Printing on Silk Scarves with Thickened Dye

This year for the Guild Auction, I'm donating two silk scarves.  There are pictures of both in my previous blog post. Yesterday, I printed with thickened dye on the hand-painted one, thinking it needed more 'something' to add interest.

While I had the thickened dye, I found another couple pieces of fabric, one cotton and one other silk scarf and printed on them as well. I had not done any thickened dye printing in a very long time. I forgot how easy it is.  I had to make up a new batch of the sodium alginate, but that goes very quick. Since I wanted to print without pre-soaking the fabrics in soda ash, I just added a mix of soda ash/baking soda to the thickened paste and liquid dye concentrate.  There's a four hour life to the paste once soda ash has been mixed into it, so it's use it or lose it.

Here's the results: