dyeing

December 7, 2023 by Tien Chiu 5 Comments

Velvet progress, a new knotting tool, and autumn beauty

The last week has shown some progress on the velvet project. I met with Chris, my friend who is doing the cantra design (and probably most of the build), and we talked about the design. He thinks we can do better than the traditional cantra design, which involves a bunch of spools on a rod suspended in the frame. (For the curious, Peggy Osterkamp has some great photos of velvet looms on her blog.)

Here’s a photo I took of one of Barbara Setsu-Pickett’s velvet cantras (which is designed to break down neatly and fit into a suitcase). It’s only partially populated with bobbins, but you get the idea. A full cantra would be packed with bobbins edge to edge.

A weight hung over each spool acts as a brake, and another weight tensions the design. Here’s a pic I took of an individual weighted spool in the same cantra:

With 440 threads to warp, and two weights for each thread, that means managing 880 weights. Oy.

Excitingly, the only way to remove a spool from the center of the rack is to pull out the rod until you get to the spool you want to change. Simultaneously, you insert another rod from the other side to hold the spools on the other side. This obviously requires significant dexterity. It also has obvious potential for hilarity, should you lose your grip on the rod. Bobbins on the floor everywhere!

Chris has proposed a simple design modification to remedy both of those issues. Simply put a tray under each rack, lined or coated with something that adds a little friction. Each bobbin fits into a slot in the tray, and a rod runs through the bobbins. Here’s his schematic of the tray:

When you want to change out the spools/bobbins, simply remove the rod. The tray holds the bobbins while you swap out the one you’d like to change. No risk of bobbin hijinks.

The tray also allows us to replace the brake weight with friction against the tray, most likely by lining it with something that will add drag. (I’m thinking some of that rubber coating that is used on tools, but we’ll have to experiment.)

Obviously this is not something to be constructed by hand, but fortunately Chris has a 3D printer, which we can use to print the trays.

This is of course all experimental at this point, but at least it gives us a place to begin! Chris is working on a small prototype tray now, so we can see whether the idea works. If it does, then it’ll be on to the larger design.

Meanwhile, I have wound the foundation warp and dyed it. I used deep indigo blue, dark purple, and black for the dye colors, scattering them about at random and squishing to make sure the dye got into all parts of the warp. It appears solid black in the photo below, but after 24 hours of curing and another 24 or so hours of rinsing out, some blues and purples are starting to emerge. I was aiming for a variegated black or super dark blue, so I think I’ve succeeded. Another day or two of rinsing, then another day or two of drying, and I’ll be done.

I tried a new thing with this warp. Waaaaay back when, someone (Debbie Kaplan, I think) had told me about protecting fine-thread skeins from tangling by “crocheting” a thread around the skein to help keep it together without compressing it. Since tangling can be a problem with warps that need a lot of rinsing, I tried that on this warp. Here’s a pic of what I did:

So far it seems to be working, holding the warp together without unduly squishing it. I’ll find out if it was effective when I actually put the warp onto the loom.

Since I will have to tie 2,200 knots to get the velvet warp and the painted warps samples onto the loom (yes – I am gasping for breath too), I decided to get a new tool: the Mesdan Fisherman’s Knotter. You lay two threads in it, under slight tension, pull the trigger, and presto! It knots the threads together and clips the ends.

It’s not entirely unlike the Boyce Weaver’s Knotters that show up periodically on eBay. Except that this one isn’t a worn-out antique, but a new one. It also ties a much more robust knot – here’s a pic from the Mesdan catalog that shows the knots tied by the Fisherman’s and Weaver’s Knotters:

I was going to buy the Weavers Knotter, but the technician at AB Carter (where I bought it) told me the fisherman’s knotter would be much better for slippery fine fibers, such as my beloved 60/2 silk, or like the rayon embroidery thread I’m planning to use in the velvet warp. He also said he thought the ergonomics of the Fisherman’s Knotter would be better.

