I work almost exclusively with silk acid dyes for painting and dyeing silk. When I paint, I mix the dyes with water and apply with a brush to stretched silk (or not stretched, depending on the effect I want). Painted pieces, as well as various low immersion and tie dyed techniques, require the acid dyes to be steam set as the final step in the dyeing process. I don’t have a professional silk steamer, but here is my super low tech way of doing it.
Three yards (108″, or about 2.75 m for the non-backwards metric-using nations of the world) is a standard length for belly dance veils . Thus, a 3 yard long half circle veil must have a radius of 54″. It must be cut from 54″ wide silk in order to really be a half circle. Some veils marketed as half circles would more accurately be described as half ellipse, because they’ve been cut from 45″ wide silk.
I prefer concise language when it comes to these curved-edge veils, but I’ve also caved to the standard of titling my half ellipses as half circles so they come up in searches (always with the appropriate caveat in the description though).
It’s geometry…
A true half circle veil in the standard 3 yard length is a LOT of fabric. There is ~17% less fabric in the half ellipse, and these two shapes do not move exactly the same.
How important these is to your dancing depends entirely on your veil work style. If you like the way a half-circle or half-ellipse veil drapes when it’s tucked into your costume, but otherwise treat the veil much as you would a rectangular veil, a half-ellipse may be just fine.
However, the half circle has the same amount and weight of fabric radiating out from the center point, so every point around the edge is going to pull outward with the same centrifugal force when you do something like a fast barrel turn. This means the true half circle veil will tend to stay open in all its glory during these moves–even more so if you select heavier 8 momme silk for this purpose.
On the other hand, if you are of shorter-than-average height, a 54″ wide veil will require more strength and finesse to avoid stepping on it. For us shorties, a 54″ veil (whether semicircular or rectangular) will be dragging the ground when our arms are extended straight out from our sides.
I only use ebay to sell my silk wares when I want to donate proceeds of a transaction to charity. I have to say, they do make it very easy to donate to a wide variety of charities; I wish etsy would support such a feature. I hoped to sell this one-of-a-kind swallowtail butterfly veil to support the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Clearly, I don’t get the right traffic. 🙁
So maybe you have a favorite veil that you love so much, and you want to know what silk weight it is so you can shop for veils that will move and handle the same way. In the absence of a series of silks of various weights, how can you determine the weight of an unknown?
As I’ve demonstrated in a previous blog and video, the weight of silk is of immense importance in veil dancing. Momme (confusingly abbreviated mm) is the unit of weight used to categorize the heaviness of silk fabrics. It ranges from 3 or so for the gauziest of silk gauze to 30 or more for very heavy suitweight silks. The weights commonly used for belly dance veils are 5, 6, and 8 mm.
1 momme describes fabric that weighs 4.34 g/m2; thus, 5 momme fabric should weight 5 x 4.34 g/m2 = 21.7 g/ m2. You can determine the silk weight of a veil if you have a measuring tape and a balance or scales of some kind that will accurately measure to the nearest gram or tenth of an ounce. I weighed my silk pieces in my laboratory on an analytical balance, but you don’t have to have anything that fancy or accurate.
If you have a standard size rectangle veil, just weigh the veil to the nearest gram or tenth of an ounce, and refer to the table below. I’ve done the calculations for you.
| Momme Weight | Weight in grams | Weight in ounces |
| 5 mm | 65-68 g | 2.3-2.8 |
| 6 mm | 78-82 g | 2.75-2.9 |
| 8 mm | 104-108g | 3.7-3.8 |
Again, these weights are for a standard size veil. The reason I calculated a range is because in the silk industry, fabric sold as 45″ in width may actually fall anywhere from 43-45″ in width. So a standard size veil should have an area between 2.99 m2 and 3.135 m2 . Also, these measurements are for the fabric before the shrinkage that occurs during dyeing and/or washing. I take shrinkage into account when ripping my 6 mm silk for veils, but most veil-makers do not. Bottom line is if your veil is a little less than standard dimensions, proceed with these numbers. If you have one of my 6 mm silk veils, expect the area and weight to be a little over.
