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

fuchsia shirt

tie-dye 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.

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!

Wednesday evening and Thursday morning I decided to finish the dyeing I hadn’t gotten around to. So I mixed up a new batch of dyestock, and dyed five Skystock T-shirts, three button-up rayon shirts, and nine pairs of socks. The results were decidedly mixed, partly because I was experimenting (and you never know how experiments will turn out, do you?) and partly because I botched the wash-out and had some back-staining as a result. (Back-staining is when one item bleeds onto another.)

Fortunately, the only thing that got really ruined was a pair of yellow-and-orange socks that wound up with blue blotches. The others were all salvageable, and some are actually quite nice! However, I’ve definitely decided to be more careful and thorough in washing out the dyes, in the future.

Here are the two colorways of the Skystock shirts:

Alas, the logo is not especially prominent on either (though it fares somewhat better on the red/black version), but the pattern is pretty nice anyway. I could overdye the logo to make the lettering more readable, but that would at least partially ruin the star. No, better to leave them as is; they’re still beautiful.

Also, I think I have the star pattern more or less down, which is nice. I will still do some more practice shirts, but I’m pleased with my techniques.

And here are seven pairs of socks (the eighth photo came out blurry):

Of these, I like the ones mixed with complementary colors (blue/orange, yellow/purple, red/green) the best. The color ranges are more complex, and the effect is moodier, which (in this case) I like. My second favorite are the blue-on-blue or blue-on-purple socks. But I think all eight pairs came out very nicely.

The six shirts (I had previously dyed three, in addition to the three I did in this spurt) were not nearly as successful, and most of them have been remanded to the pile for overdyeing or other rework. Here is the best one:

I had meant this shirt to be brighter than it was (incandescent turquoise and emerald green was what I was after), but I’m pleased with it nonetheless. The patterning is crisp and well-defined, and it’s bright enough to be interesting.

Here’s my second favorite, which is actually darker than it looks in the photo:

I’m still not deeply fond of this one, but I like the complex patterning and the muted colors. It reminds me of some types of agate.

The others I am not so happy with:

The emerald-and-green shirt above is blurry and boring, and the colors feel washed out. I will either do some surface design on it, or overdye it – probably in a royal blue crinkle pattern (solid color).

The shirt above just doesn’t thrill me. The colors came out in huge, blurry blotches, and don’t look good together. I’m not sure this one is salvageable, but I may try overdyeing or stamping/screen printing anyway. There’s nothing to lose! The two shirts above were an attempt at mixing scarlet and olive green, which sounded like a good idea at the time. The first one wound up blending a bit too much, so feels rather boring. It’s a good candidate for surface design, though. I just have to figure out what to put on it!

The second shirt has nice coloring, but the red is too bright relative to the (remnants) of olive green; the shirt is predominantly red and brown, and the red dominates more than I had intended. Back into the bath for overdyeing. Color will likely be green, just a little bit of it and not very intense, just enough to tone down the reds.

So, mixed results, but even mixed results can be enlightening. And I have a marvelous set of tie-dyed T-shirts and eight wonderful pairs of socks, and plenty of fodder for surface design experiments. While it could have been better, I’m still quite pleased with the results.

Off to work on that warp for Handwoven! The sooner started, the sooner done.