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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
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
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!

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Dye days of August

I spent virtually the entire weekend working with Cibacron F fiber-reactive dyes on silk, dyeing all the “pure” colors at four intensities.  Since it takes 2-2.5 hours to do a single dyebath, and I could only do three colors at a time, this meant a LONG time over the dyepots.  But I am nearly done!  Only one color left, and I am waiting for instructions on it, so it will probably be another day or two before I dye it.

Here is a photo of the (very meager-looking) fruits of my labors:

Cibacron F / Sabracron F "pure" colors, dyed in different intensities
Cibacron F / Sabracron F "pure" colors, dyed in different intensities

Doesn’t look like much, does it?  But it will be positively invaluable when it comes time to mix the colors.

Here is a photo of a single set for one color:

four intensities of Cibacron F / Sabracron F dye on silk
four intensities of Cibacron F / Sabracron F dye on silk

These are dyed (on Karren’s recommendation) at 4%, 2%, 1%, and 0.25% DOS (depth of shade), meaning the amount of dye is 4%,  2%, etc. the weight of the fiber.  As you can see, 4% produces an intensely saturated color, while 0.25% produces pastels.

A word about the handles.  They are the temporary wristbands that you see at athletic events, made of Tyvek and hence resistant to both heat and dye.  (Google “Tyvek event wristband” and you’ll find them.)  They’re cheap, make a convenient handle, and you can write on them!  So I weigh the skeins, put a Tyvek “handle” on them, write the weight of the skein on the handle, and then scour/soak them.  Later, once the skein comes out of the dyebath, I write the name of the dye and the DOS on the handle with a ball-point pen.  (I could write it before dyeing it – which would be better for obvious reasons – but I would need to use a permanent marker.  However, it’s usually not that hard to tell the different intensities and colors apart.  When I start doing samples for color-matching, I will probably write the information on the handles before dyeing.)

The Tyvek bands will stand up to about 180 Fahrenheit before the glue melts, so you can easily do a dyebath with them.  Don’t boil it, though!

I’ve been discovering some interesting things about Cibacron F (fiber-reactive) vs. Lanaset (acid dye) along the way.  Cibacron F has remarkably high-chroma (“bright”) colors compared to Lanaset – some of the Cibacron F colors are practically “dayglo” bright.  Lanaset is more muted by comparison.

Cibacron F (and fiber-reactives generally, I think) is also more of a pain to dye.  From my point of view, this is because the dye, salt, and soda ash all need to be added separately.  So the Cibacron F process looks like this:

  • 0 minutes: add dye, water, and skeins to dyebath.  Keep dyebath at 60C throughout.
  • 15 minutes: add salt, circulate skeins around for more even dyeing
  • 30 minutes: circulate skeins
  • 45 minutes: add soda ash, circulate skeins
  • 60 minutes: circulate skeins
  • 75 minutes: circulate skeins
  • 90 minutes: remove skeins from dyebath, rinse/soak for 10 minutes in very hot tap water
  • 100 minutes: neutralize skeins in very hot tap water + a little vinegar for 5-10 minutes
  • 110 minutes: simmer skeins at 80-85C in hot soapy water
  • 120 minutes: rinse skeins with a final vinegar dyebath (because this is silk and you want the pH at the end to be slightly acidic)
  • 125 minutes: rinse skeins in a final hot water rinse

(These are an adaptation of the Ciba instructions on how to do the dyebath, incidentally, courtesy of Karren Brito (our study group leader) who was kind enough to share them with us.)

This doesn’t actually sound too awful until you realize that I’m dyeing twelve skeins at once, and that each item added needs to be carefully measured down to the 1/10 of a milliliter (which is about two or three drops).  Because Cibacron F is a fiber-reactive dye and hence reacts with water, the amount of water in the dyebath is an important factor.  So I have tables and tables (spreadsheet-generated) of how many milliliters of water, salt solution, and soda ash solution to use for which weight of skein.  This makes the entire process very fussy, and the only reason I’m putting up with it is the beautiful clear colors.

