Silk hankies are a special type of luxury fiber. Its not often that the average spinner has such a preparation available in todays world of commercially processed fibers and with most people being so many steps away from the "farm" if you will. Its also exciting that hankies are an affordable way to dip your toe into silk, and that we have them available to us at reasonable prices, unlike silk a couple of generations ago.
I love working with Silk, give it to me as a Top, Sliver, Hankie, Cap, straight from the cocoon, I'll take it any way I can find it. It is one of my top 3 fibers, if not THE top fiber for working with, spinning, knitting etc. and there are a lot of really cool things you can do with silk!
Today we are going to be talking a bit about dyeing silk hankies, which are silk cocoons that aren't quite good enough for reeled silk (fine silk threads, like sari threads, and for embroidery), or silk top, which is a smooth preparation with all the fibers parallel. When they make hankies, the worker has a square frame, with pegs on each corner. They take the cocoon, stretch it over the pegs, and push it down. The worker does this hundreds of times, until they have a block of silk on the pegs. When it dries they pull it off and sell it to us. This give us many layers in each hankie, and each hankie can be literally hundreds of cocoons! We can then spin each layer, knit directly from each layer, etc.
On to the dyeing, right!? To dye silk I start like any other protein fiber (wool, alpaca, an easy way to tell is if it comes from something living its a protein fiber, if it comes from a plant it is cellulose and this dye method will not work) weigh out how much fiber I want, and then arrange it in a pan and pour in some acidulated water. I usually let silk soak in the water much longer than wool, this batch I soaked for about 4 hours before coming back to it to add color.
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Soaking
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Weighing
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| Hankies in the pan |
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| Dye on flipped hankies |
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Dye on top of hankies
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Next I mix up the colors I want, and pour HALF of the measure right on top. I let them sit in the dye for about an hour, flip the hankies over so that the bottom is not up, and pour the other half of the dye solution on. I do this in the solution the hankies soaked in, so technically this is a vat style of dyeing.
I also set these with heat a bit differently than I do other vat dyeing. I turn on my oven to about 350, make sure I have at least 1.5 inches of liquid in my container, and throw the whole shebang in the oven for about 90 minutes. I then turn the oven off and let them cool down in the oven for about 4 hours. Drain and dry the fiber, and you are done!
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| Finished hankie |
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| Finished hankie. |
Hope you all enjoyed the post today! Let me know if you have comments, or topic suggestions!
Brittany