Twisp of Fate

A couple of weeks ago I followed up on our guild’s silk scarf project by doing 11 more at home.  I had purchased a dozen scarf blanks and had picked up a bunch of neckties already, so was ready to go.  I also wanted to experiment with a couple of things, like re-using the necktie material if it seemed like it still had enough color in it, and pre-dyeing the scarf blanks before doing the dye transfer part.  So it was a week of play in the studio, and a break from weaving!

This layout:

led to the scarf on the left below.  Notice that the scarf on the right has some white areas.  It turns out the trickiest part is rolling them up so that no wrinkles form in the scarf blank, as this leads to undyed areas.  I later fixed this scarf by putting it through the process again, laying pieces of necktie across the undyed areas only.  It added more visual interest, so all was well!

The next was an experiment with woven, as opposed to printed, necktie material.  In our workshop, I learned that the woven ones don’t transfer their dyes as well, but I had already purchased some and was hoping to not completely sacrifice them to the waste bin.  The problem is that the dye is in the thread the material is woven from, instead of being printed on the surface of the tie.  Only one of these came through very strongly.

I later put this through again with some additional pieces that I knew would transfer dye, to make it more interesting. It is the scarf on the right.  The one on the left is the first one I did at our guild’s workshop.

This layout used some of the wide end pieces that have lining on the back (so that side won’t transfer dye).  I found that I could open up the narrow end and lay it on the back side of the wide end, thus getting printed fabric on both sides.  For these scarves, I pre-dyed the scarf blank a pale turquoise color first, so I didn’t have to completely cover the scarf blank with necktie material.

This led to the one on the left:

Another layout on a pre-dyed scarf with the wide end of neckties:

which is the one on the left:

Loved this orange tie!  I think it has enough dye left to use at least one more time.

It, and this one, led to the 2 scarves below.

It’s interesting that the olive green tie above only came through as lemon yellow on the scarf.

Here are a couple more that I didn’t get layout pictures for.

I have taken 10 of these up to the Winthrop Gallery.  I found a neat old broom display at the White Buck Trading Co. sale last weekend, and fitted it up for a scarf display.