Dyeing Day - Before

All the miscellaneous stuff that is "fit" to dye is going to be the fodder for yet some new experiments. Some time back, I published directions on how I do "double" dyeing in a "low water immersion (lwi)" gradation. It kind of duplicates the rows and columns in Carol Soderlund's dyeing book but without all the measuring! It basically gives you a gradation from one color to another by holding one color constant and doing a gradation of the second color.

My new experiment will be to try to do this on one piece of cloth instead of the individual pieces of yardage. I am going to start with a four yard piece (about 400 gms) and will put out instructions if it comes out okay. My first attempts will be moving from the yellows to the reds with hopefully some interesting oranges in between. This will all come in handy for my lily piece which requires a lot of shading. We shall see how this all works! My goal is always to simplify measuring and still get okay results. The first one above is the move from sun yellow to fuchsia. I used a constant 3% dye to weight of goods for the sun yellow (ProChem's name) and started with a strongest of 3% of the fuchsia with 8 gradations so it would be 3%, 1.5%, .75%, .40%, .20%, .10%, .05 and .02%. I am going to leave the stuff batching for longer than normal as it is not all sitting covered up in liquid like it normally is -- more like dye painting than lwi. Also the basic blue and grape below do like a little bit longer batching time.

I decided I wanted to try a gradation of grape (a pure purple color of MX dyes) to Basic Blue. Both of these are moderately weak dyes that don't give very intense colors but should result in some nice blue/purples (I hope).

I always liked the calculation part of chemistry but always hated the exactness which rarely got me the conclusions I was supposed to get anyway!! But it did train me to take notes, develop hypotheses etc. The reward of this type of work is that I get a lot of output for relatively little work as compared to the marbling which is very labor and cost intensive!!

Again, I have been sewing as well and two out of the four aprons have been finished. If my sister Gail guarantees that her husband won't see my blog, I will put pictures up! Otherwise, it will have to wait! All these aprons have required something other than just sewing them together!! Two have marbling on them, one is dyed and one has been plasticized by ironing on the Heat N Bond vinyl covering. I bought a whole bolt of this many, many years ago and never have used it. So all sorts of experiments have been going on.

So off to scrub the dyes off my arms before dinner out!