By way of contrast, here is the Lanaset dye process:

  • 0 minutes: add skeins to dyebath (carefully pH balanced to 5.0 using acetic acid (vinegar) and sodium acetate, plus 2 g/L of Glauber’s salt as a leveling agent).  Temperature 40 C.
  • 10 minutes: remove skeins, add dye to dyebath, put skeins back in dyebath  and circulate skeins for more even dyeing.  Maintain temperature at 40 C.
  • 20 minutes: circulate skeins, increase temperature to 50 C.
  • 30 minutes: circulate skeins, increase temperature to 60 C.
  • 40 minutes: circulate skeins, increase temperature to 85 C.
  • 50 minutes: circulate skeins.
  • 60 minutes: remove from dyepot and rinse once or twice with warm tap water.

As you can see, it’s a much shorter process!  (I should add that I have modified it somewhat from the recommended process, which has a “hold” time of 45 minutes at 85C instead of 20 minutes.  This is the result of some experimentation – I won’t bore you with the details, but basically I leave out one leveling agent because it doesn’t seem to work with my water, and that means the dye strikes faster.)

Anyway, that is probably far more information than you wanted to know about acid and fiber-reactive dyeing, but it is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to everything I have learned in this study group!  I hope Karren decides to offer it as a regular class, because it has been incredibly educational for me.  I had worked a lot with both fiber-reactive and acid dyes before this study group, but never had access to the detailed information that Karren has been giving us, or tried the kind of rigorous measurement that Karren has us doing.  It’s a wonderful study group.

If you are interested in more detailed information on my dye process, drop me a line (my email is in the “About Me” section of my website) or leave me a comment, and I’ll be happy to share.  The only reason I’m not including it here is that it is really too long to detail entirely in a blog post!

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Done dyeing

Amazingly enough, I finished all my dye work yesterday – except the Mustard Yellow samples which I finished this morning – so I am done with dyeing for now.  The sample skeins will go to my friend Ginny (who, with amazing generosity, offered to wind them onto cards for me in exchange for the “leftovers” from each skein), and hopefully she should have them wound by end of next weekend.  Until I get them back, however, I won’t be able to make any more progress on my Lanaset dye samples, so I’ll be focusing on weaving.  I have determined my threading (basically a point draw in double two-tie, with three narrow stripes of single two-tie blocks between the bottoms of each point) and will work on threading it up over the next few days.  I should be able to finish by Thursday, best guess, and then will be able to start weaving.

The 30/2 tencel-silk blend dyed beautifully – except for the dark brown, which came out both paler and cooler than I had wanted – and I will be winding it up over the next few days.  I may purchase a rheostat to go with the foot controller for my AVL double ended bobbin winder – I want to control the max speed with something more consistent than foot pressure, and the foot pedal isn’t set up to take a wedge (my first idea).  The replacement motor for my skein winder may be arriving soon, too, which would let me wind more skeins for dyeing.

I am also considering starting up a second set of dye study group samples, this time for Cibacron F (fiber-reactive) dye on silk.  It has occurred to me that if it takes Ginny a week to wind each set of skeins for me, I can occupy the intervening time with dyeing samples for the “other” type of dye.  I also badly want a color-matching sample set for Cibacron F, because it has some lovely fuchsias that I would otherwise have to use Polar Red to get.  Polar Red is an acid dye, but it is so much less washfast than the Lanaset dyes that I’d rather go to fiber-reactive.  Each dye has a different palette of colors available…and I would love to have the Cibacron “arrow” in my quiver!

The only downside is that Cibacron F, like most fiber-reactive dyes, takes much more work to wash out than the acid dyes.  In fact, if you are after reproducible color, you have to spend an extra 45 minutes post-dye-session to wash out the skeins – first rinsing them in hot water, then neutralizing the alkali with vinegar, then boiling with soap, and then rinsing in hot water again.  It makes me tired just thinking about it!  And because it takes so much longer, I may not be able to do my dyebaths in the morning.  (Typically I get up around 5:30-6am, and as soon as it gets light out (around 6:30am), I sneak outside and do some dyeing.  With acid dyes, this takes about 90 minutes and I’m done in plenty of time to get to work.  But with Cibacron F, where the whole dyeing/wash-out takes well over two hours, the timing will be much tighter.)

So I will also do a few trials over the next few days to see whether Cibacron F dyeing will fit into my schedule.

Plan for the next few days: do some Cibacron F dyeing, thread up loom, draft more designs to play with/weave!

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The dyeing begins!

