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.
Here’s a painted veil I made on my giant veil-stretcher. After the painting is finished, I laid it out on plain newsprint. In this case, I used a lot of water-based resist mixed with black dye to make the lines, and this black resist can bleed through one layer of paper during steaming, so I put an addition layer over the areas I was most concerned about (not shown).I rolled it up like a jelly roll. Baby Cat helped (and by “helped” I mean “got in the way”). The veil and paper are now a tube around 50″ long.Next, I roll the jelly roll up like a cinnamon roll.The cinnamon roll gets held together by a rubber band or two. Now I have something that will fit in my canning pot-turned-veil steamer. Stay tuned for Part 2 in which I will show you the actual steamer set up.
