dye samples | Tien Chiu's Blog

February 12, 2017 by Tien Chiu

Huge piles of yarn!

In between threading up my loom, I have been contending with large heaps of yarn. The first pile is this box that appeared on my doorstep a few days ago:

That’s about 30 pounds of black silk yarn – 30/2 and 20/2 weight. I bought some white silk yarn from Eurestex and asked them to dye and cone it for me. Alas, the dyers had a large minimum order, so I had to order a large lot of it. Fortunately it wasn’t that expensive, and I was able to find others to split the cost. About half of it is winging its way to others – I’m keeping the rest to use in my next few shawl warps.

The second pile of yarn is for dye samples. As you may recall, I’m making a large number of dye samples using Procion MX dyes on cotton – 1500 samples, to be exact. I’m using 10-gram skeins of 20/2 cotton, purchased from Testfabrics, for my samples. Each combination of three primary colors requires 250 skeins, so I’ve been doing a LOT of prep work. Each skein is tied in only one place, so I add a second skein tie. Then I put a label on a piece of flagging tape that indicates the color and concentration of the first dyebath, and tie the tape around the skein. For the other two dyebaths, I’m adding a second labeled piece of flagging tape, like this:

Putting together individual skeins doesn’t take long, but multiplying by 1500 skeins? That is a Herculean task.

Here are the first 500-odd skeins:

Fortunately, I’m not alone in tackling this mountain of skeins. My fiber buddy Kaye is helping out (she is of course getting a set of samples for herself). And I have two very able and enthusiastic studio assistants:

Fortunately they are mostly offering moral support. Just imagine the mess if they were truly interested!

January 14, 2017 by Tien Chiu

New Year, new projects

It’s the first month of 2017, and I’m launching three major creative projects for the year. There aren’t any pretty pictures yet, but they are interesting nonetheless.

The first project is an e-book for my Creating Craft business. I surveyed my readers a few months ago, asking “What’s your greatest creative challenge?” To my surprise, the most common response was “Getting the time to create.” So I’m writing an e-book about how to find more time to create, and how to make better use of your creative time. I plan to get the first draft written and out to beta readers by the end of the month, and the completed book ready for sale by mid-February. Watch this space!

The second project is going to be a set of scarves. I’ve wound two 20-yard warps in 60/2 silk (which is a bit finer than sewing thread) and am preparing to thread them up for double weave at 120 ends per inch. Because of the density and the very fine threads, threading is going to be both challenging and slow. I’m hoping to have the warp threaded and ready to weave by the end of February. While I’m threading the warp, I plan to work on a variety of designs – some from iOrnament, some not.

The third project is making approximately 3,200 dye samples – 1,600 in Procion MX fiber-reactive dyes on 20/2 cotton yarn, and 1,600 using the same dyes on silk (using the alkali/cotton method, not the acid/heat wool process). I’m using a method inspired by Carol Sunderland’s “dye cubes,” which allows rapid creation of samples using very few dyebaths. I’ve done a few dyebaths already to test out my process. Here’s a photo of two test batches, one in pale cerulean blue, one in cobalt (“mixing”) blue:

Because my approach involves dyeing lots of 25 skeins and then shuffling them around between multiple dyebaths, it’s critical to keep track of what dye colors have been applied and at what concentration to any given skein. I spent some time thinking through how to do this, and eventually settled on this method:

Each skein goes through three dyebaths. I needed a way to track what dyebath each skein had been in, so I ordered eight colors of flagging tape (a very light plastic tape that is easily torn with the fingers), one for each dye used. I bought some blank labels designed for extreme conditions, and am using them to indicate the concentration of dye. Each time a skein goes into the dyebath, it gets another flagging tape “bracelet” with accompanying label. Because the labels are designed for extreme conditions, they will not come off even when boiled in hot soapy water (yes, I tried!). This color-coding will make it easy to track and label the samples once they’re dyed. Which, with 1,600 samples, is essential.

The Procion MX samples on silk will be done on silk fabric, which is much easier to handle than yarn. (I’m doing the cotton samples on yarn so I can get a palette of yarns with which to weave samples.) Those will be more difficult to label, so I am planning to staple waterproof paper labels to the samples with stainless steel staples.