Here’s a YouTube demonstration of the Mesdan Fisherman’s Knotter in action:

I’m still not entirely sure how helpful it will be. I worry about repetitive stress thumb injuries with the knotter – so will have to test it and also take frequent breaks. I expect it will be faster and more secure than tying knots by hand, though!

I’ll leave you with a lovely rose (yes, ours are STILL blooming!), and a gorgeous autumn tree (autumn starts in late November here!).

And, of course, the inevitable cat. Here’s Tigress on her favorite shelf, generously distributing cat hair over all my clean clothes. (I love her anyway.)

September 16, 2022 by Tien Chiu

Playing in the dye pots

Yeah, I know. I start by saying “Less fiber content” and next thing you know, I’m posting about dyeing? But hey – that’s what I was up to last weekend. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

My wardrobe, as you may or may not know, consists almost exclusively of tie-dyed clothing. This isn’t because I’m a ‘60s child (I wasn’t born in the ‘60s), nor because I’m a Grateful Dead fan. It’s mostly a practical choice: when you are a five-foot-tall woman with exceptionally wide shoulders, you can pretty much guarantee that nothing off the rack is going to fit.

(How exceptionally wide? The average shoulder width for an American woman is 14.4 inches, and for a man it’s 16.1 inches. Mine are 17.5 inches shoulderbone to shoulderbone – plus all that muscle from powerlifting. I’m basically a freakishly short female linebacker.)

To accommodate my odd dimensions, I buy white T-shirts and white men’s shirts from Dharma Trading Company and dye them so they don’t all look identical. This strategy has worked beautifully for me for many years. 🙂

But then I got a fabulous tattoo covering most of my right arm.

My original theory was that I’d get the tattoo and then wear T-shirts when I wanted to cover it up, and tank tops when I wanted to show it off. As soon as I got the tattoo, though, I realized, “Why the *#& would I ever want to hide this??? I’m going to wear tank tops all year round!!”

Of course the only problem with this theory was that I didn’t actually have any tank tops. Dharma Trading to the rescue! I dyed eight tank tops the weekend after I got the tattoo. Whew! Disaster averted.

But a girl likes to have some variety. So last weekend I dyed eight more, plus a T-shirt for Jamie, who (much to my relief) has FINALLY relented and allowed me to dye something for her.

Here’s what came out of the dyepots (pardon the less-than-perfect photos; I was in a rush):

Blue and rusty orange scrunch pattern tank top

Magenta-purple and green scrunch pattern tank top

Square pattern, yellow-red-orange turquoise and purple tie dye tank top

The last tank top is actually double dyed. That is to say, it’s actually been dyed twice. The first time it was dyed like the second to last one (the orange and yellow flame pattern). Unfortunately, it got a stain on it, so of course the only thing to do was overdye the stain. So I tied it up in a circle pattern, put red around the edges, and dyed the outside black.

Preventing the dye from getting where you don’t want it is a bit of a tricky process – dye has a way of splashing and seeping in very inconvenient ways, especially when it’s something like black on yellow where mistakes would be VERY obvious. (The dye gods are capricious!)

To protect against this, I used a method called “capping” which is just a fancy way of saying “stick the part you don’t want contaminated into a plastic bag and then tie the bag on tightly before applying more dye. I actually capped it twice, once to keep the flame-patterned dye from getting contaminated with red and once to keep the red area from getting contaminated with black.

Here’s what it looked like when fully capped and dyed:

Red starburst tie dye in progress photo, with the red and yellow areas capped off in a plastic bag

And here’s what it looked like when it was partially uncapped:

Red starburst tie dye, partially uncapped, with the red portion showing

Here the first plastic bag has been removed to reveal the red portions but the orange-and-yellow is still protected.

You might be wondering about the sink full of water with ICE floating in it that appears in the background of the photo. The ice is the secret to keeping your tie-dyes bright when you’re rinsing out the dye.

There’s a potentially dangerous moment when you dunk your beautiful multicolor tie-dye into the water. With fiber-reactive dyes, there’s always a lot more dye than the fabric can actually react with, and the moment you plunge the fabric into the water, a ton of loose dye comes off into the water…and can potentially stain your beautiful shirt.