If you have a veil of some other dimension than the standard size, just calculate the area, convert if necessary to m2, and divide the weight in g by the area in m2 , then divide that amount by 4.34 get an approximation of the momme weight.
I worked all of this out because, in my search for a different source of 6 mm silk, I received a sample being sold as 6 mm from a Chinese textile company. The fabric felt too light to my hand. So I ended up calculating how much a veil of each weight should way, and I weighed pieces from all my silk suppliers. Sure enough, the sample was on the low end of 5 mm, so I passed on placing a bulk order with them. For the record, Dharma Trading pre-hemmed 5 mm veils are more like 4.5 mm by my measurements, and their 8 mm veils are spot on. My current source of 6 mm silk, Exotic Silk, is a bit under but reasonably close to 6 mm.
A while back I received a custom order from a repeat customer who had a beautiful modern costume covered in silk flower petals. The flower petals were pale yellow and pink. She sent me a couple so I could match the colors.
Well, I almost got a little too big for my own britches with my color mixing skillz. I almost didn’t even do a test swatch. To be perfectly honest, I almost didn’t even fetch the petals and take them to my workshop when the time came to make the veil, because I thought I had the colors in my head, like a musician with perfect pitch or something.
Luckily I did do a swatch, and did get the petals for comparison. I had the yellow wrong in my head (bottom swatch). I fixed it (top swatch).
Not exactly a near disaster, bur it was a little daily ego check. I do not have perfect pitch, and while I do remember colors well, I am not infallible. Test swatches are good. Looking at the costume photos/swatches as I dye custom orders is good. (I would have looked at the petals before shipping the veil, then I would have had to make another veil.)
My approach to dyeing is sort of “right-brained”, which is biologically not really a thing, but meaning I don’t measure things out or go by recipes, even though virtually all of my standard colors are mixtures of at least 2, if not more, powdered dyes. You would think, being a scientist by day and all, I would take careful notes and measure things out. But I don’t; I do it all intuitively. And if it’s not broke, don’t fix it, right?
Plus there are some very practical reasons why recipes and measuring spoons would not improve my methods. Consider the photo below. Here I have 4 veils that I’m taking through multiple dips in 3 different dye baths (copper, purple, teal), but let’s just talk about the purple. I blend my own purples using 2 dyes. Look at the purple region of each veil. They are not the same. The top veil is more blue-purple, and the bottom veil is more fuchsia-purple. Yet they all were all dipped in the same dye bath for about same amount of time. See, the dye bath doesn’t just get more dilute with each piece of fabric dipped. The blue components get eaten up by the fabric faster than the fuchsia in this particular mixture. So I not only have to account for overall concentration; I also have to adjust for the constantly shifting ratios of hues. So I throw in some more blue and re-dip each veil, this time working in the opposite direction, so the colors get evened out. Not ever color mixture shifts around like this one; each dye has its own behavioral quirks.
I think even across time, my consistency is very good. The colors are in my mind’s eye. But when I dye matching veils for troupes, I always do then together (like the 4 in the above photo) in one or a few small batches, so I can keep the colors very consistent.
Here’s another reason recipes don’t work well: you run out of a color and buy another jar of it, and it is different. Dharma Trading, you HAVE to do better with your house brand acid dyes. Below is a picture of dye lot inconsistency in one of my favorite dyes for mixing golds, and it is really, really annoying. Actually, this is not really a problem for my long-beloved Jacquard acid dyes, just the Dharma house ones.
Final product:
I’ve seen some pretty terrible things lately in the silk veil market. I’m not just talking about mass produced cheap stuff from developing countries, but also some pretty bleh things from within the cottage industry.
Of course hand-dyed silks are each a little different, with small inconsistencies. This doesn’t give me license to send out sloppy work and then whine that I’m an artEEst. I give detailed attention to each item that leaves my workshop. Order from me, and you will not receive something that looks like it was used for paintball target practice.
I do use stock photos for my ombré gradients, but I don’t cherry pick the best ones for photos and then send out lesser items.
