dyeing – Page 2

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!

March 21, 2021 by Tien Chiu

Decluttering

The last several days have been a frenzy of nesting activity. Three days ago (Thursday) I found a gardening service to tame the overgrowth in the much-neglected back yard. They took out the fabric pots, hacked out the weeds, and left me with a clean slate:

Our back yard, after the gardening service cleared out the weeds

It’s barer than it was in the past; our passion fruit vine died for no apparent reason earlier this year (we’re still discussing where to replant a replacement), and we took out the four peach trees because we weren’t happy with the flavor of the peaches. We’re still discussing what and whether to replant in their place. There will be more greenery come summer, though. The persimmon trees and the grape vines simply haven’t leafed out yet.

At any rate, the wild undergrowth and the weeds are gone. The lemon tree has some flowers, though, so the hummingbirds and honey bees are hovering and zipping happily about. I have started a few tomato plants (“few,” in Tien terms, meaning about fifteen to twenty – that is very restrained for a Tien!) but I think I will otherwise let the garden lie fallow this year. I have been hard-pressed to keep up with the garden over the last few years, and lately it’s been coming down to a choice between gardening and other creative pursuits. Last year I did almost no weaving or (personal) blogging. This year I’m trying to declutter my life to open some space for the creative work I value, and have done way too little of in the last few years.

Decluttering has been the big theme for the last three days, in fact. Friday I went through all the kitchen cabinets and got rid of the accumulated detritus of the last few years. There is something wonderfully freeing about finally discarding that half-empty bottle of rice vinegar that your wife brought as dowry when she shacked up with you fifteen years ago and which has not been used since. Plus, what on earth were we doing with four containers of baking powder, three jars of molasses, two bottles of liquid smoke, and a partridge in the kitchen cupboards?? (I’ve never even contemplated planting a pear tree!!)

Saturday I continued my purge, rolling into the dining room, which was suffering badly from “Well, we’re not sure where to put it, so let’s put it in the dining room” syndrome. A ton of junk went into the trash, more got given away.

Jamie also helped me put together my new dye table. My dye studio is my back patio – since I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the weather is pretty warm year-round, it never freezes, and it rains only in the winter, infrequently, this works pretty well. But I had been dyeing on a ratty old wooden table with some six-foot boards laid across it, which was a pain to work with. One of the goals of the backyard cleanup was to get rid of the ratty old table and replace it with a stainless steel restaurant food prep table that I could use for dyeing.

Which we did. I don’t have pictures of it just yet because we didn’t quite finish it today – we got it assembled and stood upright, but I haven’t yet removed the protective plastic wrapper or set it up with the plastic bins that I’ll be using it with. But it’s gorgeous – a 30″ wide, 72″ long stainless steel table with two stainless steel shelves underneath. The bottom one is the perfect height to store two 5-gallon buckets stacked one atop the other, or larger stacks of 2-gallon or smaller buckets. The top one is great for smaller boxes holding spoons, syringes, scales, mixing cups, etc. for dyeing. I can’t wait to use it!

Tomorrow’s plan is to finish reorganizing the kitchen and dining room and scrub down everything for the dye “studio”. And then – dive in and actually use the new dye table to dye the next warps for Grace and Maryam! So looking forward to the inaugural dye job.

Stay tuned! (Lots of pictures tomorrow, I promise!)

May 2, 2020 by Tien Chiu

Searching for a theme

Time passes, and I’ve now dyed the sample warp. Here’s a not-great photo of it in the raddle, getting ready to be beamed onto the loom:

Sample warp being prepared for beaming onto the loom — New warp preparing to be beamed on

The warp is actually brighter-colored in real life, particularly the fuchsia-and-green one; it’s closer to orchid purple and moss green, very beautiful.

The warp is going onto Maryam, not onto a table loom. I had been debating this for most of a week. It really makes more sense to sample on Maryam, who has the same patterning capabilities as Grace, only with a lot less effort in putting on a warp (880 threads instead of 2,640). I was just feeling guilty about cutting off the 10 yards of warp still on Maryam, and feeling guilty about using Maryam for samples for an art piece when I had originally purchased her with the intent of using her for color samples.

Then some friends (thanks, Kaye and Sand!) pointed out that the 10 yard warp had been sitting there for months because I wasn’t enthused about weaving it, and that it made more sense to put on a warp that I would actually weave than one that would just sit there for another couple months. Also that I had no particular use for those color samples, and if I wasn’t enthused about them and had no particular use for them, why were they tying up my loom?

Point made. Off comes that warp. I got a nice pair of Kai scissors (best I’ve ever used!) recently, and they come out today.

That, of course, means that I have to figure out what to weave on that warp. I confess that I have no idea what I’m going to do with it yet, I just like the colors. But I need to choose some patterning (and some weft colors!) soon. Abstract swirls? Feather patterns? A traditional weaving draft but in nontraditional curlicues between pink/green and dark green? The possibilities are so endless that I’m feeling baffled. Suggestions welcome!

Since I’m at a total loss right now, I’m thinking it would be good to start with a theme, or maybe a title for the piece.

“Orchids and Moss”? “Bougainvillea Boogie”? ” “Jungle Birds”?