However, if the water is freezing cold, the dye can’t react. That’s because the dye reaction requires alkalinity, moisture, dye, and some heat to take place. The fabric has soda ash (alkalinity) and dye in it, so if you put it in warm water, all four dye reaction components are present. If you put it in ice water, though, there’s not enough heat for the dye to react, and the loose dye can’t stain the fabric.

At the same time, the first rinse bath rinses out the soda ash that gives the dye the alkalinity it needs to react. So after the ice water rinse, all the other rinses are safe to do in room temperature or warm water for as long as you like. In fact, it’s recommended to soak overnight in cold water to make the rinse-out process as easy as possible. The rinse water will turn super-dark with loose dye – but it all comes out. No dye reacts with the fabric. All because of that first ice-water rinse!

Better living through chemistry!

I have another dye day scheduled next weekend – some friends from waaaaaay back in high school are coming over and we’re going to do more tie-dyes together. Since it’s starting to get cooler, I may do some sweatshirts, and maybe some T-shirts and tank tops for Jamie.

March 31, 2021 by Tien Chiu

41 miles of yarn

41.47 miles, actually, according to my calculations, but who’s counting?

Three-quarters of it is hand-painted, the other quarter is black. There are two warps.

Here’s the one for Maryam, the one you saw in the last blog post, finished and ready to go. I think it’s breathtakingly beautiful and can’t wait to weave on it!

"Fire" warp for Maryam — “Fire” warp for Maryam

It’s set up for double weave – one layer of warp will be black, so I can weave any color in combination with black, and the other layer will be the “fire” warp, in all its glorious shades of orange, red, and yellow.

The black warp isn’t as limiting as it sounds – by weaving a very weft-dominant fabric, I can actually transform it into virtually any other color. It will have dots of black in it, to be sure, so very light colors would be difficult to achieve, by medium to dark colors wouldn’t be too hard.

This warp is 2,680 threads (2,640 plus 40 extras to cover breakage), each of which is about 15.5 meters long. That’s 41,540 meters, or about 25.8 miles of yarn.

This warp is simply “Fire.”

And here’s the warp for Grace – that’s the sample warp for the Color Gradients class. I’m calling it “Gradients” for short. (You can attribute the names to a plethora of imagination – hey, I’m pre-coffee!)

Gradient warps for Maryam — gradient warps for Maryam

Each of the warps is about 12.5 meters long – 4 wraps round my 3 meter circumference mill, plus a few inches more traveling down the length from top to bottom of the mill and around the warping pegs. There are 1,760 ends (threads) in the warp, and it’s set up for double weave. The bottom layer will be 880 threads – that’s the big warp on the left – and the top layer will be three side by side sections of about 290 threads apiece. Those are the smaller warps. Put together they will allow me to weave gradients in whatever color sequences and weave structures I want, three color combinations across.

The Gradients warp is also not a traditional painted warp. Most painted warps are designed to blend colors into each other at the boundary between colors, to give a painterly effect. With the Gradients warp, I basically want to simulate solid colored warps, so I want abrupt, synchronized color changes across the entire warp. I want to weave multiple solid color samples on the same warp, so the goal is to get the color changes to line up precisely so there’s no waste. This is a bit of a trick.

What I did was wind the warp and tie it off while it was still on the warping mill, using ikat tape and a guide string to make sure that all the ties were in exactly the same place along the warp on every bout (or as close as I could get, anyway). This, at least in theory, will make sure that the color changes line up with each other.

It was difficult to show how this works because the color areas are relatively long in the warp, but I spread it out on a table and lined things up as best I could:

painted warps lined up so the color changes synchronize — synchronized color changes

It’s not perfect, but you can get the idea – the color changes synchronize across the length of the warp, so when Warp One changes colors, Warp Two (and Three, and Four) changes color at the same time.

