tie-dye – Page 2

April 21, 2017 by Tien Chiu 6 Comments

Tie-dyed rebel

The last few weeks have been extraordinarily busy but also depressingly lacking in any creative work. The executive director at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles decided to move on to other opportunities, so resigned her position early last week. Since I’m the President of the Board of Directors at the Museum, that means most of my time has been spent dealing with Museum logistics and preparing for the search for a new ED. So, lots of activity, but nothing interesting on the creative front.

Which is why I finally rebelled and decided to do a tie-dye marathon. I spent one entire day tying interesting patterns into twelve garments: eight shirts, two dresses, and two pairs of leggings. Then I soaked them in soda ash and let them sit until they were completely dry. Then I spent another half-day yesterday carefully applying dyes, and washed out the dye today. Here are the results, with commentary.

I’ll start with the attempts at an eight-pointed lotus design:

tie-dyed T-shirt with a fourfold symmetric design — This was an attempt to fold an eight-pointed “lotus flower” design. I was a bit surprised that it actually came out as a square! It’s lovely, though, so I’m not too sad that I failed at the lotus.

Another attempt at an eight-pointed lotus. This one came out as a diamond – go figure! I like it, though I think it’s a little too dark in the center. I wouldn’t normally put a dark design against a fiery background, but I was starting to run out of dye, and the only dyes I had enough of to form a background were yellow and orange. I like the color combination, though!

A third attempt at the lotus. I like the strong design but think the colors are a bit “too much”. This would have looked better in just two or three colors.

Here are two “lotus variants,” one in leggings and one in a dress.

tie-dyed summer dress — This dress features Yet Another Lotus Attempt (are you detecting a theme here?), this time as a very small fiery “star” against a black-and-purple “spider pattern”

Another (very small) lotus attempt on the thighs, plus a starburst further down. I like these – they’ll be very cheerful for doing yoga in the mornings.

I was a bit obsessed with doing lotus/mandala designs. I think I tied them correctly, but I may not have applied the dye in the right patterns to get an eight-pointed design. Next time I will try again! But they are not failures in any sense of the word – I love them!

You’ll be glad to know that I did eventually get bored of tying mandala patterns. Here’s a shirt that I call “Sunset in the Valley”:

tie-dye t-shirt with a sun and hills — Sunset in a valley, as interpreted in tie-dye. I like this one a lot.

And here is a shirt that was folded in half lengthwise, then folded in a spiral design, resulting in two symmetric half-spirals. There is too much black in this shirt for my taste, but I love orange and yellow, so will probably wear it anyway:

And – as a reward for reading all the way down – here are my two very favorite shirts. The first one I’m calling “Galaxy” – it’s a fairly common tie-dye pattern, but I threw in some additional stars and planets to make it more intriguing:

Tie-dyed “galaxy”. This one was time-consuming to fold and tie, mainly because of the many tiny little “stars”.

And here is my favorite of all: a rainbow “spider” pattern. This is created by folding a T-shirt in half lengthwise, then coiling it in a spiral to give a symmetric half-spiral pattern.

Rainbow "spider" tie-dyed T-shirt — Rainbow “spider” tie-dyed T-shirt

Tomorrow and Sunday I’m taking a much-needed rest break from Museum affairs, and going to an intriguing workshop instead. Chris Palmer, the author of the origami-in-cloth book Shadowfolds, is teaching how to combine the origami methods in Shadowfolds with arashi shibori to produce some very interesting and beautiful pieces. Pix when finished, of course!

Finally, because it has been far too long since the cats have graced this page, here are two pictures of the lords of the household:

Fritz eyeing a cat toy, dangled just out of reach.... — Fritz eyeing a cat toy, dangled just out of reach….

And that’s it! More in a day or two, after the workshop is done.

September 26, 2016 by Tien Chiu 5 Comments

A new wardrobe!

I needed some new clothes, so I spent this weekend puttering in the dyepots. I dyed 17 articles of clothing: six T-shirts, four blouses, four button-down shirts, a ruana/poncho, an open jacket, and – shockingly – an actual dress! I haven’t worn a dress (except my wedding dress) in at least twenty years. That’s because the dress code for Silicon Valley engineering departments is jeans-only; I found out very early in my career that anything young, female, and in skirts was immediately dismissed as unimportant.

