Painting silk ribbon

The sun came out and I felt like painting fabric, which I haven't done in ages. I decided to do a few colors on silk ribbon to use for embellishments and embroidery. I got the ribbon eons ago from dharmatrading.com.

It's a simple setup. I pour a little Setacolor paint (also from Dharma Trading) in old pie tins and water it down until it's flowable.

Then I moosh the ribbon into the paint with a cheap sponge brush. You could use several colors in one pie tin for more interest.

I let some areas remain white so that I can go in later and add a different color ... maybe pink would look nice with this orange.

I got impatient letting the ribbons dry in the pie tins, so after awhile I transferred them to plastic-covered mat boards (but you could just lay them out on old garbage bags). I let the ribbon twist and turn so that the paint would create interesting patterns as it dried.

The next morning, I peeled the ribbons off the plastic and ironed it, loving the mottled results. Be aware that the ribbon will be stiffer with paint than if you used dyes, but that doesn't matter to me.

The final result:

I did another blog post almost eight years ago about painting silk ribbon with Colorhues paint, which dries softer than Setacolor: silk-ribbon-painting-experiment.html

Have a colorful day