dye samples – Page 3

May 23, 2010 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

A productive and satisfying day

Today began relatively early, even for me. I woke up around 5:08 am when a Small Furry Thing informed me that it was breakfast time. I rolled over and went back to sleep, and woke up again around 5:12 am with the same Small Furry Thing rubbing her head against my hands and explaining how much she loved and adored me, and how much more she would love and adore me if I got up RIGHT NOW to feed her breakfast. I grunted, rolled over, and tried to go back to sleep. Have you ever tried to sleep through a small-but-insistent cat kneading your neck, purring in your ear, rubbing her head against anything you left sticking out from under the covers, and meowing as if her life depended on being fed breakfast IMMEDIATELY?

I should have known better. The cat always wins.

After I fed her breakfast, I started putting yesterday’s dyed sample skeins into strips of posterboard, which is where I store them until Ginny has a chance to wind them. That took about twenty minutes, and resulted in this lovely jumble:

You’re looking at 110 mini-skeins of dyed yarn, all done with acid dyes (mostly Sabraset but also some Washfast Acid dyes). I have 22 more in the dyebath now, plus another 77 (4 batches) that will be done over the next several days. And that, unbelievably, is IT! for the Sabraset samples. There will be a total of 495 samples when I’m done, covering every possible two-way mix of my base colors.

(For the record, my palette is: Sabraset Sun Yellow, Mustard, Scarlet, Deep Red, Royal Blue, Turquoise, Violet, Washfast Acid Magenta, Washfast Acid Golden Yellow, and Polar Red (not a Sabraset dye). )

It turns out that Washfast Acid Golden Yellow is redundant (it’s almost exactly the same shade as 90% Sun Yellow plus 10% Deep Red), and Polar Red and Washfast Magenta are nearly equivalent, so I will probably eliminate Golden Yellow from my palette of “mixing” colors, and select one of Polar Red or Washfast Magenta after doing some light and washfastness tests.

Anyway, after I finished organizing the samples, it was almost dawn, so I went out and set up another round of dye samples. Then I came back in, and started in on the day in earnest. Beamed on about half the blue/gold warp, took two hours of tapestry lessons, went shopping for some miscellaneous stuff with B., put together a small tapestry frame loom, dyed 66 mini-skeins for the Never-Ending Dye Samples, and went out for a one-hour bike ride. Then came home and ate some wonderful shrimp tempura and sweet potato fries that B. made in our new deep-fryer.

And now, off to bed! A Small Furry Thing will no doubt want her breakfast again tomorrow.

May 12, 2010 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

It’s all in the details

Who would have imagined a wedding would have so many loose ends?

Tally for the last few days:

Bought plane tickets for honeymoon
Started wedding registry at Amazon.com (oops, should have done that earlier!)
Arranged for wedding-hairdo flowers (gardenias and small orchids)
Sent out some late invitations
Finished another 22 bookmarks
Bought and reading two guidebooks on Vancouver/Victoria
Asked two people to speak at wedding
Started arranging details of rehearsal, rehearsal dinner, and two dinners preceding wedding

And there’s still a lot to do! Hotel and rental car for the honeymoon, finalizing the wedding ceremony (including writing the wedding vows!), writing the wedding program, tallying RSVPs and following up with people who haven’t yet replied, reading through Vancouver guidebooks, arranging childcare for people who need it…the list goes on and on. Unbelievable.

Fortunately, we do still have a month to the wedding, and it’s not unmanageable – being a project manager by profession, I’m naturally pretty organized. I’m tempted to make up a schedule in Microsoft Project, but I think that would be overkill – so I’m doing a set of checklists for pre-wedding preparation instead. I think that will help avoid drama the week before the wedding.

At any rate, despite the pre-wedding whirlwind, I have not been entirely idle fiber-wise – I finished dyeing another 44 skeins in the last few days, and will do more soon. I’m also starting my study of tapestry on Saturday, with Christine Laffer, a tapestry artist in San Jose. She and I had a preliminary meeting last weekend, and as I suspected, there’s a LOT more to tapestry than was covered (or even hinted at) in the book I was reading. So I’ll be delighted to start working with tapestry.

Meanwhile, I will leave you with another nice photo of my dyed samples:

piles of dyed sample skeins — piles of color!

May 9, 2010 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

Color, lots of color!

I have now done another seven or eight batches of dye samples, producing some GLORIOUS colors. Here is some of the eye candy:

freshly rinsed dye samples, hanging to dry

Believe it or not, I am rapidly nearing the end of the 400 skeins I had wound originally! Fortunately, I already sent off enough yarn to make another 500 skeins or so, and they should be coming back this week. Ginny is also doing a yeoman’s job of winding the skeins onto bobbins, so I’m feeling pretty good about the samples I’m making.

Later, once I have the bobbins back, I intend to study them and try to correlate the results I’m seeing with principles of color mixing, to see if I can predict the result of mixing colors A and B. Karren Brito (in her book Shibori) has a very intriguing passage on the Munsell color system and how she uses it in mixing dyes; I want to mess around with it and see if I can figure out how to mix a given color reliably. I will probably never have to do color-matching, but if I want a lovely bottle green, I’d like to know how to mix it up instead of having to dye a thousand-color palette to find it.