However, having left high-tech, I decided that it might be fun to experiment with radical wardrobe changes (ooh, cross-dressing!), so I scrunch-dyed this lovely dress in emerald green, cobalt blue, cerulean blue, and a hint of turquoise. I love it! And I may actually wear it. Friends: try not to faint when you see me. 🙂

Here are the nicer T-shirts:

And the light jackets:

"Waterfall jacket" from Dharma Trading Company — “Waterfall jacket” from Dharma Trading Company

And two of the simple blouses. These were meant to provide a boring background for more decorative/dramatic jackets and shawls. I had intended to dye them evenly, but there was a little bit of variation in color. I love it! The slight variation gives them more visual interest than a truly solid color.

And now I have a new wardrobe! Just in time, too – I’m leaving next Monday to go traveling, both on family business and to attend the American Craft Council’s “Present Tense” conference in Omaha, NE.

July 8, 2016 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Tie-dye fireworks for the Fourth of July

B.’s mom has been visiting us for the past week. I found out she’d never done tie-dye! So of course I had to show her. We spent the mornings of July 3 and July 4 tie-dyeing shirts, socks, and a bathrobe (yes, a bathrobe!). I stupidly forgot to take photos of her tie-dyes (which came out beautifully), but I thought I’d share the products of my labor.

I started with fireworks. I was originally envisioning seven stars floating in space, so I scrunched the shirt up into seven spirals, and dyed the spirals orange and yellow and the background cobalt blue. When I untied the shirt, however, I was surprised to discover that instead of stars, I had bursts of fireworks!

Next, also in the theme of tie-dye in outer space, I dyed a starburst. I was actually going after a mandala pattern, so I folded the shirt in eight parts, tied it tightly, and dyed it in rainbow colors. I didn’t get the mandala, but I got a very beautiful starburst:

Going from space to sea, I did a scrunch-dye (basically a low-water immersion tie-dye) shirt in deep ocean colors, which came out very nicely:

And, finally, the bathrobe. My previous bathrobe (also tie-dyed) had become threadbare, and I bought a replacement years ago but never got around to dyeing it. But of course I couldn’t break with tradition and wear a white bathrobe (I’ve been wearing tie-dye bathrobes for almost 30 years), so I’ve been making do with the old bathrobe that entire time. So I jumped at the chance to dye a replacement.

Now, some people prefer light, casual bathrobes, but I personally prefer the formal, floor-length bathrobe, because I often wear it to black-tie occasions and a little black cocktail bathrobe would never do. So I had a huge bathrobe made of luxurious terry-cloth…and dyeing one of those is like trying to dye four or five giant, super-heavy bath towels. And of course towels are made to soak up lots of water.

Nonetheless I was surprised to discover how much dye it took to penetrate the fabric. We poured on dye. Then we poured on more dye. Then we peeked inside the folds, saw tons of virgin white, and added dye again. Repeat, repeat, repeat until at least three quarts of dye had gone into the robe – and there was still plenty of white peeking through.

At this point, I was starting to run out of my chosen colors. So I added several other shades of blue and orange to the mix, squished down the tied robe to help the dye penetrate, said a few prayers to the gods who look over tie-dyes, and left it to batch.

And it came out fabulous!

There’s still a bit more white than I would ideally like, but the colors came out happily exuberant. It will be perfect for those black-tie fundraising balls. (And just as fabulous for lounging about the house in the morning.)

I have, of course, also been busy with developing the business website, and am almost ready for the website launch. It’s looking good! There is a lot I could improve, but the basics are set up. I’m very pleased. Expect the Big Reveal soon!

Finally, the book release is going to be NEXT WEEK!! so I’ve been doing something I have been waiting for for almost four years…planning the launch party! It’s going to be Saturday, July 23. I’m inviting all my friends – in fact, darn near everyone I know – to help me celebrate. I’m trying to think of book-themed activities to make the party more interesting – would love suggestions!