The ikat tape (the plastic stuff wrapping the warp at the color changes) is designed for, well, ikat weaving, in which portions of the warp are bound off before dipping in dye (usually indigo). The bound areas resist the dye, creating patterning. Since ikat tape is specifically designed for this kind of work, it’s perfect for my much less stringent needs. (If you’re wondering where I bought it, I got it from John Marshall’s booth at Convergence. I don’t think he sells it mail-order, though, so you’ll have to try to catch him at a show. Before I found it I used Dharma Trading Company’s artificial sinew, which also works, though not as well.)

Here’s a closeup of the ikat tape, showing how it binds the warp and prevents the dye from running between sections:

ikat tape bound section of warp — ikat tape-bound section of warp

That probably doesn’t look that interesting if you aren’t a dyer, but if (like me) you’ve spent a ton of time trying to figure out how to keep one section of a painted warp from bleeding into another, getting that sharp and clean a demarcation between sections is nothing short of amazing. The Holy Grail, achieved.

The other secret is to blot excess dye out of the warp after painting. I can’t believe it took me that long to figure it out. The few resources on warp painting I could find all said simply to put on enough dye to cover the warp but not so much that it was dripping. I have never been able to reach a happy balance point where the dye reaches full coverage but doesn’t run more than I like it to during batching or steaming, so if avoiding running is critical, I blot my warps with a bit of paper towel after painting to pick up excess dye. It shouldn’t be dry, but it shouldn’t be dripping wet, either. No more problems!

Here’s what the warp looks like after the ikat tape is removed:

warp immediately after removing ikat tape

See how clean the line is?

And here’s the warp after it’s been spread out and fluffed a little:

fluffed out warp showing white areas where the ikat binding was removed

Obviously the white sections can’t be used in finished samples, but if I’ve done my job right, they should be lined up pretty closely so not much yarn should be wasted. I’ve budgeted about six inches of waste per color for the synchronization, which should (at least in theory) be plenty. It’s not actually completely wasted because I can use that section for testing, refining, and sampling the weave structures and stripe patterning for that particular section of samples. That would be waste in any case, so it all works out in the end.

I wound up with a little lagniappe at the end of all that warp-winding and dyeing. I had mixed up four gallons of dye for all that warp – which I knew was overkill, but dyes are relatively cheap, and running out of dye midway through painting a warp section would have been disastrous. (Let’s not even go there.) When I have excess dye, I simply add to my wardrobe. 90% of the time I run around in tie-dyed T-shirts and jeans, basically because if you’re a five-foot tall woman, with broad shoulders, and can deadlift 245 pounds and squat 200+ pounds, nothing off the rack is going to fit you anyway. And I live in California, where nobody dresses up for anything. So when I’m dyeing, and I have leftover dye, I just grab some T-shirts and some short-sleeve, button-up men’s shirts (that’s what passes for formal wear around here 😉 ), and throw them into the leftover dyes. I generally do low-water immersion dyeing, because it takes five minutes and no brains to dye a shirt and the results usually look great.

And here’s what I got out of it:

That’s the formalwear (hey, it’s California!), and I’m madly in love with all three of them, especially the fuchsia/orange and the blue/green shirts. Heck, all three are wonderful. It’s hard to pick a favorite.

Then there are the T-shirts. I’m less enthused by them, not because they aren’t pretty, but because the colors aren’t really “me”. This one, for example, is pretty, but far too conservative for magpie me:

And this one is a little too chartreuse (in real life it is brilliant yellow-green with patches of bright and rusty orange):

Fortunately, though, Jamie fell madly in love with the last T-shirt and immediately carted it off to her lair, so everything has found a home except the red-and-blue T-shirt, which I will probably give away. I have lots of T-shirts already, and T-shirts are cheap at about $2.50 apiece, so one more or less makes very little difference. And the excess dye got used!

Next step is to put the warps onto the loom. Jamie and I spent a full day over my vacation (I’m back to work now) swapping out the guts of the looms – we still need to rearrange some parts, which I’ve ordered from Tronrud Engineering in Norway, but meanwhile I can get started beaming the warps, and threading up Maryam. With 2,640 warps to tie on, that’s going to take quite awhile. And after that, I’ll need to thread 1,760 heddles on Amazing Grace. Better find some good audiobooks!