And, the bookmark factory is humming along. Here we are at the 20-bookmark point:

To make things neater, I pull one warp thread right to either side of an eternity knot, which marks the line for cutting later. Then I fuse the coat fabric to the dress fabric using Heat n Bond Ultra Hold, a strong fusible adhesive. This stiffens the fabric some, but as it’s a bookmark, that’s not a problem. After it’s fused, I then cut carefully along the lines of the pulled threads, and cut the bookmark “head” and “tail”. It takes some time, but it’s still a lot quicker than trying to sew them all myself!

B. and I have finally settled the wedding details that were stressing me out: the ceremony structure and our honeymoon location. We now know which friends we will be asking to speak at our wedding – and, we will be honeymooning in…drum roll please….VANCOUVER!

Now I just have to figure out some cool places to visit in Vancouver…if you have an idea, please email me or leave a comment, I’d love to know!

May 3, 2010 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

More dye samples

Ginny, bless her heart, emailed me on Friday letting me know she had nearly finished winding my dye samples onto bobbins. So I went and picked them up today. Beautiful colors – I’ve been working with the blue-purple-magenta range and really like the color blends I’ve been getting. Here’s a photo:

For this round of dye samples, I’m only mixing two colors, in varying proportions, systematically working my way from one color to another in units of 10%. So I start with 100% color 1, then 90% color 1 and 10% color 2, then 80-20 color 1 color 2, and so on until I reach 100% color 2. Eleven samples in all. I’m basically doing all combinations of “pure” Sabraset colors, which will be a total of some 300-ish skeins if I recall correctly. (For some close-to-each-other colors, I’m only doing 6 combinations, jumping by 20% each time.)

After I’m done dyeing, I (or more accurately Ginny) wind a few yards onto a cardboard or plastic bobbin:

This tells me at a glance exactly how to reproduce the color.

Then I file all these samples away in a dye notebook. When I want to select a color, I can just go and flip through my dye notebooks until I find a close match, then figure out how to modify it to get the shade I want. Or, if I’m selecting a palette, I can flip through until I find some shades I like, pull out the bobbins, and lay them next to each other for comparison. Because the bobbins are labeled, I have no trouble figuring out how to put them back afterward.

For a detailed description of how I make my samples, see my dyeing page.

April 24, 2010 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

Eureka!

I spent part of this morning fiddling around with doubleweave drafts, with limited success. Finally, in exasperation, I created this diagram using Photoshop and a screen capture tool:

Doubleweave drafts, illustrating different warp/weft combinations

(Click on the image for the larger version, otherwise it won’t make sense.)

This is doubleweave on a divided parallel threading, as Bonnie Inouye showed me. The advantage of doing it this way is that the tie-up is easier to “read” ““ here both layers are 1/3 twills (but if you actually look at the backside of the cloth, you’ll see a 1/3 twill on one side and a 3/1 twill on the other. That’s because you’re looking at the back of the bottom layer, not the top!)

Anyway, I was staring and staring at the diagram, trying to make sense of it, and finally it dawned on me: the black sections in the tie-up show where the warp is raised. Therefore, if a weft pick occurs on a treadle with all black across one block of warp threads, those warp threads are ALWAYS weaving on top of that weft, and that weft pick therefore must be weaving on the back side. If it occurs on a treadle with all white across one block of warp threads, those warp threads are ALWAYS passing underneath that weft, and so that weft weaves on the top.

I didn’t quite leap naked out of the bath shouting EUREKA!!!! (primarily because I didn’t make my realization in the bathtub! 🙂 ), but I came pretty close.

I still don’t have a deep intuitive grasp of it, but I feel like I’ve made a great first step, both in understanding how to read drafts generally and in learning to design doubleweave. I’m going to play with it a bit more today and tomorrow, creating more diagrams and trying to “think deeply” about it, and then I think I’m going to set up the loom with a doubleweave sample in blocks. I think I will make the blocks 8 shafts each (so four shafts for each layer), which will give me three blocks on 24 shafts. I think that will be more interesting than 6 blocks of 4 shafts each (6 ways of doing plainweave!), but I’m not entirely sure, so I will think about it tomorrow before I start to set up the loom.

Once I understand the basics of doubleweave blocks, I’m going to move over to what Pat was showing me earlier and start designing doubleweave in the liftplan, using Photoshop presets.

Meanwhile, a few snippets on other things:

Dyeing: I’ve been playing around with different color mixes, and think I’ve settled on dyeing most of my samples at 3% weight of goods. This seems a nice compromise between slightly-too-somber at 4% and a somewhat-too-light (to my tastes) at 2%. It looks like a deep jewel tone indoors and a bright saturated color outdoors. So now I’m settling in to dye all my samples.
Invitations! The wedding invitations are back from the printers. They’re perfect. So now I’m making up the guest list, getting addresses, and trying to find a hotel near the ceremony location that I can recommend to out-of-town guests. I hope to send out invitations mid next week.