I needed some fabric to represent 'fire' for a round robin I am taking part in. After a lot of thought I decided that silk velvet would be the idea fabric to use. I just happend to have some white velvet so carefully scrumpled it and threw acid dye over it. Into the microwave for 5 minutes. Hmm. It must be viscose/silk. It came out a bit wishy washy.
I just happenned to have some more so this time I carefully crumpled it into a litter tray and poured 'dyn-a-flo' over.
I put the litter tray with the soaking fabric on a box behind me and dampened some habitai, put it into a smaller tray. Reached behind me to grab the dye and knocked the first tray over. Sigh. Not much I could do, so just shoved the velvet back into the tray. I put it in the airing cupboard overnight to dry. Next morning, it was still soaking wet. I got an old towel and wrapped the silk in it, along with some other bits of stray fabric (waste not want not) and got ready to wring. Oops, the dye paint had dripped out of the towel and I had lovely orange dots all over my oatmeal covered bedroom carpet. Sigh. I can't remember what made me think working in the bedroom was an idea.
I scrubbed the carpet and then, with the towel, fabric and dye over the bath tub, I wrung the excess dye out. Scrubbed the bath. Sigh. Then I put a black sack in the bottom of the bathtub, a drying rack over and hung up the fabrics to dry. Got fed up waiting and got the hair dryer out. 10 minutes later I was ironing. And if I say so myself, it is a nice firey piece of velvet.
This is the piece of silk habitai that I coloured at the same time.
The old towel that I borrowed from the dogs went into the washing machine and came out perfect. No staining of the dyn-a-flo at all. The carpet has some echoes of orange but I guess it will disapear in time. I sat in the bath and found the stray paint splots before anyone else could...