Dyeing has now begun in earnest for my dye study group.  I’ve finished my process testing, dyeing three samples three times each to make sure that I can get reproducible color.  Here are one set of sample skeins from the process tests.  Each was dyed in a different dyebath at a different time, but using  the same methods:

Dye study group, process testing samples
Look Ma, reproducible color!

As you can see, the colors are identical (at least, I can’t tell the difference).  The lighting in this photo is unfortunately from the side, so the rightmost skein looks paler than the leftmost one, but “in the flesh” they are identical.

So I have a dyeing method that gets me reproducible color.  Yay!

Next on the agenda is dyeing samples for each of the “pure” colors, i.e. dye colors that are not a mix of other colors.  (Dye houses frequently mix together “pure” colors to produce a greater variety of shades to sell, but since those mixes are proprietary, they can (and sometimes do) change their formulas, making the mixed colors not as good for color mixing.)  I did Sun Yellow, Royal Blue, and Deep Red yesterday morning, and wound the cards for Sun Yellow and most of Royal Blue last night:

Yellow and blue samples for Munsell color matching dye study group
Yellow and blue samples for Munsell color matching dye study group

The numbers on the bottom are the Munsell color codes for that particular card.  The first indicates the hue – the “color”.  The second indicates the value – roughly, how light or dark the color is.  Higher values are lighter, lower values are darker.  The third indicates the chroma – roughly, how bright/intense/saturated the color is (high chroma = more saturated color).

Karren Brito, who is teaching the study group, is having us determine the Munsell number for samples because that gives us a permanent record of the color of a freshly dyed sample.  Dyed samples deteriorate over time, gradually fading away (faster if exposed to light).  So old samples are not reliable determinations of color.  But the Munsell number is absolute – it doesn’t change over time.  So I can look at the Munsell number twenty years from now and still know what color the sample was originally.

One thing that is interesting to me is that, in addition to the expected changes in value and chroma (more dye = more intense, darker color), there is also a shift in hue.  It’s hard to see, but the yellow, especially the far left sample, is a little greener as you decrease the amount of dye, and a little more orangey as you get to the 2.5% sample, which is the highest concentration of dye that I sampled.  And the blue gets a trifle greener, though it’s so faint you can barely tell.  I need to compare against the Munsell color notation of the substrate (yarn I’m dyeing) to see if that is the influence of the substrate or an actual difference, though Karren also says that a hue shift is more-or-less expected when doing different concentrations of dye.

I’m really enjoying this dye study group – it’s opening my eyes to a totally different world of color, and teaching me how to dye to get precise, repeatable results.  Definitely different from a weekend workshop!  I have been thinking more about colors, hue, chroma, and value, like never before.

I am still thinking about what to do with this warp on the loom.  I have read up enough about overshot that I don’t think it is the most effective way to get pattern on a lots-of-shafts loom; it seems primarily to be a way to squeeze four blocks out of four shafts, and the requirement for blocks to be in twill order really restricts what can be done  on a multi-multi-shaft loom.  I would need to examine it more closely to understand the block structure, but that’s what I’ve been getting out of my reading so far.

So now I am examining other possibilities.  Lampas and taquete both sound intriguing, and I have been reading up on them in The Woven Pixel and in my collection of Weaver’s and Prairie Wool Companion.  I have a complete collection of Weaver’s and PWC, acquired by scouring the Internet for many months, and it is a treasure trove of information.  The Woven Pixel, of course, has information on how to construct the presets and convert a drawing to a liftplan, in addition to some information on the structure.  And I am intrigued by Lillian Whipple’s kimono draft in Complex Weavers’ Greatest Hits – I’ve seen the kimono pattern in person and it is exquisite.  I think I could create some nice imagery that way.

But that, of course, requires a great deal more reading to understand the structure and be able to design/weave it off, so I am studying that as well.  I’m pleased, though – I’m finding that I’m able to read and understand these articles (albeit with intense study) – a year ago, they would have been over my head!

Off to work!

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Waffling

By dint of hard labor (4 hours on Friday and another 6 hours on Saturday), I got the warp threaded, sleyed, tied on, debugged, and (ta-daa!) wove the first two yards of samples yesterday, all in variants of waffle weave.  I cut the sample in half and wet-finished half of it, though I didn’t press it since I was after a collapse effect.

