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May 27, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Broken threads

I’m starting to dye the reeled silk I bought from John Marshall, and am running into the problems I more or less expected.  I’m hand-painting the skeins, batching, and then rinsing very carefully to avoid tangling the skein.  The skeins unwind in an orderly fashion (it helps that I tied each skein in 12 places before dyeing), but the thread is fragile, and difficult to wind off without breaking it in lots of places.  Patient as I am, it’s driving me nuts.

I have been experimenting with different dyeing and unreeling techniques in an effort to reduce tangling.  I want to use fiber-reactive dyes because Cibacron F fiber-reactive dyes has a much brighter color range than Lanaset acid dyes.  The trouble is that soda ash damages silk.  I had (being impatient) been painting the skeins with fiber-reactive dyes and then “batching” in the oven for an hour or two at 180F, but I think that may have made the thread more fragile.  I’m now painting the skeins and letting them “batch” at room temperature for a day, in hopes that this will reduce damage to the silk.  The final step would be to switch to acid dyes – probably Jacquard since I can’t get the colors I want in Lanaset – but I’m putting that off as long as possible, because non-Lanaset acid dyes just don’t have the washfastness I’m looking for.

I am also thinking of trying an immersion dyebath instead of painted skeins – I may try that later today.

I have also switched from my heavy wooden swift to a cheap plastic swift.  The plastic swift is of relatively shoddy manufacture, definitely not as high-quality as the wooden swift – but is much, much lighter and so less inclined to break the yarn.  I have switched from my electric bobbin winder to a (yikes!) hand-cranked cone winder, which goes slower and gives me more time to react to a tangle instead of simply breaking the thread.

All that and it still took me 3 hours to wind on 18.5 grams of thread yesterday, with lots of broken threads and knots.  (Unacceptably many, I think.)  I’m really hoping that the soda ash + high temperature had damaged the thread in these skeins – because if the skeins really are that delicate, I’m not sure how I’m going to unwind successfully.

Fortunately I do have enough skeins to experiment: I bought 1400 grams from John Marshall, which is about 3 pounds, and it comes in 50-gram skeins, so I have 28 skeins to play with.  And I can always buy more – he said he’d bought about 1600 pounds of fine silk yarn, and while it isn’t all the same, I’m sure he has at least a few more kg of the stuff.

But if anyone has tips for unreeling fine thread, let me know!

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Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, dyeing Tagged With: phoenix rising

Previous post: Weaving along
Next post: Dyeing and digging

Comments

  1. terri says

    May 28, 2012 at 3:21 pm

    have you looked at the process of reeling silk from cocoons? once the silk is reeled, it’s wound onto spools, etc. it might work for what you’re doing. here’s one website: http://www.wormspit.com/silkworkindex.htm

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