Galaxy Dyed Silk Scarf Project

Over the weekend my big kids and I got a jump on Christmas by completing a fun project, the Galaxy Dyed Scarf Project from Blick Art Materials*, one of their great DIY project ideas that can all be found here! The kids and I worked on the project in my studio space, laying out our supplies....

wetting the scarves, and then diving right in with gloves on and fabric dye in small squeeze bottles. We had purple, deep blue, turquoise blue and red dyes, colors to create the look of a galaxy. Beginning with the darkest color on the outside we started squeezing our dyes all around the fabric. For the kids the idea of circles inside of circles helped them to visualize the way that their dye pattern should look.

Once we got to the center of our scarves we used our fingers to feather the dye colors together.

Then we added small squeezes of red dye within our blue layers....

And finally finished off with a fine layer of crystaline salt, which we allowed to sit on our fabric for a full 24 hours. The salt is meant bring out little points of white on the scarves and it needs time to do its work, thinking about this process helped the kids wait, but they were still very eager to see their finished scarves.

So, it felt a bit like Christmas morning when we came back to our scarves, gave them a dye set wash, and after allowing them to dry were finally able to see the beautiful results of our work! They really did come out looking like a picture of a galaxy, with nebulas and stars.

These will become Christmas gifts for a few special people, and the kids feel so proud! Overall we had so much fun with this project, it was simple, quick and satisfying for all of us.

I had the pleasure of doing this project for the first time last week on our second In Our Element Retreat on Cape Cod. We did this project on our first night together and it was a great ice breaker as we got down on the floor working with our hands in the dye. As a teacher, I appreciated that the fluid nature of this project using drops and washes of color, helped everyone not to feel intimidated by this project, even women who had never done anything like this before.

We had so much fun and I loved how even though we were all working on the same project everyone did it just a bit differently, each one reflected our own personalities.

Here are a few of us with our finished galaxy scarves, definitely an easy project with a big wow factor and most importantly we had a great time!

I'm already eyeing a few other projects on the Blick DIY list.... they have lots of other great holiday crafting ideas, and looking ahead I think that these Cupid Arrows might have to be part of our Valentines Day Crafting plan. Aren't they the cutest?!

 

*this post was sponsored by Blick, I only write about products and projects that I love!