A Day in the Life….Creating Small Framed Silk Pictures

Most of you know my freehand silk mandalas that I love creating. Whenever I’m asked about templates, I always tell you that I almost never use them and enjoy the process of freely creating as I go.

But there are a few items that I use templates for and those are the smaller items that I reproduce as variations on a theme.

I just wanted to share an insight into my small framed silk pictures, items that I do indeed use templates for – you can click on each individual pictures to be taken to a listing.

Normally I stretch the silk onto a frame and then divide the area up into lots of smaller areas using my waterbased resist.

Then I use little templates I have for my evergreen silk pictures – my labyrinth, Glastonbury Tor by Night, the vesica pisces and my lotus. Normally I encourage people to trace the designs onto the silk but I draw them straight on using the gold liner.

The next step is to paint them using my French dyes and when they’re dry, the silk is taken from the frame and rolled up in paper and suspended in my steamer.

When they are steamed, they are cut apart from each other, attached to paper to give them a bit of firmness. I then put little mounts on them and then place them in wooden frames.

I first started making these well over 10 years ago and they have remained popular ever since. I must admit, I have quite an attachment to them.

If you’d like to have a look at them, you can currently see them in my Etsy shop in the silk pictures category: Silk Pictures

And if there’s any particular design you’d like me to paint as a small framed picture then just let me know. Thanks.