Saturday before last was Printing Day. The projects on my to-do list weren’t the usual stamp carving, wrapping paper making kind, but the fabric printing kind, and there were just two:

Cook Islands T-shirt replica
Try solar dyeing

I decided I liked these small to-do lists that allow me to defeat a category in one day. Well, if all goes to plan…

I didn’t have a particular solar dyeing project in mind at first, but ideas soon came to me. One was to make gifts to take os. At first I wanted to print on thin cotton shawls, but I didn’t want to get stuck with lots of time-consuming hemming to do. Shawls would be bulky, too, taking up space in my suitcase. But what if I printed on silk? Silk painting was an obsession of mine back in my 20s. I knew you could buy pre-hemmed scarves. I still have some scraps of silk, so I decided to test the solar dye on one. I used a scrap of plastic lace for the stencil:

After iron to set the dye and a wash to test the colourfastness and I had this:

The lace pattern wasn’t as distinct as I’d like, but that wasn’t unexpected as the silk didn’t want to sit flat and there was a bit of a breeze stirring things. The lace pattern was rather fine, too. I figured I’d iron the scarves, pin them to rubber foam interlocking squares to stretch the fabric out a little, and cover and weigh down the stencils with a sheet of clear plastic on top.

A trip to Zart later and I had more solar dye and some pre-hemmed silk scarves. I gathered together some possible stencils and did test prints on more scraps. I tried feathers, punched out paper shapes, string, white board markers scribbled on the plastic sheet and a fan. Unfortunately, where the wet cloth touched the plastic strong blotches resulted and most of the stencils didn’t work:

I decided to try another plastic lace piece with larger holes. I was all out of scraps, so I tried a scarf:

It looked great, but the dye was shiny and sticky and even after ironing and washing it the scarf kept sticking to itself. I put it through a hot wash cycle but that didn’t fix it.

So I looked at the instruction sheet I’d picked up when I bought the first bottle of dye. It says ink is meant to be diluted 50/50 with water. But I’d read the instructions on the bottle and was sure it said the dye ‘may be diluted up to’ 50/50, so I had figured no dilution would mean a strong colour. Turns out I was right:

The next scarf I dyed I wanted a paler blue so I had diluted it anyway. I used lots of metal rings to make pale circles. By then there was enough wind that, despite weighing things down, the rings moved. I tried spritzing the scarf with more diluted dye and got more rings but less contrast.

I didn’t love with the result so I decided I’d overdye it.

By then the sun was getting too low in the sky so I packed up. I was pretty disappointed that I hadn’t finished one project on my to-do lists that weekend (the flanelette blanket fix wasn’t on any). But I figured I’d started my weekend halfway through Friday, so I could spend the next morning doing more solar dyeing… if it was sunny enough.

As it turned out, it was. I started early and I put what I’d learned to good use, deciding to stick to the lace as my stencil. I did a red scarf, another blue one, a grey one and I overdyed the rings scarf from the previous day. I had quite the process line going, ironing, washing and hanging the previous scarf while the next one ‘developed’. Here are some photos of them on the line:

Yeah, I was pretty pleased with the result. Here’s a close up of the overdyed scarf:

You can still see the rings, but the way the blue and black interacted looks fabulous. I put a lot of effort into smoothing the first three scarves when painting the dye on, but I let the grey one stay wrinkly.

However, the red dye, though diluted at 1:1, is still a teensy bit sticky. A little of the silkiness of the scarves has been lost at that ratio. The grey scarf, dyed at 1:4 dye to water has come out the softest.

So it seems that if I want to dye silk, the stronger the colour the more detrimental it is to the fibre. I should aim for a diluted effect. I don’t mind this too much – I like how the blue scarf almost looks like denim that’s had a pattern bleached into it. I’m going to get a few more silk scarves and make a few more lace print scarves. Perhaps in purple, green and brown – and see how pale a blue I can get, too.

As for the Cook Islands tshirt? Well, that turned out to be a fizzer. I tackled it the following weekend, but found the fabric ink just didn’t coat the stamps thickly enough to make a good print.

I figure it would be easier to take a photo and have it printed at Cafe Press or some similar site.

So with that project abandoned and solar dying well and truly tried out, I could declare the Printing category defeated.

After the storm last week I kept finding myself eyeing downed branches from eucalyptus trees and thinking about dyeing. Near to home there was one particular branch that wasn’t cleared up by Saturday, so in the afternoon I went for a walk to get it. Unfortunately it had gone quite dry, though it is still possible to dye with dried leaves. While dragging it home, I discovered that the gardener for the block of flats across the road had been trimming trees, and there was some fresh gum tree branches on the pile. So I nabbed them as well. It made for quite a pile in the cat run:

The fresh leaves were nicer to touch, so I started ripping off leaves. It turned out that it took only one of the smaller fresh branches to make up a kilo of leaves. (According to my book, Eco Colour, you need around the same weight as the textile you’re dyeing.) So my green waste bin is now half full of gum branches and leaves.

Then it turned out that my pot wasn’t big enough – something I’d forgotten since the last dyeing experiment. I only got a little under half the leaves in.

I set the leaves simmering, and in the meantime set up another pot to dye a t-shirt. I’d tried solar dyeing it before and only managed to darken a stain. This time I had some green tea that Paul had accidentally bought instead of peppermint tea. To add an extra bit of experimentation to the mix, I wrapped the t-shirt around some rusty nails.

Once the leaves had simmered long enough I took them out, then introduced half the yarn (Cleckheaton Country 8ply) and kept stirring to make sure the dye bath never went beyond steaming to actual boiling. I poured a kettle full of boiling water over the tea bags and t-shirt, and decided to leave it at that rather than risk I’d run out of gas for the camp stove.

After the yarn had steeped for the right time, I turned the heat off and left it to cool in the pot overnight. This morning I repeated the steps with the second half of the leaves and yarn. As you can see, the yarn is now a honey colour. Which is nice, but not very ‘me’. I’m thinking of getting one of those really big soup kitchen pots and more leaves to overdye the yarn, and see if I can get the kakhi green the book says you get if you dye in an aluminium pot.

The t-shirt, however, was a great success:

The tea made very little difference, but the nails left a blue-grey imprint that is fabulous. And it goes perfectly with the porcelain pendant necklace I bought at the Northside Makers Market that morning.

On Sunday I went to a bookbinding class, but I’ll save that for another post…

Before heading off to Adelaide for New Years Eve last year I set up some solar dyeing jars, using an old singlet top and some silk scarves. The idea was they’d be something for me to open after a month of travelling.

The jars had been sitting on the west side of the house, getting the afternoon sun. They’d obviously had plenty of heat, as one of the rubber seals was all cracked and stuck shut.

When I took the singlet top out it smelled like tea and lemons – quite nice. I’d wrapped it around some lemon gum leaves and seeds and the result was pretty good:

When I took the silk scarves out of the other jars, however, they stank rather badly. The nasturtium leaves and flowers worked quite well but smelled of rotten vegetation:

But the camelia and flame tree leaves stank of vomit and didn’t dye particularly well. This is fine – I can overdye with something else.

I washed everything thoroughly and hung it out to dry. Unfortunately, the stink has got into the skin of my hands, and I’m regretting pouring the dye water out in the garden near the kitchen window. Next time I’ll definitely be using gloves, and emptying the jars a looong way from the house!