It’s Wednesday around 1pm and I can’t stop thinking about that petrified washing soda from yesterday. So to quench my curiosity I mixed up a dye bath with just a little water and 2 teaspoons of procion avocado Green. I have a silk pillow cover that I have been dyeing to do something with for a while. I have a rusty red one that I finished off with a discharge silkscreen print of branches and such from my back yard.  The discharged area came up a beautiful light green and I’m hoping that this cover will compliment it. But I never want to play it safe- I’m always taking risks and this is no different. So after submerging the dry white, silk cover into the low water dye bath, I started sprinkling it with dry washing soda.  I don’t know what will happen, but I am hoping that as the soda slowly dissolves (or not) I will get a mottled, dotted or somehow textured color. As always, I then began to look around for anything else that I might submerge,

but first I dissolved about 3 more tablespoons of soda into about 1 cup of water and slowly poured it over the top of the sprinkled pillow cover. I noticed that the sprinkles didn’t move and they had already hardened on the silk. I must admit to a sinking feeling (should I have used salt instead?) that perhaps I had gone too far and my cover would be ruined.

I did have one more silk scarf left and so into the dye pot it went-dry as a bone. I watched as the avocado green began to slowly travel into the silk scarf and I’m delighted to tell you that the color of the dye changed right before my eyes from green to blue. Will it stay that way? I don’t know, but I am walking away to write this disrespecting an incredible urge to stir the pot . . .