I had a chance to watch an episode of Simply Quilts earlier this week and the guest was a guy who hand dyes silk and makes quilts out of the dyed fabric. The silk dyeing looked very easy. Essentially you just soak the silk in white vinegar, fold it into a glass dish, drizzle with dye and put it in the microwave for five minutes. Then you let it dry and have beautiful hand dyed silk. They also said that the final product was machine washable and dryable.

It appears that the guest, Jim Kankula has been on the show before with a shaving cream dyeing technique for a Father's Day quilt. I searched the show schedule, but couldn't find reference to this show coming up any time soon.

Of course, I'm now itching to try hand dyeing some silk myself. It looks like I can get all of the supplies at Dharma Trading. So now I just have to decide on which dye colors to order. This site has some good info on dyeing and recommends starting out with the "primary" colors of fuschia, magenta and turquoise and maybe black and brown to adjust the depth of the other three. So that should probably be my guide to start out.