dyeing | Tien Chiu's Blog

August 23, 2017 by Tien Chiu

End of a (dyeing) era

Yes, the 1500-skein Procion MX dyeing project is FINALLY at an end! Here are the last 250 skeins hanging up to dry:

Sun Yellow, Fuchsia, Navy Blue dyed skeins hanging up to dry

It took a bit over eight months start to finish, but all the dyeing is finally done. (Many thanks to my friend Kaye, who has been helping out!)

The project, however, is not quite done. My friend Carla is still winding the skeins onto cards – two sets of cards, one for me and one for her, plus two sets of mini-skeins for the other people who offered to split costs. She is making amazingly fast progress – she’ll be finishing up the 1000th skein sometime in the next few days. After that we’ll go on hiatus until I fly out to Maryland to visit family, and can bring the two final sets of skeins for her to work on. (On my last trip, I brought 750 skeins – which meant two large suitcases full of yarn! My family was wondering why I needed two suitcases and a carryon for a three-day trip…)

This reminds me of a poem by the second-greatest sage of the 20th century, aka Shel Silverstein:

Shel Silverstein was one of my best-loved writers as a kid…this poem is from Where the Sidewalk Ends. My copy is more than a little ratty, but then, it’s been read countless times since my mother gave it to me at the tender age of seven. (It was my favorite book for most of my childhood – superseded only by Lord of the Rings, years later.)

And I just found out that more books of his poetry and illustrations were published after his death! I’m so excited – just ordered my copies from Amazon. Yes, his poems are silly, but there’s great wisdom in silliness, too.

And – speaking of wisdom – are you wondering who the greatest sage of the 20th century might be? Why, isn’t it obvious? It’s none other than Mr. Theodor Geisel, who wrote my personal motto:

If you never did, you should!
These things are fun, and fun is good.

– Dr. Seuss, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish

We now end this outburst of poetry and return you to your usual creative-mischief channel. 🙂

July 6, 2017 by Tien Chiu

I can haz ALL the colors!!

It all started so innocently.

After weaving Marvelous Mandelbrot, I decided it would be fun to do more weaving with rayon machine embroidery thread. It’s the perfect size for the weaving I’m currently doing, comes in hundreds of beautiful colors, and I don’t have to dye it, which saves a ton of time and effort. Plus, with standardized colors, I could reuse my woven samples rather than having to do a new set of samples for every piece.

So I went off looking for rayon machine embroidery thread.

I had bought some thread at Jo-Ann Fabrics for Marvelous Mandelbrot, but was horrified at the cost. Eight or nine measly little 1000-yard spools had set me back almost $90! Surely there had to be cheaper sources out there. So I hied myself over to eBay. After a few searches, I found a vendor who had somehow gotten ten thousand (!) 4000-5000 meter spools of Anton Robinson rayon machine embroidery thread, and was selling them in lots of 50, 100, and 220 spools.

I thought, “Aha! This is perfect. Anton Robinson is a good brand of thread, which means I’ll have no problems with quality. The cones are big enough to finish an entire project at least. Plus, I’ll be able to reorder colors if I need to. And it’s only $300 (including shipping) for 220 spools! That’s only $1.50 apiece for 4000-meter spool – way less than what Jo-Ann was charging me.”

So I bought and paid for a 220-spool lot.

A day or two later, it occurred to me to wonder just how much rayon machine embroidery thread I had just bought. 220 mostly full spools of thread – figure 4500 yards per spool – divided by about 18,000 yards per pound – HOLY COW!! Had I just bought fifty-five pounds!! of rayon machine embroidery thread?!?

Well, actually, I hadn’t. When the shipping notification arrived a day or two later, it was for two packages totaling 70 pounds! Allowing for the weight of the box, I had actually purchased about sixty-five pounds of rayon machine embroidery thread.

And here it is, sorted by color:

236 spools of rayon machine embroidery thread!

