A Square A Day Keeps The Doctor Away

Experiment 7: Once more back into the foray. Using French dyes to hand-paint a pocket square. A more refined but more disciplined process than screen printing that requires a lot of attention.

The French Serti Technique for hand-painting silk is one that requires loads of patience. If you were to sweat whilst you painted, the droplet, should it fall onto the silk, is enough to ruin your work. The salt crystals in your sweat will cause a splotch that is difficult to remove. If you paint one brush stroke incorrectly, you can smudge a key part of the design and potentially this ruins the entire canvas. You must watch where your elbows are, you need to look to where you placed your hand, monitor how far your dye pots are from the canvas, and you must watch the dyes spread evenly to ensure they don't run over your gutta lines. Of course, I love it, so I would not tell you not to try it yourself, I would just suggest that you don't set yourself a timeline for results, because you will be bitterly disappointed. Oh, and one last thing, thickening the dyes into a paint is not advantageous so far as I can tell, so there really is no cheating if you want to get bright results. This one is for sale. Experiment 7, $50.00 from www.lenoeudpapillon.com