March 26, 2021 by Tien Chiu

Warp painting, slightly unconventional

I’ve spent the last few days painting my warps. Five warps, actually, though only two warps after they go onto the loom. Four of them are going onto Grace as a single sample warp. It will be double weave, three warps going as bouts in a single layer side by side, and the other in the bottom layer. The other is going onto Maryam, as one layer in double weave, with the other layer in black, as the “art warp”.

Today I’m going to talk about the process for Maryam’s warp, the “art warp,” as Grace’s warp is way more complicated to explain and I think it will be easier to explain once the warp is actually on the loom. So here it is.

The conventional way to paint a warp is to stretch it out on a table and paint it crosswise in stripes of solid color. This produces horizontal banding of solid color, kinda like this:

a piece woven with a painted warp — conventional painted warp

This is pretty, but not at all what I wanted. I wanted a warp with random variations in color, in all the colors of fire, like the orange splotches in this swatch:

swatch from my piece "Bipolar Prison" — swatch from “Bipolar Prison”

To achieve this effect, I used threads of different size and different fiber types, so they’d absorb the dyes differently and also have physical texture due to the different thread type. So I set out to do the same with this warp.

I wound the warp with one strand of natural (unbleached) 10/2 cotton, which is about 4200 yards per pound, one strand of bleached 20/2 cotton (8400 yards per pound), one strand of 4-ply silk cord (8500 yards per pound), and one strand of natural 60/2 silk (15,000 yards per pound). Scoured, soaked, and stretched for dyeing, it wound up looking like this (luscious!):

To get the variegated effect I was after, with patches of subtle shading, I painted it with four colors: lemon yellow, gold, orange, and diluted scarlet. I wanted the overall color to be yellow-orange, and I wanted a lot of color blending. I diluted the scarlet because I know from experience that scarlet is a strong color, and also that orange is a mix of 80-90% yellow/gold and about 10-20% scarlet, so if I wanted orange-red I needed very little scarlet indeed!

I started by applying splotches of lemon yellow. You start by applying the weakest color, mixing-wise, because as you apply more color, the brushes will pick up previous colors and contaminate the colors in the bucket. If I’d started with scarlet, the brush in subsequent colors would have picked up bits of scarlet from the warp and dumped it into the lemon yellow, turning it into orange in no time flat. I didn’t want that, so I started with lemon yellow to keep it pure. Scarlet will barely notice if you add lemon yellow or orange to it, so I put it last in the queue.

Here’s the warp after applying the lemon yellow:

warp with splotches of lemon yellow dye — warp after applying lemon yellow dye

Next I added splotches of gold dye. I applied these two colors very heavily because I wanted to make sure there was no white left in the warp, and both these colors are relatively weak relative to orange and scarlet. If I soaked the warp in gold and yellow and then added a bit of orange and scarlet, the warp would wind up yellow, orange, and scarlet; if I tried using orange, gold, and yellow in equal proportions, the orange would overwhelm the gold and yellow, producing a warp that looked almost entirely orange. If I added scarlet in equal proportions, it would overwhelm everything else. So: mostly gold and yellow, first.

Now it was time to apply the orange. Because orange is so much stronger than yellow, and because the warp was already quite soaked with dye at this point (encouraging the dye to “run” along the length of the warp), I dabbed on only bits of orange here and there:

warp with dabs of orange dye — orange, freshly applied

If I had stopped here, the orange would have run slightly but there would have been distinct patches of pure orange dye. This is not what I wanted. I wanted a blended look. So I quickly squooshed (that’s a technical term 😉 ) the warp with my fingers to distribute the dye before it had a chance to bond much.

Here it is after squooshing:

orange, gold, and yellow warp, after squooshing to distribute the orange a bit — orange, gold, and yellow warp post squooshing

This warp is fine so far as it goes, but it lacks a feeling of emotional tension. It could use a trace of something a little darker to add a bit of value (light/dark) contrast. Enter the scarlet:

warp with dots of scarlet dye — dots of scarlet

You’ll notice I kept the dots of scarlet quite small. That’s because they are supposed to be dots of shadow, sort of like highlights but in reverse. I didn’t want them to be a big part of the design.