Check out the veil on the right: It has pale, underdyed areas. Blotches. Harsh transitions. The veil on the right is, by my standards, a big NOPE. Especially if I’ve used the veil on the left as advertisement. No, I didn’t ruin a veil just to make a point. The veil on the right is just unfinished, after the first round of vat dyeing. Numerous more dips are required to blend away harsh boundaries, melt away blotches, fill in pale, washed out areas.
If I think a veil is finished, and later see that it isn’t, it goes back to the basement for more dyeing. Or maybe I have to start over. Right now I have a stack of gold/black and silver/black gradients that I thought were finished, but after they dried, I see I didn’t get the black edges black enough. Black is difficult. But when I say something is true black, it has to be so.
I make beautiful veils, and I confidently stand by my work with an open return policy.
Iridescent silk chiffon has a shimmery,luminous glow to it. It changes hue and/or shade as it moves. Unlike all the other silks I work with, iridescent silk comes factory-dyed in several dozen colors.
Its special qualities arise from the warp and weft fibers being different shades. Take for example, this “silver” iridescent chiffon veil:
It is actually not silver at all, but rather has black threads running one direction and white threads the other direction:
Now, in another video I have made, I argued that ombre veils were superior because they have dimensionality that shows off movement better relative to solid color veil. Iridescent chiffon offers an alternative way to highlight your veil moves. It can be overdyed to make an ombre, but it also shows off movement quite nicely in its original factory-dyed condition. Check it out:
Looks like liquid silver in motion, doesn’t it? By the way, this fabric only comes in 54″ widths, so it is actually easier for me to make 54″ wide veil. Tedi is dancing with a 54″ x 3 yard veil in the above video.
As if the “silver” iridescent chiffon isn’t cool enough, it looks great overdyed. When it is overdyed, the white threads dye, and the black ones just stay black, so the end result is a color with a black underotne:
Here’s some other photos of overdyed iridescent chiffon. The first one is the silver overdyed. The others are overdyed peacock blue or light pink iridescent chiffons.
Here’s another look at iridescent silk chiffon in motion — this time a teal/peacock overdyed ombre and a handpainted peacock pattern.
You can purchase iridescent chiffon veils in my etsy store:
An ombre veil is more than just a way to bring several colors together. The ombre brings something to your dance over and above what can be achieved with a solid color veil, or a mottled, tie dyed, or randomly blotchy veil.
A 2.5 minute video is worth a thousand pictures; my dance partner Tedi provided me with several hours of barrel turns holding various veils so you can see what I’m talking about. (As an aside, don’t you hate instructional/informative type videos where the narrator starts out with that ear-piercing “Hi everyone!” and then proceeds to ramble in front of the camera for waaayyyy too long? You click one minute forward into the video and they are still rambling uselessly, so you click two minutes in, three, four. Finally you get to the 15 seconds of useful information in the five minute video? I hate that. I promise to never waste your time like that. The video that youtube tries to make you watch after this one will probably be one of those.)
In a nutshell, the ombre itself brings dimensionality to the veil. It distinguishes the two edges of the veil in 3 dimensional space, so that what you are doing shows up better. The effect is particularly striking on a big stage. This 3 dimensionality shows up whether the edges are contrasting colors as in the video, or whether the ombre is more subtle. For this reason, when customers ask me for a solid veil, I will usually suggest a subtle lighter to darker gradient of their desired color. It just provides depth to veil in motion; even a subtle difference brings dimensionality to the veil in motion.
An alternative strategy to highlighting movement is with a lengthwise gradient in which the colors transition across the 3 yard dimension of the veil. These aren’t as popular, and for a long time I thought they were inherently inferior. I recently made one by error and was quite surprised. Here is a side by side comparison. I found the way it highlighted movement different and delightful from the usual ombre.
And finally ombres provide options in terms of the direction of the gradient that we hold. Depending on the the colors of your ombre, your costuming, and the lighting, you might decide one direction lends itself more to what you are trying to create with your dance. You can also change the edge you are holding during a dance and play up that contrast.
What about painted designs? I try to do them on a gradient background if possible, for just all these reasons.