Whew! Its Finished! This one was a challenge from the start... But having come out on the other end of it all, I have to say I'm quite pleased with the results! This scarf is for a very special friend who has undergone and overcome some major hurdles in her life this year. Because she doesn't know it yet, I won't tell the whole story now... but soon I'll be sure to tell... the Rest Of The Story! But what I would like to share is how I overcame several obstacles of my own in creating this gift!
The first hurdle for this scarf was that it is an infinity scarf, meaning, it is already sewn in a circle, making it easy to loop around the neck a couple of times for an easy-to-wear style. When painting on silk, you normally stretch a flat piece of silk onto a wood frame to make the silk taut, like a canvas. However, this proved to be a challenge when dealing with something already sewn in a circle, like an infinity scarf is. Luckily, I'm about as left brained as I am right brained, so my inner engineer kicked in and help me to develop a way of stretching it, making it possible to paint without getting dyes on the other side of the scarf.
As you will see below, I took a separate piece of wood, normally used as an end piece for this size frame. It already had holes in it for the nut/bolt attachment I use on the corners of my frame (more about building frames to come in a future post). I sanded all the edges of this piece of wood and added green painters tape alongside the edge that would rest against the scarf to prevent snagging the silk. I slipped the 2 wood pieces I had prepared on either end of my scarf, so I could stretch the scarf tightly. Much to my surprise and sheer delight, I found that the holes already in the wood pieces fit perfectly over the end of the aluminum push pins I use on the sides of my frame. All I had to do was position the push pins on either side of one end of the scarf and slip the wood piece over the push pins. Then I went to the other end of the scarf and repeated... placing the wood piece through the scarf, marking a dot through the hole of the wood piece on either side of the frame so that I could position the push pins evenly and give a firm stretch to my infinity scarf....then I slipped the holes of the wood piece over the pins. (Wow... much easier doing it than explaining it, but I hope you understand.) Here is a three part pic below showing the scarf without the wood piece... with the wood piece inserted and connected on one side... then with the wood piece firmly attached over the pins on both sides of the frame, giving a nice firm stretch to the silk!
The next thing I was concerned about was having two layers of silk so close to each other. It would be so easy to have excess dye splatter or drip onto the lower layer. So I slipped aluminum foil in between the layers of the scarf. See photos below. One thing I did that does not show in the photo, is to tape the foil down to the table so it would not move around or have any opportunity to touch the top layer while it was wet.
Now you may be asking yourself, especially if you have painted on silk before, how did I paint the parts that were wrapped around the two end pieces of wood. The simple answer is: I didn't.
I created my design in between these wood cross bars and did not paint onto silk wrapped on the wood cross bar by stopping before I got to the bar. (see above) After the top was completely dry, I then loosened the entire scarf from the rubber bands on the sides of the frame, removed the straight pins and left the wood cross bars intact, still keeping the scarf stretched long wise. Then carefully, I rotated most of the painted side down to the underside of the frame, leaving part of the dry painted part on top. This allowed me to paint right up to where my painting left off. If needed, you could loosen one of the wood pieces on the end to aid in this rotating process. I continued this same process of painting, drying, then rotating the painted and dried part of the scarf to the backside until the entire piece was complete.
I felt quite accomplished by this time... but what I had not thought of yet was how I was going to wrap this scarf for the steamer so that none of the scarf touched itself while steaming!
Unfortunately I did not take pictures of this process and to tell you how I did it would equal to a whole chapter in a book! But I will tell you, that I had 2 sheets of plain newsprint paper with foil in between on the inside of the scarf and paper covering all the outsides of the scarf before rolling it up like a tube and placing it in my fancy shmancy home made steamer! (Details of how I made this steamer can be found on Google, keywords: homemade silk steamer )
Steaming times can vary from place to place. I live in Austin, Texas where it is pretty low altitude and fairly dry humidity. I may have steamed a little longer than normal (3 hours) for this piece because it was wrapped in so much paper... so I wanted to make sure it achieved every opportunity to get hot enough to fix my dyes. (Dupont French dyes were used on this piece) Once steamed, I was anxious to see the results... This is the part of silk painting where you hold your breath while unwrapping your now steamed package of silk!
At first sight everything looked great... the paper stuck to a few areas of resist... but this washed off nicely during the rinsing in Synthrapol stage... however I started noticing small black lines floating in the water! What in the world was THAT? I finished rinsing out the Synthrapol and took the scarf out... "Oh My Word Miss Agnes!" (to quote my grandmother, Mamma Belle!) Whole lines of the black resist were lifting off the scarf! I took it outside and hung it on the line to dry and wait. There was nothing I could do at that time to access and remedy the problem... I had to wait...
After it was dry I was able to take a closer look.... Below you will see a closeup of what I found to be true all over the entire scarf...
All those lil stray squiggly black lines that don't look like they belong... are places where the resist lifted up off the silk. What was so confusing is it didn't lift off everywhere... only in certain places. I went to my trusty silk painting friends on FB in the The SPIN (Silk Painters International) group and posted the above picture to see if anyone could help me to understand what I did wrong. Well thankfully my friend Ron G. knew exactly what I had done! I had used two separate resists; one clear, one black. I first did my design line work with the clear resist and once that was dry I added more line work with the black. Well the black did not adhere to the silk wherever it crossed over the dry clear resist lines... it never connected to the silk fibers...except in those places it didn't have clear resist underneath it! Had I done the black line work while the clear was still wet... it would have been an non issue... Live and Learn!
With mystery solved, I still had another row to hoe with this scarf! I needed to get all those loose tags of black resist off this scarf first before I could figure out what to do next. Thus began the inch by inch examination of this scarf. Under good lights and magnifying glasses I began the search and scrape mission. I used a plastic pallet knife to scrape every inch of this scarf where the black resist had crossed over the clear resist. Some of the lines were still almost attached, but not quite... so I scraped those off too. It took hours to do this... but this was a special gift, remember... and the price my friend was paying going through her ordeal... far outweighed a few extra hours of my labor of love.
After the scraping was done my intentions were to return to the areas where the black was missing and reapply the new black resist into place. But now that it's complete, I'm finding I really like the sketchy additions of black. They look less intentional and more sketchbook-like. And so it is complete, finito, ferdig... finished!
Sometimes what we perceive as imperfections...
are actually the soul shining through!
CREDITS: I must give credit to those who's artworks have inspired my own: Christine Krauss, Wyanne Thompson, Flora Bowley, Jess Yelvington, Donna Hosking and so many others! Thank You!