Of course, now the warp looks like it has measles. Worse if you look at the whole thing:

entire warp plus table — warp with measles – highly contagious, keep back!

(You’ll notice that the dye “studio” now looks like a total mess. I told you that neat look would last about ten seconds!)

The cure for warp-measles, of course, is more squooshing. The sooner, the better.

squooshed warp, with scarlet — Squooshed warp, measles magically cured!

When you paint a warp, you always want to flip it over to check for white spots. I flipped it, touched up the back with more dots of yellow, orange, and scarlet (mostly orange and scarlet – there was plenty of yellow), and squooshed again. Then I flipped the warp back to the front. By this time, the scarlet was becoming very nicely distributed:

Now I was done painting that section of warp, and ready to pull the next section up for painting. To keep it under control, I chained it – essentially, crocheting it – like this:

You would NEVER EVER EVER want to do this with a conventional painted warp because the colors would bleed all over and contaminate each other, but with this particular warp, I wanted color blending, and the colors all blend gracefully, so it made sense to chain the warp. Chaining it helps keep the warp threads aligned and prevent tangling later.

Here’s the finished warp:

You may be wondering about the white part. That’s the back end of the warp, which won’t be woven because it’s loom waste – the part that is stuck in the heddles at the end and can’t be woven. Dyeing it would be a waste of time and dye, and leaving it undyed makes it easy to identify which end of the warp is which.

I finished yesterday afternoon, which means I can start rinsing the warp later this morning. Because fiber-reactive dyes are so tenacious, rinsing is a 1-2 day process. Looking forward to seeing what it’s like once it’s fully rinsed-out and dried!

March 23, 2021 by Tien Chiu

Dye studio

I set up the new dye studio yesterday, and I thought I’d take a photo during the ten seconds that it will actually look presentable:

New dye table and dye equipment — new dye table!

Needless to say, if you ever see a setup this neat from someone who claims to be a working dyer, run away quickly, because either the person just spent the last 40 hours scrubbing their studio to take the shot (who has time for that?!?) or they never actually use the studio for dyeing.

Or, of course, they just set up a brand-new studio and can’t resist showing everything off!

Actually I thought this would be a good opportunity to show you the equipment I use. So here it is.

Safety equipment for dyeing — Safety equipment – 12″ long, 10-mil nitrile gloves, respirator with P100 cartridges

Safety equipment first. The acid dyes and fiber-reactive dyes sold for artisan and home dyers are pretty darn safe (please don’t listen to folks who tell you otherwise), BUT any kind of dust is bad news for your lungs, some of the associated chemicals are lung irritants, inhaling fiber-reactive dyes can lead to allergies to the dyes, and it’s stupid to breathe in any kind of chemical if you don’t have to. If you’re working with dyes, wear a GOOD dust mask or a respirator when mixing up dye powders and/or auxiliary chemicals such as soda ash, citric acid, etc. It’s not because dyes are horribly toxic and can kill you, it’s just plain common sense, folks.

Because I work with dyes frequently, I wear a respirator with P100 cartridges. These happen to be good for organic vapors, too, but the dust protection is what’s important.

I also wear gloves. Again, common sense, but also because I mostly work with fiber-reactive dyes and repeated exposure to fiber-reactive dyes can result in developing an allergy to the dyes. Also because the detergent that is used to wash out the dyes can really dry out your hands, and the soda ash solution that you soak the yarns in for fiber-reactive yarn dyeing is highly alkaline and very bad for your skin.

I find that the usual type of glove, which reaches only to the wrist, doesn’t offer enough protection, especially when hauling things in and out of buckets of water, so I use 12″ long gloves. I don’t have a latex allergy, but I still prefer heavy-duty (10 mil) nitrile gloves as they are less likely to tear while hauling buckets around and also insulate my hands better when handling yarn that’s been in hot water.

