Alcohol ink on silk scarves

I've been working with Silk, Sharpies and Isopropyl Alcohol again = yippee! The more I experiment with this technique the more I learn and look forward to expanding my approach! After some trial and error I decided the best way to stretch the silk was to use the largest quilt hoop I could find. Using permanent Sharpie Markers I colored across the surface of the silk. It's a very slow process as I move the hoop around to fill up the fabric surface. Here is a detail shot of dropping the…

Any of you that paint on silk will be familiar with the alcohol technique. For those of you that don't paint on silk you may be surprised to know that it doesn't mean having a wee dram before starting the project. Alcohol is used to displace the dye to form patterns by painting onto dry unfixed dyed silk. It will only work with dyes, not silk paints, as long as the silk dye has not been fixed. My sequence of pics show the process in stages. 1. After stretching the silk on the frame I painted…

I've been playing with a new technique for about a month now...applying Magic Sizing to my silk and using it as a resist. Thanks to Karen Sistek, who developed this technique, and to Francine Dufour Jones for sharing information about this process. Here's some brief notes about the process I have tried: I spray the…

Painting on silk is a fun and simple project that anyone can undertake. You only need a few materials and a creative mind! There are a few different techniques for painting silk, including the Serti method and the alcohol and salt method....

I started my journey as a dyer almost 20 years ago… hard to believe! In the beginning, I pretty much stuck with learning how to tie-dye t-shirts with traditional patterns. But at some point, I started to experiment with other techniques, and discovered I can make it up as I go along… freedom! Drizzle dyeing comes under that heading, and I thought it would be fun to share it with you. Drizzle Dyeing is a technique that uses an eyedropper or pipette to drizzle the dyes over a silk scarf that…

It's been a while since I picked up the combination of silk, permanent Sharpie Markers and rubbing alcohol. Using the technique in the pa...

The left scarf was done with blues and pinks to make the purples. The middle was done with browns, yellows, and oranges. The right scarf w...

Alcohol ink on silk

For my last few posts, I thought I would give you a glimpse of some fabrics I have colored using a technique that has been around for a long time – but one I struggled with when I first started experimenting with it. Basically, it is using permanent marking pens and high grade Isoprophyl alcohol. Here are a few examples of my earliest experiments on cotton: These were fun, but I did not know they needed to be heat set before washing, and they ended up fading quite a bit. So I put the…