1760s Painted Silk Sacque Gown: Painting the Fabric

Hey everyone, this is Samantha, aka The Couture. Since there was so much positive interest in seeing how I do the painted silk, I put together this little video. Hopefully it turns out okay. I'm really not a tech-savvy person, but we'll see how this goes. But just a really brief overview for this project, I'm making a sort of 1760s sat gown, and I'm painting the silk for it in a way that would have been done in China for a western market. So they were painting the silks and then exporting them to the west to be made up into fashionable clothing. And it's just a really beautiful, fashionable look. And I also like the fact that it's this combination of eastern and western textiles and techniques, and since I'm a blend of east and west, I thought that was also really cool. Alright, let's get started. So this is my full-size pattern, essentially, for the drawing, the repeat that goes on the floor. And basically I just stared at hundreds of pictures of extant gowns and fabric fragments and fabric panels to get an idea of what I wanted. You notice that the styles for the designs change as you go from the 1750s up into the 1790s, and for the time period that I'm doing, it's really a dense, kind of swirling design. As you get more towards the late 70s and into the 80s, the designs become a lot more delicate and a bit more simplified. But I really love this very dense, colorful style that you get in the 1760s. With the light pad turned on, you can see just how great. I can see right through my silk taffeta, which is here, and I just placed my pattern underneath. So yeah, it's awesome. I can get pretty much the full repeat on the light pad there. So that's really, really helpful. So now I'm going to actually start drawing my design onto the fabric. So these are the materials that I use when I'm painting on the silk. I use Jacquard Dynaflow silk paints, which people use for resist and different modern silk painting techniques, but I don't use them in that way. I use them more like watercolor, I guess. And it does behave like a dye, so it soaks into the fabric, which is nice because it's not sitting on the fabric. It doesn't make the fabric stiff. And then you can heat set it with an iron so it stays put. Let's see what else. I've got just water because it is water soluble, a paper plate that I set my paints on because I do have to work on top of the whole piece of fabric. So I need to be able to put the paints somewhere where I know they won't drip onto the fabric. I'm using a very thin brush. This is a 00. The smaller, the better. Even though you might think you want a bigger brush for some of these areas, the fact that the paint spreads so much, starting small helps you really control it. And then I have just a paper towel so that I can blot on here and control how much paint is actually on my paintbrush before I go onto the fabric. So now I'm going to work on the leaves that are on this motif here. They are darker in the middle and have a lighter green on the edges. And I discovered that the best way to do this is to obviously work the darker color first and then very quickly work the lighter color after that. And when they're both wetter is when they can blend better. Onto this flower here. And because I have to work within the palette that the Dynaflow comes in, I don't always have a lighter and a darker version of each color. So you can water down the paint a little bit to kind of create a lighter shade. So it's going to be darker near the middle of the flower and it'll come out lighter on the edges. And so I usually start by going in with the dark, putting all everywhere that I want it to be darker, and then I'll go back with a little bit of the watered down paint and try to work really quickly. Because again, what it's first on there is when it's easier to blend. To kind of get used to is knowing how much is, how much paint is too much or too little. And it's always better to err on the side of too little because again, it does spread a little bit, but that's where the little brush comes in handy and just being really careful, taking your time. Even if you do mess up and your paint bleeds outside of your design, don't worry too much because you absolutely 100% see that in the originals. I really think that they're probably doing this way faster and a bit more slapdash than I am because they have to churn out so much yardage. And it's definitely a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. You want to look at it as like on the whole, what the project is going to look like when you're done and not try to focus too much on one flower that got really messed up. It's a little hard to do, especially for me. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, but I just have to remind myself that nobody's probably going to notice that one little flower where things bled too much. All right, that's one section done. This is maybe my favorite flower out of all the flowers on here, so that's why I chose to do it. It's still drying a little bit over here in the blue just because it was really saturated with the two different shades. But this actually dries quite quickly, which makes it nice because I can move the fabric around to get to different sections. When I work, I tend to work one color at a time, or I try to anyway. So I do all the vines first, and then all the leaves, and then the different flower components color by color. It's just a way to try to keep track and to save time a little bit so I'm not constantly opening jars. So the final step is to go over everything with silver paint, which is something that you see on originals. Some originals, the silver still survives, but since they were using real silver, it has either tarnished or flaked off in a lot of cases, and you're just left with kind of what looks like ink, basically. But when I put the silver on for the first time, I was just blown away by how it looked, and I realized it would be worth the extra time and extra money to do it, since that is what these gowns would have looked like in their original state. And I have to thank Neil Hurst and Mark Cotter for really encouraging me to go that extra stuff, and I'm really happy with it. And there's our finished motif, all painted and outlined in silver. I want to say a huge, huge thank you to Robin of Sew Loud and Peggy of Noodle Stitch for contributing to help me find more of these silver pens. I had no idea when I set out to do this that I would need so many pens, and you guys just really touched me. I really appreciate the help. So now this gown can become a reality. If you have any questions about any of this, please send me a message and I'll try to get back to you as soon as I can, and thanks for watching!