Here’s what I got:

Plain weave with white 60/2 silk weft, beaten firmly. Warp is black 60/2 silk sett at 40 epi.
Plain weave with white 60/2 silk weft, beaten firmly. Warp is black 60/2 silk sett at 40 epi.

You can see that there is (as expected) close to no collapse here.  I think the sample looks darker because the warp and weft collapse into one another a bit, “averaging out” the color.  It’s a pity, as I really loved the silvery look of the freshly woven fabric.  Pressing might also help; I need to try that later.

Next up, waffle weave, both as an allover pattern and as a networked pattern, also with firmly beaten 60/2 silk as weft:

Waffle weave, networked and allover pattern, with white 60/2 silk weft, beaten firmly. Warp is black 60/2 silk sett at 40 epi.
Waffle weave, networked and allover pattern, with white 60/2 silk weft, beaten firmly. Warp is black 60/2 silk sett at 40 epi.

Here you can see more collapse, but not as much as I had hoped; I was hoping for a really puffy look, but what I got was a bit of unevenness.  I suppose that’s to be expected as the waffle cells were not huge and there is still quite a bit of plain weave.  Notice that the sample is getting narrower, too, because of the collapse.  Especially in the “pure” waffle weave section.

Next, I tried weaving it with an overtwist wool yarn that I got from Laura Fry.  First, I beat it firmly:

Plain weave and waffle weave, networked and allover pattern, with white overtwisted wool weft, beaten firmly. Warp is black 60/2 silk sett at 40 epi.
Plain weave and waffle weave, networked and allover pattern, with white overtwisted wool weft, beaten firmly. Warp is black 60/2 silk sett at 40 epi.

The collapse is fairly dramatic and even the plain weave sections are collapsing substantially, suggesting that the 40 epi sett is still a little wide to produce a balanced weave with the overtwist yarn – thus giving it room to collapse in on itself.

The collapse in the waffle section is even more dramatic, but – zoom in to look at the closeup – most of the definition is gone from the waffle cells.   A pity; I thought they were attractive.

And, finally, the overtwist yarn, beaten very softly to produce a very open cloth:

Plain weave and waffle weave, networked and allover pattern, with white overtwisted wool weft, beaten loosely. Warp is black 60/2 silk sett at 40 epi.
Plain weave and waffle weave, networked and allover pattern, with white overtwisted wool weft, beaten loosely. Warp is black 60/2 silk sett at 40 epi.

Here the collapse (as expected) is super dramatic – over 50% – but, alas, you can barely make out any pattern.

I am guessing that using a felting wool weft would probably result in similar results.  Today, if I am sufficiently motivated, I may try weaving up a sample with a 1/22 mohair yarn (a trifle larger than the 60/2 silk warp) and wet-finishing it in the washing machine.  But today is dye day, so I’m not sure I will get to it!

Plan for today: dye the first batch of Lanaset samples in “pure” colors.  This means mixing up stock solutions for each of the pure colors (colors that are not mixes of other colors), then dyeing skeins of yarn at various depths of shade.  Per Karen’s assignment, each color should be dyed at 0.1%, 0.5%, 1.0%, and 2.5%, with navy and black at 0.5%, 1.0%, 2.5%, and 5%.  That comes out to 4 samples for each color.

Now, I am dyeing the 5 gram sample skeins in pint mason jars, and I can fit 17 of them into the electric frying pan that I use for samples.  So I can basically do four colors at once, assuming I can keep up with all the stirring that needs to be done.  (I think I can, but have to experiment to find out!)  So that is one set of dyeing work.

I also want to dye some 12,000 ypp tencel/silk yarn in jewel tones to use as weft with this warp.  This means using a different dye, since tencel is a cellulose fiber.  I will dye this using Cibacron F.  Since I am not especially concerned about reproducible color here, I can use a looser methodology than with the Lanasets.  But it still means using winding (and tying!) more skeins, a different type of dye, mixing up different dyestocks, and somehow trying to keep track of all of this while dyeing the other stuff.  Maybe not such a good idea!  But I really do want to get it dyed as well.

And, finally, ten pounds of cherries are still staring at me reproachfully from the fridge.  Today is cherry pie day, I think, and maybe a batch of brandied sour cherries, or some more candied sour cherries.

All in all, makes for a busy day.  Better get started!