dyeing | Tien Chiu's Blog

February 19, 2024 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Fire in the rain

Well, the velvet attempt was a bit of a disaster. I’m still determined to weave velvet, but I’ve realized that debugging the process and solving all the problems is likely to take months. More on that in a future blog post. (I haven’t given up, just contemplating my next move.)

Since I would really like to have a finished project – any project! – someday, I’ve decided to warp up the left side of Grace. I was initially thinking about a black and white warp, which is what most people put onto a jacquard loom because of its versatility. However, black and white is booooooring. (I also almost never use white in my designs.) So I decided to create another “fire” warp instead.

Here’s the one I cut off Maryam when I sold her:

warp dyed in many shades of orange, yellow, and red

It’s a mix of different fibers and yarn sizes. Here’s how that warp looked, before dyeing:

warp prior to dyeing, showing the different types of yarn in the warp

I think that warp was a mix of mercerized cotton, silk, and unmercerized cotton. The fibers took the dye differently, producing the gorgeous variegation shown above.

This new warp is a different mix. It’s one strand of 10/2 tencel, one strand of mercerized 10/2 cotton, one strand of a 4/28 nm cabled silk, and one strand of 20/2 silk. They should absorb dyes differently, and also reflect light differently – some are very lustrous, others are not. It should be interesting!

Here’s the warp halfway through winding:

partially wound warp on a large warping mill

I wound the entire 29″ warp in a single bout. I know you’re not supposed to do this, but with painted warps, winding multiple bouts usually results in abrupt color shifts in the middle of the warp. There are ways to make that less noticeable, but for me, it’s easier just to wind a super-wide warp, dye it, and then separate it out into smaller sections when warping.

(I can get away with winding a very wide warp because I’ve got a large warping mill. I think this approach would not work nearly as well on a warping board.)

Now to the rain part. It’s been pouring about half the time, which is fantastic because this is California and we (always) desperately need rain. But my dye studio is on the patio, and, well, it’s raining for the next four days. (Hurray! Boo! Hurray!)

Fortunately, we have a table that sits under an underhang, and stays dry. So I sneaked out during a lull in the rain and did a little dyeing:

It looks like a solid color in the photo, but once it’s rinsed and dried, it should be all shades of fire. (Crossing fingers that this actually happens – dyeing always entails some randomness.)

I used 1.75 gallons (really!) of golden yellow to start, pouring it over the warp and squishing to soak the entire warp in yellow. (I really didn’t want white spots.) Then I drizzled 2 quarts of orange and red-orange over it, flipped it over, and squirted more orange/red on the yellow spots. My goal was a mostly orange warp with some areas of red-orange and a few areas of gold.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll start rinsing out the warp. I think it will work great for my AI-generated tiger, so I’m going to spend the next week or two working a bit more on the design. In particular, I want to think about how I want to render the circuitry – whether to weave it in metallic yarns, embroider it, couch real circuit boards down, or (this sounds exciting) use the retro-reflective yarns I bought ages ago to create brilliantly reflective areas.

(Retro-reflective yarn, in case you’re wondering, is a plastic yarn that’s been coated with the same glass beads that are used for high-visibility/reflective clothing. It looks flat gray until you shine a light directly at it, at which point it turns brilliantly white with reflected light.)

In case you’d forgotten, here’s the tiger I plan to weave:

The left part of the tiger will use the Fire warp, and the right side will use mostly the black warp, I think.

Can’t wait to see how this all turns out!

December 19, 2023 by Tien Chiu 5 Comments

Setbacks in the search for velvet

I finally gave up rinsing, though I got enough of the blue out that the rinse water was only tinted. Then I beamed the warp onto the loom:

The trick of “crocheting” around the warp before dyeing seems to have helped. Despite a zillion rinses, the warp went on smoothly with a minimum of tangling and very few loose threads. Much better than other painted warps I’ve done before.

The warp is not perfect. As you can see in the photo, there are some undyed white bits where the warp stuck together and didn’t take the dye. They’re sprinkled throughout the warp, a few here and there, just enough to be truly irritating (and ruin perfection).

I’m pretty sure that the problem was too short a presoak, and/or not scouring (washing) the yarn prior to dyeing. I dumped it straight into a soda ash solution and painted it twelve hours later; the yarn clumped together and never got entirely wet. Because it was still dry in places, the dye didn’t absorb properly despite my best efforts. I should have known better; that’s what comes of rushing.

Now, the choice: leave the flawed warp on, or spend another week winding and dyeing a replacement?

If I were to weave this warp off, I’d have to either fix or cover up any white bits while weaving, which would be time-consuming and produce a less-than-perfect result.

If I were to discard it, I’d lose a week’s work and all the trouble that went into winding, dyeing, and endless rinsing. Plus the effort of putting the warp onto the loom!

Regret over lost time and effort, however, is not the best way to make decisions. Economists call this the “sunk-cost fallacy,” and it generally leads to throwing good resources (time, energy, money) after bad. We develop attachment to anything we’ve spent a lot of time and energy on, so often we waste MORE time and energy trying to “rescue” a failing project when walking away and starting over would make much more sense.

This applies to many things beyond weaving projects. For example, someone who got a law degree but then realized they hate practicing law, might feel they “ought” to stay in law because they spent a lot of time and effort getting that degree. And then spend the next 10-15 years as a lawyer, hating their job. Better to get out as soon as possible, so you aren’t suffering for more years or decades because you made a wrong decision earlier.

Seth Godin has an excellent method for overcoming the sunk-cost fallacy. Instead of thinking about the time and effort you’ve already put in, think of whatever you have now as a gift, freely given, from your past self. You can accept that gift…or say “Thank you, it’s not for me.”

So. Past Self gave me (thank you!) a warp that is dyed and on the loom, but which has flaws. Do I keep the gift, and spend another 200 hours working with it? Or do I politely decline, and start over?

I spent a couple days mulling this and decided to start over. The amount of time I’d spend twiddling with fixes is far greater than the cost of creating a new warp. I politely thanked Past Self for the gift, though. It was thoughtful of her to get the process started, even if her gift isn’t what I need right now.

So the new warp is wound, PROPERLY dyed, and in the rinse cycle. Hopefully the cycle won’t be endless this time!

Meanwhile, I have finished rinsing another warp. This one is destined to be samples (in many different colorways) for a class about painted warps. It’s 17 yards long, so that is a lot of weaving to do!

On the powerlifting front, some major successes. I’m testing my 1RMs this week. The 1RM is short for “one-rep max,” which is the most weight you can lift, just once. In August, my squat 1RM was 300 pounds. Today, I lifted 310! That is ten pounds of progress in just four months – that is amazing for someone who’s been lifting as long as I have. I LOVE my coach!

I had to fight like heck for this one, though. You can actually hear me say “nope” about halfway through to signal my spotters that I was not going to be able to lift it. Of course, as soon as I did, the weight FINALLY started moving. I’m glad they didn’t believe me!

310 pounds, of course, is 1,240 weasels, for those who remember my first powerlifting post in 2018. I was measuring weights in Standard Weasels (aka four ounces), and my long-term goal was just 700 weasels.

And now? The USPA national record for my age/weight class is only 325 pounds (1,300 weasels). I’d need to beat it by at least 5 pounds to set a new record, so my goal is 330 pounds, or 1,320 weasels.

By Keven Law (originally posted to Flickr as On the lookout...) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons — photo by Keven Law

December 7, 2023 by Tien Chiu 8 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 5 Comments

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 C., 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 C..

March 31, 2021 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

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, C. 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. C. 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!