It was impossible to capture the beautiful colors in a single photo, so here are a few more:

rayon machine embroidery thread - purples and blues — rayon machine embroidery thread – purples and blues

rayon machine embroidery thread - greens — rayon machine embroidery thread – greens

rayon machine embroidery thread - yellows and oranges — rayon machine embroidery thread – yellows and oranges

rayon machine embroidery thread - reds and fuchsias — rayon machine embroidery thread – reds and fuchsias

I wound up with 236 big spools and about 10 small spools. Even though there are many duplicate colors, I’m guessing I have at least 150 colors to work with. Truly, my palette runneth over.

Of course, those are very fine yarns. And since “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing” is my personal motto, I’ll treat you to a few more colors, this time in 20/2 cotton yarn:

250 skeins, from the turquoise-fuchsia-sun yellow dye "cube" — 250 skeins, from the turquoise-fuchsia-sun yellow dye “cube”

These are just 250 skeins from my 1500-skein dye sample project – various mixes of turquoise, magenta, and fuchsia using Procion MX dyes on cotton. I dyed them, my friend Carla wound off the sample cards, and these are the skeins that were left over.

Here’s what they look like organized into color families:

turquoise fuchsia sun yellow dye skeins, arranged by color

This photo is deceptive, though: the skeins are piled three or four deep throughout the photo. So there are a LOT more skeins than are visible in the photo. (Not to mention the 1,250 skeins that are yet to arrive.)

Each skein is about 7-8 grams, which is perfect for weaving small samples for the online color class I’m developing. (More about that in an upcoming blog post.) Plus, colors! I could jump headlong into the pile of colors, roll all over, and not come out all day.

Which is, of course, exactly what someone else did. Here’s Tigress the professional photobomber, enjoying a nice rest atop my beautiful dye samples (and a few swatches woven for my color class). It’s a good thing she’s the most wonderful cat in the world (except of course for Fritz) – otherwise, she’d never get away with everything she does!

June 13, 2017 by Tien Chiu

Happy anniversary to us! (And, the best gift ever!)

Monday was Mike’s and my anniversary – celebrating 7 years of wedded bliss. It’s been eleven years since we got together, and I love him more with each passing day. I’m so happy we met!

To demonstrate one part of why Mike is the best husband ever, the night before our anniversary, he presented me with this:

It’s a cone winder that he made for me. It uses two parts that I bought from a guy in Russia, and is based on some photos of working cone winders that the fellow in Russia sent us, but the actual design and construction comes from Mike’s ingenuity and mechanical skills.

And it is FABULOUS!! It winds skeins onto cones twice as fast as I could do before (I was using a double-ended electric bobbin winder with cone adapters), and creates beautiful, neatly wound cones. No more having loops of yarn flying off the end of a cone! This will massively speed up my dyeing process. And it’s a lot better than anything I could possibly buy. I think it’s the best gift I’ve ever gotten.

(That’s not why I married Mike – I married him because he is kind, generous, trustworthy, creative, funny, and thoroughly lovable (among a host of other reasons!) – but gifts like these are a nice bonus.)

Here are photos of two cones that it wound:

As you see, they’re wound as tightly and neatly as a commercially wound package of yarn. The purple cone is 3300 yards of fine silk; the tan one is 1650 yards. About 10 minutes to wind the tan cone, which is super fast.

I’m backed up on blog posts at the moment, so you’ll get one more tomorrow. The next one will be about a “quickie” I am weaving for a San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles fundraiser – a handwoven image of part of the Mandelbrot set. I wanted to create something that showed off the beauty of mathematics – and this one promises to deliver! Here is the original image (created by Professor Wolfgang Beyer, found on Wikipedia, and used under Creative Commons license):

Part of the Mandelbrot set; image created by Wolfgang Beyer

Some of the detail will be lost in translation, but I think it’ll be beautiful.

Finally, for those who asked about Fritz and Tigress – don’t worry, they are up to their usual antics. Here’s a video that shows Tigress going “undercover” to pounce on Fritz.

