Fun with direct application

Last night I indulged myself in some fun by combining an arashi shibori pole wrap with direct dye application. What a blast!

I don't currently own a steamer. That makes it difficult to do direct application of acid dyes to my silk. I decided to play around with direct application of activated fiber reactive dyes instead -- rather than presoaking the silk in soda ash solution, which I think might be bad for the silk, I mixed up thickened dye solutions already containing soda ash. These I squirted onto a veil that I crushed and wrapped on a shibori pole; I covered the resulting mess with plastic wrap and let it sit a couple of hours. Result? Well... not subtle... kinda crazy... but I haven't seen it dry yet. Let me get it ironed up and I'll post a picture soon!

Etsy roadblocks

I haven't posted here for a MONTH. How very lame and annoying of me. Of course, any posts would have been fairly empty of content -- I figure that's MORE annoying.

I have started off my Etsy journey. I signed up for Vashti Silks at Etsy. Then I was going to list a veil... except that I had somebody wanting to view veils in a few days. So I held off in case I should list the one she wanted. But then that didn't happen. So I started to post an item... only to find out that the photos I had of my current items were the wrong size and really blurry! So I had to set it aside again.

The next thing that happened was that all my veils came along with me to be displayed... and they all got wrinkled on the way home. So before I can re-photograph I have to re-iron them all. Gaaaah! It's going to take forever. And, oh yes, I need to be dyeing more silk as well.

I'm also very excited because my new sewing machine is coming. I'd really like to make some clothing items out of my dyed silk at some point. Maybe something like Kwik Sew 3462.