My next silk dying experiment was using Jacquard’s Solarfast dye, again purchased from Dharma Trading. Solarfast is a dye that uses sunlight (or probably any UV light) to cause the dye to set. Where it’s covered, it doesn’t set or sets lighter.
Once again, I wet the silk, but this time I wrung it out and then put it in a bowl with the dye. Well, I think I needed to dilute the dye so that it spread more evenly through the silk because I definitely ended up with dark and light bits.
Since I had gone with an avocado green color, I decided to use leaves to do the setting. Unfortunately, as you can see in this photo, they blew away. It was kinda a fail.
Where the leaves did stick (due to moisture, luck, whatever), I did get a neat leaf shape. The non-color parts were more of a yellow color.
On the upside, after washing this veil was nice and soft like normal and the color held nicely. If I were to do it again, I would dilute the paint so I could better soak the veil and I would use shapes that I could weight down.
Maybe I’ll try it again, but not sure. At $8 for 4 oz which is barely enough for one veil, it’s less cost effective than other methods of dying.