Focus On Fiber Retreat -Part 8 - Color Comparison - Silk vs. Cotton

I have been using pure dyes and mixing my own colors recently.
In this class we used dyes that were mixed colors.
I wanted to do a color test with some of my favorite mixed colors on both silk and cotton.
I laid a piece of the cotton/linen damask and the silk next to each other on a sheet of plastic.
I then squirted dye concentrates on each of them.



This is the result on the cotton/linen damask. It takes colors the same as 100% cotton.

There is white between each color on the cotton/linen.
I thought the colors would run together more but there was not enough dye liquid to make that happen. It actually is a better sampler of the colors since they are separated.



This is the silk scarf I dyed with exactly the same colors. The dyes migrated together more on the silk.



The colors I sampled were Chino, Chinese Red, Curry, Kiwi, Mustard, Raspberry, Bronze, Loden, Marine Blue, Hot Chocolate and Chino, not necessarily in this order.

In addition to each fabric taking up the dye differently you can see that the results of some of the exact same colors were different on the cotton and the silk.
That is the nature of these dyes.

Colors are flatter when used on cotton and more vibrant on silk, that is the nature of the fabric.

Another observation I made is that some of the colors had a haloing or fade out on the edges as the colors in the dye attempted to separate out.

Feel free to click on any of the photos for a larger view.