Drizzle Dyed Silk Scarf

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 has been scrunched up on a project board covered with plastic, then left to batch for about an hour before rinsing and washing.  Here are a couple of examples of my Drizzle Dyed Habotai silk scarves:

I fell in love with the wonderful markings that are achieved using this technique.  As with any hand dyed fabric, no two come out exactly alike, making it a form of wearable art in my opinion.

Here is the process I follow to achieve these results:

I use a long, narrow project board I created from foam board, a piece of lightweight cotton, and covered with heavy duty plastic.  I have 3 colors of dyes mixed – Turquoise, Bright Green and a light mixture of Azure Blue.

I soda soaked my habotai silk scarf for 15 minutes, squeezed out the excess, laid on the project board and “scrunched” up to form the peaks/valleys.

Here, I have drizzled the Turquoise using my eyedropper.  I tend to dye sparingly on these, as the dyes migrate over the peaks & valleys, creating the patterns.  Leaving some white enhances the overall look.

Here is the scarf after I applied the other two colors.  I covered with a plastic trash bag to batch, typically for about an hour.

And here is the result.  In this case, the colors are light and soft, just right for a spring or summer accent!  Let me know if you give this a try… would love to see your results!

Some more drizzle dye

Here are 2 other ways of using drizzle dye. The first piece of fabric is a halfyard, which was hung on a drying rack. With a syringe blue dye mixture was applied to the fabric. After it had run down, the fabric was turned around and the same process was done with a yellow dye mixture. This is how it turned out:

Besides dye, you can also use bleach in your syringe. This is a commercial black fabric on which I drizzled tiny quantities of bleach. Don't you love this result? Unfortunately I was never able to find this same black fabric anymore.

These were my 3 posts of this week. Coming Friday Kelly will show a new mystery technique.

Mystery revealed

This is how I created the mystery fabric of last Friday. I placed a soda soaked piece of fabric on a plexiglass sheet which was standing in a container. The wet fabric created lots of wrinkles.

Using a small syringe I drizzled small quantities of dye mixture from the top. Because of the wrinkles the dye followed erratic paths.

After it was washed and dried it looked like this. I love this technique which I call drizzle dye to make fabric for skies.

With this piece of fabric I stopped after the blue, the fabric I showed on Friday I continued with different colors. Normally a syringe is used to apply 60 or 120 or bigger quantities of dye mixture to fabric, but using a small syringe gives you lots of play opportunities. 

There were a lot of people who guessed correctly. I picked Pam as the winner for this week. Pam, please email me your address to: wil@wilopiooguta.com.