the diluted fixative didn't work at all. Misting worked much better, but not perfectly on the green.
Dragon ring banner, 45 x 45 yes yes, with rinse before fix yes misting with diluted fixative
So far, this one's been the best of our results all round -- partially because it doesn't have big white areas to get splotched or stained by migrating dye.
Dragon shield banner, 45 x 45 Chalked, guttaed
Yes Yes misting with diluted fixative The red jumped the gutta at the rolled edge and wicked out a bit, but the Tide laundry stick reduced the stain, and that edge might get folded over to make a sleeve for the banner rod anyway.
Replacement Wurm Wald banner, 45 x 45 Chalked, guttaed Yes Yes misting with diluted fixative The black jumped the gutta in the laurel leaves in a couple spots, and the Tide stick didn't work as well on the black as it had with the red and green. So I used the silver paint for cleaning up Aleator's sword on the laurel leaves as well. (We might want to use the silver paint on the Wurm Wald tree leaves too?)
Narrow banner 4, 15 x 60 Chalked, guttaed
Partially Not yet TBD In progress
PERSONAL BANNERS          
Aleator's Yes Yes Yes misting with diluted fixative Repeated mistings with dye fix have got the green set about as well as it's going to get. I've also used silver paint to cover the places where the green dye jumped the gutta line in the sword area, and will do the gold handle next. (Painting thickly on one side, flipping, and touching up the spots on the other side seems to work well.)
Roana's ? ? ? ? (She has her banners and dye things)
Sofya's Chalked, not yet guttaed       There are a lot of crossings-out. It might be worth considering a wash and retrace to make sure the gutta-ing person can know what to draw and what not to draw.
Hrefna's ? ? ? ? (She has her banners, but the dye is still in the big box)
Cindy's ? ? ? ?

(Ditto)

Lynette's ? ? ? ? (I'm not sure whether I'll end up with personal banners after we redo the Wurm Wald ones that have been damaged in the fixing process.)

 

 

 


 

Useful links

Supplies:

 

Groups and advice:

Comments (1)

Anne McKinney said

at 6:22 am on Aug 2, 2013

Let's bring this up at the meeting next week. I'd like to ask the shire to cover the cost of replacement banners.

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