Or maybe I need to start with interesting patterning ideas and develop a title from there.

Your thoughts?

April 19, 2020 by Tien Chiu

More painted-warp cape dye samples

I’ve now done a few more sets of yarn samples for the painted-warp cape, testing out a few more dye approaches for the double weave warps. I started by trying the fuchsia/orange/yellow and deep indigo blue idea, dyeing these three skeins:

Three skeins of yarn, dyed in fuchsia/gold, fuchsia/orange/gold, and navy or indigo blue. — Fuchsia and Gold, Fuchsia/Orange/Gold, and Deep Navy skeins

The top skein is dyed using Fuchsia and Golden Yellow MX fiber-reactive dyes; the middle skein is dyed using Fuchsia, Soft Orange, and Golden Yellow. The bottom skein is dyed using Strong Navy. (All names are Dharma Trading Company (Procion) MX fiber-reactive dye names.)

What’s interesting about the top two skeins, if you look closely, is that Fuchsia and Golden Yellow strike about equally well on cotton and silk – there’s no difference in darkness in the threads in the top skein, which is only Fuchsia and Golden Yellow. But in the middle skein, which contains Orange as well, there is a noticeable difference in the areas that are orange – the strands of silk yarn (the shinier strands) are lighter, suggesting that the orange dye either absorbs or binds preferentially to the cotton yarn.

You can view this differential dyeing as either a fault or a positive trait. Or both. I happen to like it in the fuchsia/golden yellow/orange skein, and in the dark blue skein below it (where the silk strands are noticeably lighter than the cotton strands). However, it’s dreadfully inconvenient in this green sample, where I wanted different intensities of a single shade of forest green:

Green skein showing differential dyeing - some yellow and some blue-green areas

As you can see, I wound up with strands of pale yellow-green and bluish moss green instead, because the yellow and blue component dyes struck differently on the silk and cotton. (There’s no such thing as a “pure” green dye, alas.) The result is a gorgeous skein of yarn – that is not at all what I wanted.

I solved the green dye problem by doing what Ian and Teresa (and perhaps a few other people) recommended a few blog posts ago, and overdyeing. I dyed the top skein in the photo below variegated dark blue two blog posts ago; now I’ve overdyed it with gold. Now it’s a lovely dark forest green, with some subtle variation in color – but not nearly as much as the skein below, which was simply painted with green (blue + yellow) dyes in a single pass.

dark green skein on top, variegated yellow and medium green skein on bottom

Of course, neither skein is “right” or “wrong”; they’re both attractive color combinations, and both could create beautiful projects. However, the top skein is much closer to the effect I’m looking for, so I will paint one warp blue and then overdye it to get mottled forest green.

And the second warp?

I was not really happy with the combination of fuchsia/orange/yellow and dark blue. I’ve been working with that color combination for quite some time, and this time it didn’t “sing” to me.

Fortunately, I had decided to try another skein of fuchsia and green, this time using Golden Yellow instead of Sun Yellow. This was for technical reasons. Sun Yellow is a weak mixing color, meaning that it takes a LOT of Sun Yellow to shift either red or blue noticeably from its original color. So here’s the first skein, where green + fuchsia produced purple:

One of the things that happened (I think) was that the Sun Yellow simply got overpowered by the blue and the fuchsia dyes, resulting in purple and fuchsia. Golden Yellow is a MUCH stronger mixing color, and better able to hold its own against other colors.

Anyway, the next skein came out beautifully. Here it is, with the first skein (the one that produced fuchsia + purple) below it, for reference:

two fuchsia-and-green skeins, dyed differently

The first skein has much more subtle color variation, and much less dramatic differences between the threads. It looks much more unified than the other skein.

I think that’s because I applied just enough blue dye that – in the darker threads – the blue dye is the same darkness as the pink threads. I’m not going to go into all the color theory, but keeping the colors similar in darkness means they will blend together visually.

At any rate – I had eyeballed the dye mix for that particular sample, so the next step was to mix up dyes for another set of skeins using much more rigorous (aka, reproducible) measurements. Out came the digital scale and the measuring syringes. And here are the two final samples:

third set of fuchsia and green sample skeins

The top sample uses about 1/3 more blue than the bottom sample, so produces a cooler green. (The bottom skein looks more yellow on my screen than it does in real life; the top skein looks bluer than it ought. I could write reams about color inaccuracy in digital photos, but perhaps another time….)

I like the bottom sample better, so will be using that ratio of dyes.

The next step will be to test what my dye application method does on an actual warp. To dye the skein, I simply spread the skein out, dabbed bits of green dye on it, filled in the undyed areas with pink dye, flipped it over, and did the same on the other side. This produced what appeared to be unified areas of color. BUT – I don’t know whether those areas would continue to look unified if the dots and dabs were put into a warp. How would the threads rearrange themselves? How big would the areas of color be? What would it look like once woven?

Interesting questions. I don’t know, and I would like to know before dyeing, beaming, and tying on a monster 2,640-thread warp (20 yards long!).

Since Maryam is tied up with a different project, I’m arranging to borrow my friend Alfred’s Louet Jane table loom, so I can wind, dye, and put on a short warp, weave a little bit, and see what happens.

Stay tuned….

« Previous Page