Measuring and mixing equipment next:

You might be surprised to see both a set of highly accurate scales and the notoriously inaccurate teaspoons and tablespoons. That’s because I do two kinds of dyeing. The first is precision dyeing, where I mix up my own dye samples based on the 2,500 sample studies I’ve done, and expect highly accurate and reproducible results. That’s what the scale is for. The second is off-the-cuff dyeing, where I either use premixed dyes or just eyeball things and take whatever comes. For the first, I use the scales and “pure” dye colors for accurate results. For the second, I use Dharma Trading Company’s premixed dyes and their recommended numbers of teaspoons and tablespoons of dye to get an approximation of the color in their swatch charts.

Both approaches have their place and I use both methods. For immersion dyeing, I almost always use precision dyeing; for warp painting, tie-dye T-shirts, and so on, I generally use the off-the-cuff method. That’s because the precision dyeing swatches don’t always apply to surface design application methods, and Dharma’s formulas are designed for those methods. Also, accuracy isn’t usually critical for warp painting. But it really depends on what I’m after and whether I need precise color results.

I use plastic tablespoons and teaspoons because I can get a 20-pack for $10. When I’m painting warps I can easily wind up mixing 10 or more colors of powdered dye. If I only have one or two tablespoon measures, that adds up to a LOT of washing and drying, and interrupts the work. With 20 tablespoons, I can just grab another one, and toss the used ones into a bucket of water. By the time I’m done, all the dye has soaked off and it’s just a quick rinse, then put everything away.

The syringes are also a measuring tool. A VERY useful measuring tool, for liquid dyes. Once I’ve mixed up a stock solution of dye, I use syringes to measure out and mix smaller amounts. I get these from veterinary supply shops (you can also get them from Amazon, of course) – the 60 ml kind are the ones I use most, but I occasionally use 30 or even 10 ml syringes for really small dilutions.

The cups are for measuring auxiliary chemicals (soda ash and urea mostly, since I work mainly with fiber-reactive dyes), but occasionally for larger amounts of dye.

Multiple sizes of dye mixing cups in back. They’re clear and marked with different numbers of fluid ounces on the side. If I’m precision dyeing, I tare out the cups and add water by weight; if I’m off-the-cuff dyeing, I just pour in water until I reach the right number of fluid ounces, marked off on the side of the cup. Not terribly accurate, but if I wanted accuracy I’d go with the scale.

Next up, dye application tools:

dye application tools: foam brushes, masking film

For painting dyes onto warps or skeins of yarn, my tool of choice is the foam brush. They’re cheap, easy to clean, hold a lot of dye, and can be used to smoosh dye into the warp quickly. My one complaint is that they can hold too much dye, but if you squeeze it out against the side of the container a bit you can avoid the worst of the splooshes.

Behind the foam brushes is masking film. This is lightweight rolls of plastic that is used for painting houses (I think on wall trim) but which can be used under painted warps in place of plastic wrap, which I find difficult to control. There’s 9″ masking film, which I tried last time and found a little too narrow, and 12″ masking film, which I just found at Home Depot and am eager to test. Prior to that I used 10’x 12′ 4-6 mil drop cloth cut about 10-12″ wide, but I’d prefer something that comes in a continuous length. I’ll keep you posted on how this works out.

Dyes:

This is about half my collection of Procion fiber-reactive dyes. Mostly they’re from Dharma Trading Company. I buy from Dharma because they sell great dyes and they’re practically in my back yard – I can order from them and get it the next day. I order from Pro Chemical and Dye when I want dyes for precision dyeing, though, because that’s where I got my dyes for the dye samples so I want to be consistent about sources. Both are excellent companies and I wouldn’t hesitate to order from either.

I have a large collection of both premixed colors and “pure” colors from which I can mix my own colors on the fly. Some people say it’s better to mix your own, some people prefer premixed. I say it depends on what your priorities are at any given moment, and I use both approaches freely depending on what I’m trying to accomplish. Peace, folks.

So that’s the dye studio. I spent four or five hours setting everything up yesterday and mixing up 20 batches of dye with which to dye my warp, after which (of course) it was too dark to actually dye anything. So I’ve got everything prepped, and as soon as that darn sun comes up, I’ll be out to paint that warp!