April 8, 2014 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

A busy day in the dyepots

Sunday was a busy day in the dyepots! I dyed eleven shirts and seven pairs of socks:

Of these, my favorite is this one, which reminds me of bougainvillea:

And, of course, what would a tie-dye shirt be without matching socks?

In addition to all that tie-dye, I tested two discharge processes – reduction discharge using Formusol/Rongalite, the active ingredient in Jacquard discharge paste, and a thiourea dioxide immersion bath. I tested each of the two discharge processes on 22 samples covering most of the “pure” colors of Cibacron F and Procion MX fiber-reactive dyes (plus a few mixed colors). I haven’t had time to photograph and write up the results yet, but will post them in the dyeing section of my website later. Hopefully my work will help some other dyer.

I did not, alas, manage to tie-dye the Skybox T-shirt. It turns out that the black dye used does not discharge well with either Formusol or bleach, and only discharges to an ugly medium tan with thiourea dioxide. I still have one discharge method up my sleeve (RIT color remover, aka sodium hydrosulfite), and will try that out this coming weekend. If that isn’t effective, I’ll go back to thiourea dioxide, and overdye with red afterwards- that will likely give me only a dull brick red, but that still might look good. I have three T-shirts to play with, so I’m pretty sure I can cook up something.

April 3, 2014 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

Illumination dyeing

I’ve been enjoying my life of laziness – sleeping in, lounging about, and puttering around at not much of anything. But three days of this is more than enough! Time to get back into the studio.

Well, sort of. I’m still percolating on the color-study warp, and while I’m busily writing chapters of the book, I want something physical to play with, too!

So here is my dyer’s challenge:

This is a T-shirt from work – they handed them out to commemorate the opening of the camera door on our satellite, a momentous occasion known as “First Light”. It’s the moment when you find out whether your carefully-designed, lovingly-built, breathtakingly-launched satellite will actually do what you are hoping/expecting it will. In this case, it was the culmination of four years of hard work from everyone at the company.

Okay, so it’s a momentous occasion. But it’s still a black T-shirt. And I couldn’t possibly be caught dead in anything solid black. At least, not at work, where I’m renowned for wearing tie-dye shirts. (Our CEO is fond of pointing out to visitors that I even have matching tie-dye socks!) So clearly, the gauntlet had been thrown.

But I didn’t have time to take up the challenge in December, being too busy disassembling Emmy, shipping her, reassembling her, weaving a project for Handwoven, judging a show, teaching a workshop, and all those other distracting bits and pieces. So my SkySat-1 First Light T-shirt has been sitting lonely in a closet ever since.

But no more. This weekend I’m going to fix that. I’m armed with all sorts of toys, including discharge paste, bleach, a full range of fiber-reactive dyes, and some newly-purchased vat dyes that I’d love to play with. And, in addition to a couple of First Light T-shirts (I pinched a few extras from the pile of leftovers, just in case my first attempt went wrong), I have a bathrobe, five long-sleeved T-shirts, two short-sleeved T-shirts, three bras, four sweatshirts, and a partridge in a pear tree that also need dyeing. So clearly, it’s time for a dye day.

What am I planning on doing with my First Light T-shirts? I’m not sure yet, but a starburst on the back (centered on the image in the photo above) and a smaller starburst centered on the Skybox logo on front seem like a good start. I plan to try discharge paste and bleach on the hem of one of the T-shirts so I can get an idea of how much color can be removed. And then I think I will try illumination dyeing with vat dyes.

What is illumination dyeing, you ask? It’s a process where you remove one dye while simultaneously adding another. So, instead of black, I’d wind up with the color of the illumination dye. Vat dyes turn out to be great for this because the same process that reduces the vat dye into soluble form also strips color from most dyes. Obviously this is something totally exciting that must be played with. (Because, as the kittens have explained, everything is a cat toy!)

So I’m going to spend the next day or two figuring out what I want to dye when, and experimenting with different methods of discharge. And then I’ll spend all weekend dyeing, discharging, and re-dyeing.

Meanwhile, several people have asked how effective a guard kitten could possibly be. Here’s Fritz to show you how he protects my laundry, as he bravely drives off an attacker, the Evil Hair Monster, with teeth and claws. Bravo, Fritz!