All these materials are not cheap, but I’ve found three other people to split costs (and some of the labor) with me, which brings the cost down to something affordable.

And that’s it – my three big projects for 2017. It will be interesting to see what happens!

April 22, 2016 by Tien Chiu

Procion MX dye samples

One of the blessings of taking time off is that I can catch up on creative infrastructure projects. These projects provide the foundation for creative work, but are time-consuming and distinctly unglamorous. When I’m working full-time, they compete directly with time in the studio, so I generally don’t do them. But since I have more free time right now, I can tackle some of the bigger infrastructure projects: The studio reorganization, the website facelift, and now…dyeing 1100+ yarn samples to create a huge palette of fiber-reactive dyes on cotton.

Long-time blog readers may recall that, a few years ago, I spent an entire summer dyeing samples of silk using Lanaset acid dyes. This gave me a big color palette for acid dyes on silk. However, I seem to be moving more towards cotton, tencel, and other cellulose yarns, and I don’t have many samples for those colors. So I am starting to dye a palette for cotton, using fiber-reactive dyes. If I complete the full set that I’m envisioning, I should wind up with 1,134 samples. I’m going to use Procion MX dyes – while I prefer Cibacron F fiber-reactive dyes, the manufacturer recently discontinued one of the primary mixing colors, so it’s no longer viable for creating a wide color palette.

What samples am I dyeing? Well, first up is a set of six skeins each of fifteen colors, each at different concentrations of dye. Here is the first set – lemon yellow, fuchsia, and cobalt blue at DOS 0.25%, 0.5%, 1%, 2%, 4%, and 6%. I’m basically doubling the amount of dye between every pair of skeins, except for the last one which is only 1.5x the strength of the previous one.

cobalt blue, lemon yellow, and fuchsia Procion MX sample skeins

I plan to dye 15 colors this way – the “pure” colors that I will mix together for the color samples, plus some premixed colors that I find handy.

After dyeing the single colors, I’m going to reduce the palette to two yellows, three reds, and three blues, and pick a specific concentration of dye to work with. And then I’m going to dye all possible combinations of those three sets, in increments of 10%, starting with two-color combinations and working my way up to all possible combinations of the yellow, red, and blue dyes.

Will I finish all 1,134 samples? Probably not. My plan is to continue until I feel I have a sufficiently large palette. This might take 500 samples, or 800, or the full 1,134. Samples are not cheap, time-wise, so I will stop working when I reach the point of diminishing returns. (Dyeing each set of 18 samples takes about three hours. If you do the math, you’ll see that the full set of samples will take about 190 hours, or about 5 weeks of full-time work. Not for the faint of heart!)

And have I forgotten about the loom in the rush of dye setup? No, I haven’t; I’m now about 2/3 done threading, and I expect to finish next week. I’m also starting to develop weave structures for the “Bipolar Prison” piece. And, finally, I’m continuing to think about what comes next in my life. (Yes, I’m saving time for that, too.)

May 25, 2013 by Tien Chiu

First experiments in surface design

Things have been going more slowly than I’d like, but I’ve finished my first set of experiments in surface design. Here they are!

The first piece is an exercise out of Making Your Mark by Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan. I laid down a thick line of different colors, and used a credit card to scrape and swoosh the colors around, mostly diagonally. I really like the visual texture of this fabric. (The photo is with the dyes still on the fabric; I’ll post more photos after wash-out.)

The second piece is another exercise from Making Your Mark, this time scraping the credit card horizontally. I used three colors – turquoise, yellow, and cobalt blue – and roughly mixed them both with clear print paste (to dilute the color) and with each other before scraping the card across the fabric. It produced a wonderfully interesting marbled effect:

more things you can do with a credit card!

(All these photos are before washout; I’ll post more photos after I wash everything out tonight.)

The third piece is also made with a credit card – a cheap way to exercise your card!

Here I was playing with the edge of the card, making thin lines for an edgy, scratchy effect. I played with the idea of creating a focal point in bottom left, using the fuchsia dye.

Next I got into writing. I did one practice piece to get used to writing with a squeeze bottle:

This was fun – it started out blobby but I gradually got more control.

