well, so much for that!

I was a little sad that I wouldn't have time to photograph all my new veils before I sold some at the local workshop. But no worries! I can still photograph them!

Because... I only sold three veils. Two were the two semicircles I posted pics of a while back, and the other was a black veil with a teal edge. Yes, business was that bad. Otherwise I sold a couple pieces of costume jewelry and a shirt. Le sigh.

So, I'm in the hole for my supplies this year. I guess I can't be too surprised... people just have a lot less money to spend these days. At least I didn't have to pay much of anything for gas and accommodations since the workshop was literally 10 minutes from my house.

I'll have to get these all photographed... and then maybe I will actually, FINALLY, list something on etsy. What a concept!

It was an eight veil weekend

I'm trying to build my stock back up before the Isidora workshop at the end of the month, so I took advantage of the holiday weekend to get a lot of silk into a lot of dye.

Two things I ran entirely out of were blue veils and "fire" veils, so I decided to do a series of each. I really enjoy doing several variations on a theme all at the same time -- it's easy to see the difference between them. For the "fire" veils I did one based around a red dye, one around fuchsia, and one around coral, giving me a pretty nice range, though the fuchsia veil did not have quite as much strong pink as I would have liked.

For the blue veils I worked with a very dark blue dye called "Midnight", a less-inky, more clear-blue dye called "Sapphire", and a dye that's new to me called "Caribbean." I paired each with a different blue in a lighter tone. These also turned out prettily, but oh! I hate rinsing turquoise based dyes. I rinse and rinse and rinse. Darlene's advice to heat my silk more and let it cool completely before rinsing has helped on most other colors, but not turquoise. It's so tedious.

I finished a veil that was half-done, as well... I dyed a veil black and protected one long edge. After much dithering I dyed the edge teal. It looks very fine wet; hope it looks decent dry! My other surprise on that front was a veil I dyed using Colorhue dyes with an arashi shibori wrap. It was truly hideous while still damp, but dry... well... maybe it's not so bad? I will reserve judgement.

Now I need to go rinse out some rayon jackets I wrapped on the pole this afternoon. Very curious to see how they turn out!

alas poor butterfly

Well, the technique I planned to use to create the mourning cloak butterfly - inspired veil is not going to work. I intended to use a shibori "capping" method to protect circular/oval areas of the veil, but the best way to draw up these areas accurately is by using a running stitch around them and pulling them up. I tried this on a sample of my veil fabric... while I was able to protect the area as planned, pulling up the stitches on that featherweight fabric damaged it considerably! Despite using quite a fine thread, there were obvious holes left behind. Yuck. So much for that plan.

I also played around more with the Colorhue dyes today, trying to see if I could get a reasonable black on silk. Their initial recommendation was 12-15 drops in a half cup of water. This turned out to be about 1/4t. For black I tried 1/2t, which gave me a sort of dark gray/blue color. I doubled again to 1 t. Still not a very black black -- a pleasant very dark blue/gray, but just not black. Now, supposing that I need to immerse a whole veil... that would probably take at least four cups of water at a bare minimum... with a little math that means 8t of the black dye would be needed to obtain a not quite black color. That's about 1 1/4 ounces per black dye bath.

Did I mention that the Colorhue dye is $30 for 8 ounces?

I believe I'll just be using up the rest of my sample set. It was a lovely idea, having an "instant" dye that requires no heat on silk, but... it just doesn't work quite well enough.

(And, incidentally, DO NOT SPILL this dye on anything you care about. It's very very hard to clean up.)