Commission Day One

Day One.  (It's a long one, so bear with me).
I've spent most of the day in the basement dyeing silk for a long-anticipated commission work featuring over 2 yards of hand-dyed hand-painted silk for a certain gentleman in New York who somehow found me on the internet and wanted me to copy one of my scarves but in a sizable quantity so he can have it sewn into the lining of a jacket he is having made for him.  Yes, a long sentence, that.  Here is a picture of the scarf he found online (it is also posted on my website paintedtrout.com), where you can mouse over the image for close-up viewing of all the wonderful details.

The first thing I did before starting out was check my supplier to see if they had our particular silk in stock -- that would be in case I screwed up this first part of the project and might have to reorder and start again.


We needed 15mm silk because 10mm was probably not strong enough to endure the rigors of life as a jacket lining.  Not sure what kind of jacket, of course (I suppose I can ask him, the gentleman from New York), but I reckon he will be wanting to wear the garment and that means a robust life of putting on and taking off (and showing off, one hopes), and one wants one's garments to not rip unduly because of flimsy fabric.

The next thing I did was tear the 4 meter long 54" wide fabric into the two pieces I would be dyeing and printing, with a third smaller piece that I would be using as a test piece for not only color but printing and hand-dyeing.    That part (the ripping) was easy, though I do tend to fret over my estimates of shrinkage. 

The Dye Rack

Not sure how much technical stuff to put in here, so I'll just say quickly that since we wanted to approximate the colors on the grouse scarf,  I knew to use the same kind of dye.  It is a type of dye with superior washfastness and lightfastness, and I made up a fresh batch of each color I would need to get this odd peachy gold.  I knew I wouldn't be able to match it exactly, but at least I had a basis for getting near.  This is one of the downers of doing commission work:  you can never exactly replicate what someone has seen in your non-commission work.  Or at least I can't.  There are some artists, and many fiber artists at that, who write down everything they do, including formulas for every project and effect.  I can do that, but why?  Or to be more honest, I used to be able to know how to do that, but now can't bother.  

The Farm-auction $4 sink

Soaking the silk

Scale for weighing dye n' stuff

First up was dyeing the "test piece," but not before washing all the silk in a process known as "scouring," which basically means soaking in specific type of soap and washing soda in a super-hot bath for at least 30 minutes.
Yeah, but that would mean I'd have to clean out the sink to make way for the soaking bins.  I got the sink at a farm auction for $4.00 and it's been a faithful friend ever since.  But I digress.

While the silk sat in the scouring water, I made up the the dye bath, which meant I had to measure the chemicals into the water according to the (dry) weight of the fabric, and measure in the dyestock solution that I had just made up.  Only problem is, I forgot to weigh the fabric before soaking it.  Ah, but being a person who uses a scale quite often (for postage,  as well as chemicals and dye), I had a good idea what the pieces weighed, so I went ahead with little concern, knowing that there were greater things to fear.

Checking the pH

Here is where I can fast-forward to the result.  After many hours of dyeing the test piece (it takes easily 3 hours to fully dye the size I was working with) as well as two other silk scarves, using variations in the color formula (combinations of violet, two yellows, a certain type of red),  I had dyed the silk too dark.  Midway through the process I realized that the result would be almost brown, not warm gold, as I had planned.  I had overestimated the weight of the fabric and underestimated the strike rate of certain colors in my formula. Complicated, I know.  Never mind.  It was a good lesson, for while I was making my mistakes, I was learning from them.  I knew now I could "build" color on the silk even in the pot as it was dyeing, and that I could correct the color as long as I could control pH and temperature.  I came away from that part of the day confident about color.

BUT I also knew I would be in new terrain when it came time to dye the "real" pieces.  Not only were they each considerably larger than my test piece, there were two of them.  This meant that I needed my hugest pot, an old canning basin that I was not at all confident would accommodate the yardage. You can't crowd silk and expect to get an even color -- one more thing I hadn't thought about when I agreed to the job.  Yikes!  What else was in store?

The old table

A new cover

Staple guns young and old.

Once the fabric has been "cooked" (meaning held at a certain high temperature for an hour), you need to let it cool down, not just in order to handle it but to allow the final bits of dye to set.  So while that was happening, I got to work re-covering my print table.  Nothing elaborate, just the need to clean off the table to begin with, then carry down the new roll of covering and find the staple guns.  The cover has been great for the past 6 years or so, but I'm not going to embark on such a project and leave anything to chance, like stray deposits of tape adhesive, weird stubborn paint stains that mysteriously decide to come lose after years of being indelible, or forgotten irregularities in the surface texture.  

The other thing I did while waiting for fabric to cool was get the first silk screen ready. No picture for that, but I did take a break to go cuddle the cat.

 

  Okay, now back to dyeing.  At around 2 pm, I lower the "real" silk into the pot, piece by piece...
It isn't until 8 pm that the dyebath reaches the goal temperature of 185 degrees F.  Along the way I am adjusting and adjusting the color, monitoring the temperature, tracking and compensating the pH, and most of all, stirring and moving and repositioning the huge swaths of steaming dripping silk.  Good thing the basement is about 20 degrees cooler than my office.  It's one of those awful sweltering summer days and every time I come up from the basement I am about ready to pass out from the heat.

In between tending the dyebath, I make my move to rinse out the "test" pieces and iron them while they are still damp.  The best way to manage silk, as long as we're on the subject, is to wash in cool water with a mild soap – a few swishes with an Ivory soap bar is just the thing – rinse well, then roll in a towel.  Unroll and iron immediately on a hot setting such as cotton or linen. Do this while it's still damp, or your creases and wrinkles will set permanently  Do not fear silk!  It's an incredibly strong material and can withstand high heat from an iron.

Only me withstanding the heat from the iron is another matter.

My ironing board (the good one, mind you; there are several throughout the house), is at the top of the basement in what I call my "old office."  Not air conditioned, is what I'm saying.  It took a while to iron out these pieces (the main test piece plus the smaller silks I had added for color testing), mainly because the weight of the silk was so heavy.  The test piece took about 15 minutes to iron dry, though the other pieces went quickly.  It was interesting to compare colors among the various silks as compared to the original grouse scarf...

Scarf, test silk, and Grouse scarf...

By 9:30-10:00 the dyeing was complete.   I had been working for 14 1/2 hours, not counting cuddling the cat, and while I didn't like the idea of leaving the silk in the dye pot after it had adequately cooled, there was nothing I could do.  I mean nothing.  It was only with great coaxing that I got my bones up the stairs and into bed.