The next piece came out really interesting. I started by drawing lines, curlicues, triangles in various colors, as you can see at the top of the cloth. But I thought they were really boring and repetitive, so I took a credit card, dipped it in orange dye, and scraped it across the bottom of the cloth. (Later I mixed in a bit of rust brown). I like the resulting fabric much better – it has a moody, textured effect punctuated by the lines.

The next piece was an experiment with brush strokes, also out of Making Your Mark. I snipped up a paint brush to make the bristles ragged and irregular, then drew the brush along the fabric in various lines and colors (golden yellow, scarlet, rust). The result was a beautifully textured piece full of dynamic lines. (The yellow-white section to the right is not part of the piece, but an artifact of the light: the piece was partly in shadow, partly in sun, making photographing it difficult. The entire piece is the rusty orange in the left half.

Next I experimented with paint rollers:

Here I was using three rollers. The first, the golden yellow, was a plain one imprinted with hatch marks by rolling it across a textured surface. The second, the scarlet, was a roller compressed tightly with a piece of string, wound tightly along a diagonal, and produced beautiful wavy lines. The third, rust brown and black, was a smaller roller wound randomly with a piece of string. They produced beautiful textures.

I didn’t especially like this piece, so I made a second one, which I’m not sure I like any better – it’s a bit too regular:

That’s it so far! Friday I experimented with soy wax, mostly unsuccessfully. My tjap (tool for printing with hot wax) turns out to be quite tricky to use, and I expect I’ll have to print many throwaway yards of muslin before getting good prints. I’ve set it aside for now, but may come back to it later this weekend My soy wax crayons turned out to make good rubbings, but I wasn’t thrilled with the results. I did learn to draw in hot wax with a tjanting tool – it’s easier than I expected! – but my attempts at coloring the wax mostly ended in failure. It’s OK; I’m just playing around at the moment, getting to know my tools and materials. I have very few expectations, and certainly don’t expect to make masterpieces – mostly I want to get a sense for what kind of marks each tool makes, and how the dyes behave in thin and thick form. Composition and intentional design come later! For this weekend, I’m only playing.

Today I’m planning to mess around with monoprinting. Monoprinting basically consists of putting dye/paint on a flat surface, creating textured designs on that flat surface, and then laying a length of fabric over the surface to transfer the pattern onto the fabric. It’s a great way to build texture. I plan to do a bunch of monoprinting today, going through a lot of fabric – that will give me a good textured base on which to layer subsequent techniques, like thermofax printing, discharge paste, and various water-soluble resists. I am also seriously tempted to do some fish prints – prints made by painting fabric paint over a fish (yes, an actual fish, from a fish-monger) and then laying cloth over the fish. It’s astonishing how cool this looks – I tried it ten years or so ago, with wonderful results.

Wow! I didn’t feel like I got a lot done in the last two days, but it looks like I did. 🙂

I’ve also sewn up a muslin for the dress, but I need to get Sharon’s help with it – it doesn’t look quite right. Fortunately, she’s coming over tomorrow to play with dyes, so I can (hopefully) pick her brains then.

August 28, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Dyeing the color wheel

I made my first attempt at dyeing the color wheel (using Lanaset dyes) yesterday, and got fairly decent results. I only hit one color “dead on”, but that was more than I had expected! and it was a single shade (turquoise), so not that hard to manage.

Here are the closest-matching yarns, wrapped and set against the color wheel:

first attempt at dyeing color wheel using Lanaset dyes

As you can see, the turquoise is dead on, the red is a hair too blue and too high chroma (intensity of color), the orange is way too yellow and too high value (i.e. too light), and the yellow is too high chroma (intensity of color).

I dyed seven other skeins as well, but they were obviously non-matching, so I didn’t wind them.

Here is a table with some of my initial notes and speculations (click to read the table, it’s too big to fit into the regular blog post). The number/letter sequences are references to the Munsell color notation – see Wikipedia for the details.

notes from first attempt at dyeing color wheel using Lanaset dyes

I am definitely developing a discerning eye for color, though it isn’t easy – the green hue in particular I had to stare at for awhile, because it’s nearly a perfect match but not quite, and figuring out which direction it was “off” took some doing. But it is getting easier with practice.

Today I am going to a weaver’s estate sale, and then spending some time with a friend who’s coming over to visit and do crafty stuff together. I hope to fit some dyeing and weaving time in, though!

« Previous Page