Indian flavored scarves

Please bear with me - I can't figure out how to get the pictures to fit nicely with the text, and I can't seem to put a table in the HTML without messing greatly with the spacing. I dunno.

I finally finished all the scarves last weekend and gave them to Tej last week. She loved them, absolutely loved them. I'm so glad.

Her wedding is coming up next weekend and I can't wait. An Indian ceremony, Indian clothing, and - super yum! - Indian food.

The thing that tied the set together was this Indian design, which I screen printed in red at each end of all six scarves. And then from there I worked sort of in pairs.

I took two of the scarves and screen printed the same design - in the same red dye on one of them and in lighter pink dye on the other. Then, after steaming to set the dye, and hand washing them, I put them in two separate low immersion dye pots.

Low immersion dyeing is different from regular dyeing in that you use significantly less water. And you get uneven effects, which I love. If you want your fabric to come out more even, you need to use more water and stir the fabric around. I scrunched these up, poured the dye on, poured the soda ash solution on immediately to start setting the dye in the creases, and left them for the hour required for the dye to bond adequately with the fibers.

I pole-wrapped two other scarves. Pole-wrapping is one of many Japanese shibori techniques. I have PVC pipe that I use for the poles. You wrap the scarf around the pole but at the same time you are wrapping string around the fabric and scrunching it up. Hopefully this picture illustrates what I'm talking about. In the end your scarf is scrunched quite small on the pole.

For the third set, I clamped them with objects. One with CDs and the other with plastic squares. And binder clips on both. First I dyed them warm yellow. Then washed that out and scrunched them up and put them in a low-immersion fuchsia dye, just as I'd done with the first pair of scarves.

I love how the yellow comes through in places and blends with the fuchsia in others. And in the spots that were left white through the clamping, you have bits of white as well. Tej has two Indian bridesmaids, and I think she'll give the yellow-orange-fuchsia scarves to them.

Her wedding is next weekend. We're all going to be hanging out on the Eastern Shore for 3 days, so I am hoping there will be ample time to get each of them to model for me in their scarf!