Comparison

I washed the soft gray scarf seen in yesterday's post and the color is warmer now with some pinkish tones.  Interesting, but I wish I could hang onto the cold gray tones.  I have hard water.  I neutralized the rust with baking soda then washed by hand in Ecover.  Will take some experiments to discover why the color shifts.  Not much I can do about the hard water.  Not sure it is the culprit as I do a thorough rinse of the rusted silk outdoors with the hose immediately after the reveal and nothing changes then.  I scanned approximately the same area as before.

Details

A few days ago I wrapped this 60" long scarf on one of my rust rods.  (BTW, this is a scanned detail.)  I rolled one direction then overlapped the next layer going the other direction and still had scarf left for a partial third layer.  The rust does a remarkable job of penetrating the layers, In this case--with pleating, there were 12, but the timing and the 3rd layer resulted in a much lighter toned design in parts of the whole length of silk.

The soft grays come from used tea bag dust, which reminds me I have hundreds of tea bags in a sack that need to be emptied.  I have not yet washed this scarf and I suspect I'll see some color shift when I do.  I'll post the washed pressed scarf for comparison later.

Stripes were created by an auger.  This is a 72" scarf so a portion on either end had to be folded over before being wrapped on the 4' long iron piece which resulted in the chevron pattern.

Rusty bits fresh off the press

Another hour or so and I might have had to kiss this silk good bye--at least for wearing.  I nearly forgot to unwrap the goodies.  Humidity was high and the results are strong.  Silk satin is difficult to photograph--too much shine--and the scarves never want to lay very flat, so I threw these on the scanner and just did details.  All but the last one will be at the EAC gift shop soon.

                                                                           

Pocket Square

I've spent a good deal of time lately in the garden getting the tomatoes and other veggies in the ground as well as planting flowers.  I just made a list of all the shows I have on the calendar this summer and fall and scared myself silly tonight!  Thought I would post some scans of scarves to prove I've actually been working in the studio too.  This is a detail of a pocket square 17" on a side before rusting.  It was done in the shibori method.  Quite a bizarre design isn't it?  More new work to see in the next post.