Naturally dyed & printed silk scarves & wall art; silk apparel note cards

Artist Statement

I embraced my creative side and took up the craft of weaving after my career in media sales. Watching yarns on the loom turn into fabric is almost magical.

When not at my loom, I eco-print using live flowers and leaves, dye silk with dye baths using plant material such as ground roots, or make note cards with silk apparel.

Eco-printing is part of the natural dyeing tradition. I place fresh petals and leaves on the silk and get them to embed/print their color and pattern into the silk. I make a bundle and then use pressure, moisture, heat, and time. Not every botanical will dye/print successfully so opening every bundle is a surprise. A recent innovation is the use of a paper shape puncher to make heart, butterfly, and other shapes out of eucalyptus leaves.

When making a natural dye bath, I follow a specific recipe to create it with ingredients such as ground madder root, indigo crystals, dried cochineal bug bodies, etc. The resulting dye can be used to overdye eco-printed silk or to create patterns that spread across the silk by employing Shibori, the Japanese resist dyeing technique. In Shibori, a silk blank is folded, bunched, cinched, twisted, etc. It is then clamped / bound. The bound areas are undyed, the unbound area is dyed. The results are dramatic and stunning.

With the silk apparel note cards I spotlight the design on a tie, blouse, dress. I started making the upcycled silk apparel note cards when in 2020 a friend was looking for unusual cards to sell on a local artists website. I had been gifted a bag of necktie and kimono silk and I realized that the patterns can be the graphic element of note cards.