May 1, 2017 by Tien Chiu

Another dye cube, and some thoughts on color mixing

I finished the Procion MX Sun Yellow – Mixing Red – Mixing Blue dye “cube” a week or so ago, but only finished photographing it a day or two ago. I found it fascinating to compare this “cube” to the Gold – Mixing Red – Intense Blue cube I finished a few weeks ago – here are some photos and analysis for you.

We’ll start with a photo of the Sun Yellow – Mixing Red and Gold – Mixing Red color combinations (no blue in either mix):

Combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples — Sun Yellow – Mixing Red – Mixing Blue light cube level 0

These were all dyed at the same concentrations. Left to right, the concentrations are 0, 0.06%, 0.12%, 0.25%, and 0.5% DOS in yellow; bottom to top are the same set of concentrations in Mixing Red. There is virtually no difference between the two color combinations except in the bottom row – which is pure Sun Yellow on left and and pure Gold on the right. This is largely because the Gold is a slightly more reddish yellow (like Sun Yellow with a bit of red added), so when the Mixing Red gets into the act, it overwhelms the very slight hue difference between Sun Yellow and Gold, making the combinations look identical. Put another way, the Gold looks a bit like Sun Yellow plus maybe .005% Mixing Red, so when you throw 0.06% Mixing Red into the mix, the 0.005% difference gets obliterated.

Now, let’s see what happens when you add a tiny bit of the two different blues to the two essentially-identical combinations of yellow and blue. This is the same mix of dyes as in the previous photo, except with .06% Mixing Blue added on the left, and .06% Intense Blue on the right.

Here you can see that the Intense Blue (right) is a much weaker mixing color than the Mixing Blue (left) – it has a slightly dulling effect on the bright colors in the first photo, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the impact of the Mixing Blue. The Intense Blue doesn’t even have enough mixing power to turn the Gold at bottom left to green!

Here is the same cube with a little more of the blues: 0.12% Mixing Blue on left, 0.12% Intense Blue on the right.

Again, you can see that the Intense Blue on the right is far weaker than the Mixing Blue on the left. You can also start to see differences in the hue between the Intense Blue-Mixing Red mixes and the Mixing Blue/Mixing Red mixes – the Mixing Blue combinations produce less saturated (duller) colors than the Intense Blue/Mixing Red combinations.

What happens if you compare the dyes at roughly similar combinations of visual strength? Here is 0.12% Mixing Blue on the left, and 0.25% Intense Blue on the right.

You’ll notice that the Intense Blue – even at double the concentration – still isn’t quite as strong as the Mixing Blue, but that it produces a slightly “cooler” set of colors than the Mixing Blue, which has redder undertones.

Here is level 3 – 0.25% of each of the blues:

Now the temperature shift is becoming more obvious, as is the overall brighter (more saturated) colors achieved with the Intense Blue (left). That’s largely because the Intense Blue is a more saturated blue than the Mixing Blue (right). When you mix two colors together you can never get a more saturated shade than the original colors. But it’s also because the Intense Blue is weaker (= less blue to dull down the oranges) and because it has more yellow in it than the Mixing Blue, which means it dulls down the oranges in the middle of the “square” less strongly (they both contain lots of yellow).

Here is the final level of the “light” cube, with 0.5% of each of the blues:

And here are the darker shades. I didn’t have time to set up a comparison of these to the Intense Blue combinations, but adding them for completeness, so you can see the full set of concentrations. Left to right, and top to bottom, the concentrations are 0, 0.5%, 1%, 2%, and 4% DOS for Sun Yellow and Mixing Red. Each level has a single amount of Mixing Blue, indicated in the caption.

Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples - 0% blue — Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples – 0% blue

Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples - 0.5% Mixing blue — Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples – 0.5% Mixing blue

Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples - 1% Mixing blue — Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples – 1% Mixing blue

Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples - 2% Mixing blue — Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples – 2% Mixing blue

Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples - 4% blue — Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples – 4% blue

And that’s it for now!

April 21, 2017 by Tien Chiu

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: