My Fabric Dyeing Class!

I had been asked to have a dyeing workshop for the Quilters By the Sea group I haven't taught this class in a number of  years but did manage to find the old directions on a cd.  I decided to do my old standard gradation with fat quarters and then just have a play day for the ten members who signed up (we had to cut off there as we were doing this at Miranda's house).  Pat Mattison helped me with the ladies as well as the take down and clean up.  Miranda did a Herculean effort getting everything set up and flawless although she didn't get to do any dyeing.  She did take lots of pictures and I have included a couple of these.  Not only did I forget my sd card in the camera (Miranda lent me one) but I just didn't remember to take pictures as we went along -- too busy I guess trying to remember everything I wanted to tell them!!

All the ladies are gathered around their tables.  This technique using plastic bags and a dishpan to hold them takes up very little room.  We had a bucket of clean water at each table and later a bucket of soda ash solution at each table.

The ladies were each taking a quarter cup of the different dye solutions (5% solutions) to dye their 8 step gradation.  This meant the strongest was about 6% and halved at each step.  Loose instructions for this are on one of my other blog posts.

You can see the fabrics "curing" in their baggies during our play time.  We had lots of dye to play with and I had brought extra pfd fabric as well.

Doing the preliminary rinses to get out the soda ash before washing in the washing machine at home.

This looked like a colorful bucket!!

This was Betty V's gradation of a greyish green.  It should have been more green but I think because of the chillly temps, the tangerine didn't take as well as it should have.

You can see here Karen's finished pieces.  The ones on the right are a gradation of Intense Blue.  I had a lot of white on white snowflake fabric which I shared with the class and I love how Karen's pieces turned out (pictures taken from a note she sent me)!

Betty got some nice solids (she had wanted solids).  It shows that you can get some really nice solids using low water immersion dyeing if you squish and message the baggies enough! I took these pictures from Betty's Facebook posting!

Some just sprinkled the liquid dyes on folded pieces of fabric (note the snowflakes).

Scrunched with yellow and blue dyes.  This is the back side of one of the snowflake fabrics.

This is the back side of a snowflake fabric.

This is the front side of the above piece!

Another back side of one of the snowflake fabrics.  Got some nice deep colors with this one!!

There was a lot of dye left so I took the opportunity to throw in a couple of tshirts which I will post later when they finish drying.  Don't think they are my best efforts but they are okay!

All in all, it was a fun day and Miranda's location is gorgeous and the weather behaved for the day as well.  Her garage was a perfect setting with plenty of room!

Extreme Overdyeing Again....

Well, as usual I am overachieving with my dyeing!  I usually do 35 yards at a time with my extreme dyeing technique but figured since Marcia and I used to do it together and make 70 yards at a time, I could just double my yardage!!  I have been trying to make some semblance of order in my basement and had literally two boxes filled with what I thought looked like prewashed pfd fabric (the only fabric I would prewash!).  I just grabbed it all, cut two yard lengths or gathered up a bunch of scraps to make up two yards.  After using it all up, I grabbed a couple of bolts of my Egyptian cotton and cut that into 2 yard lengths as well. 

I decided I really needed some true reds and can always use greens.  I wanted to see how the fuchsia, mixing red and burnt orange interacted as well.

I actually had forgotten some of my process for doing this so will document it here for future reference!!

Steps are:

(1) Plan how much and colors
(2) Make up the dyes
(3) Mark the fabrics
(4) Set up the "pots" with the right amount of water and dye and put in fabric
(5) Make up soda ash solution and add to pots
(6)  Wait
(7) Rinse
(8) Dry
(9) Sort by second set of dyes
(10) Repeat steps 4-8

First step is to plan how much fabric of each color you want (I am  using one yard per color for this example) and then what colors and depth of color you want to play with (five base colors and five overdyes).  I generally use "pure" dyes in primary colors as a starting point as I don't want too many browns.  I usually do one yard of about 100 gm/yd fabric for this.  Important to know the weight of the fiber you are dyeing though as it is the weight of the dye with respect to the weight of the fabric that determines the depth of shade.  Most MX dyes reach maximum depth of shade at 3 or 4 percent (3 gms of dye/yard of 100 gm fabric).  Some will go darker though.

Next step is to make up the dyes. There will be six  yards of fabric in each "pot".   As my water is not super soft, I use urea water to make up the dyes (2 1/3 cups urea to 1 gal of  warm water).  I make up a few gallons.  I  use metric measures for making up the dyes and make up a 10% solution (10 gms of dye to 100 mls of water).So if I am doing those six yards per pot and I want the concentration to be 2% (I frequently use this), I need 6 x 2 gms (or 12 grams again assuming the fabric weighs 100 gms/yd which is pfd print cloth weight).  I use about a cup of urea water and dissolve the dye in it.  To do this, put a little water in the bottom of a measuring cup larger than a cup and then put in all the dye and mix it up like a paste.  Then  add the remainder of the cup of water.

The next step is to mark all your fabric so you know what colors caused what results.  I use tyvek labels with permanent markers and safety pins.  As my extreme dyeing is a 5 x 5 matrix, my numbering is A0-5, B0-5 through E5, and then 01-05.  That is 35 different colors.  the AO-EO are examples of the plain color as are the 01-06.  The latter don't get added until the second batch of dyes.  Most of the time I use a yard for each.

I set up my "pots" even though I am essentially doing low water immersion.  Each of these "pots" (kitty litter boxes, 5 gallon buckets) will hold 6 yards of fabric in the one yard of each color example (first pot will be all the A's, second all the B's etc.) I put my pots on an old coffee table so that I don't have to raise my arms up in the air to do the smushing.  It's a little bending but is actually easier on the body I find for at least this kind of dyeing (and shibori as well).  I add eleven cups of room temp water to each pot and the one cup of dye to each pot.  This is 2 cups of liquid for each yard of fabric and I always use dry fabric as I want the dye to be as even as you can get with low water immersion dyeing.  If you want it wet, decrease the water accordingly.  

I add the fabrics to each pot making sure they are smushed up.  I then do a lot of pressing of the fabric and manipulating of it. I move onto the next pot and do the same through all five.  Then I start from the beginning again and smush and manipulate the fabric  making sure there are no dry spots.  I repeat this a few times while I am preparing my next step.

Time to make the soda ash solution.  There will be six cups of soda ash solution per each "pot".     This is 6 x 5 cups or just short of 2 gals of soda ash solution (30 cups = 7 1/2 qts and 4 qts = gal).  I use slightly warm water for this as my basement tends to be a little chilly and I want the dye solution to be a bit warmer (but not hot).

After the fabrics have been sitting in the dye solution for 15-30 minutes, I then pot by pot pull out the fabric, add six cups of soda ash solution and then put the fabric back in and smush -- very important to get the soda ash solution to hit all the fabric or you will get faded ugly spots. After I have finished this, I go back to the beginning and smush some more.  After doing this a couple of times, I weight down the fabric by putting plastic  containers with some water in them so that fabric is above the water.  I let it sit for at least an hour.

Next is rinse out.  I am lazy and use the washing machine after the first rinse which gets rid of most of the soda ash.  I wash the fabrics in warm water and Synthrapol  and double rinse in warm water for these once dyed fabrics.  I do dry them as well and make sure all the labels are still   I wash them in separate loads if there are greatly disparate colors (like yellows together, blues  together and reds together).

After they are dried, I pile them all up and separate and sort according to the second digit so that all the ones go together ( A1- E1), then 2s etc.  You are finished with A0 and the other 0s. 

You then put the new piles in the new pots and repeat the first bunch.  

 After you have finished the overdyeing, the first washout in the same.  After you have done that washing and rinsing though, you do the serious washing!  Serious washing is Synthrapol with the hottest water your washing machine can do.  I also make sure I wash for at least 30 min (I turn the dial around so that it does the time twice).  I do two rinses and then do the whole process again.  Make sure that no one is taking any showers for awhile as this will probably use up most of the water in your water heater!!

This is the pile of 70 yards that I ended up with and actually managed to not cripple my back with the water and fabric hauling!  I liked them all except for three which I will overdye with navy probably to make them browner.  I got some great reds and some nice greens as well.  Never can have too much green or too many colors of green!

Here are all the colors!  Looks like burnt orange should be between the tangerine and strong orange.  I do love strong orange and the new pure navy blues that come from Pro Chem.  When added together they make awesome browns and blacks (1:1 for brown and 2:1 navy to str or for black).  My first set of pots were the sun yellow through burnt orange overdyed with the blues and reds.  All the names I used are ProChem names as those are the MX dyes I use.

I decided I wanted some more lighter greens that were a bit more like lime so used some 10:1 sun yellow to turquoise and basic blue.  I liked the basic blue ones better (the top ones) but may try a 20:1 sun yellow to turquoise to see what color I get.  It is amazing how little you need of some dyes to shift the color quite a bit.  Same is true of shifting fuchsia to bright red.  I was amazed at how even the color was on the fuchsia pieces.  I must have really done a lot of mushing!!!  I also have found that I need to add a little more water to the darker colors.  Altogether, I dyed 90 yards with the overdyeing and the greens.  Another 40 yards are being washed out now!  If I can get 500 yards done this summer, I will be happy.  I have all sorts of non-cotton fabrics, yarns and other fibers to play with as well.  I think I will get a large bag of ice and try my hand at some ice dyeing using the colors I have been working with.  And then there are the t-shirts.....

Amid all of this dyeing, we have been picking, pitting and preserving sour cherries from our tree.  We covered it with netting to keep away the birds and squirrels and managed to get almost 2 pecks (16 quarts) this year!!!  We left the netting off after we picked the last big amount and by the next morning all the remaining cherries were gone!!!  Shows how well the netting works!!

You Just Never Know - Journey of a Dyer!

An art quilt friend asked me to do some custom dyeing for her which I do occasionally (but very selectively). She wanted a very muted beige/brown background with subtle mottling -- she always gives me the photo she is working from as a guide. As I was trying to get up a group of this color myself for the lions, I gave it a first try.

For my dyeing, I almost always use Preferred for Dyeing (pfd) fabric but have found that for lighter colors and overall "solidity", sometimes a good non-pfd fabric will work well -- some of those that have some permanent press finish or some optical brighteners. The finish acts as a resist and you get some nice overall colors sometimes (especially those pesky lavenders that you want to have some blue in). So I decided that this would be a good fabric for doing my friend's request. It was a non-pfd white Robert Kaufman Kona that I got at Joanns. I keep a small stash of the white for my marbling and fabric painting as it performs well in those capacities.

So I went with a pretty low concentration (maybe 2% for bright yellow and golden yellow) on this fabric and then added in Pro Chem's Basic Brown (one of the few "mixed" colors I regularly use). I only added about 1/2 to 1% of this. I figured I would get nice and light. Wrong!! It acted just like a pfd fabric and sucked up all the color and I got a very deep gold color. You can see this in the first picture above!


I knew the above color would not do so took one of my snow dyes to her with which she was thrilled! So now I am left with 6 yards of deep gold, some of which I can use. I had a bunch of the basic brown left (although it has been aging down there in liquid form in the basement) so added a tsp of Deep Black to the solution this morning and poured it over 5 of those six yards. The result is not too bad! There was obviously no permanent press or optical brighteners in this batch! I got good mottling and a lot of very deep browns. These two pieces are the results -- one is two yards and the darker one is three yards.

I have another 10 yards of it all scoured and ready to go. I am thinking some reds and oranges overdyed with browns and blacks. I am doing things a little differently also. I have a couple of big flat boxes and I am scrunching the fabric and covering the bottom of the box. 5 or 6 yards fit easily into one of the boxes.

I am doing LWI the Ann Johnston way with just wetting the fabric (usually I use it dry) and then pouring the dye all over it and then messaging it in. I am of course pouring the dye very unevenly but doing a lot of message to get the subtle mottling but an overall variation in color. I let it sit for 15 minutes and then pour in the soda ash solution and message a little bit. I then weight down the fabric with another box with a bucket of water in it. I really like using baggies as it is easier to squeeze out the air and get overall coverage of the fabric but this is working pretty well! I let it sit for about 2 hours, rinse, wash and iron!

Won't these two fabrics above work really well for my lion's mane? I was planning on doing a lot of piecing but these almost stand alone with lots of stitching. Nah, will still piece!

Gathering Up the Goodies....

Well, I finally had to make some headway into getting all my hand-dyed "solids" together as I had promised our guild that I would provide some fabrics for our Diamond Anniversary quilt -- yes, our quilt club will be celebrating 75 years of continuous meetings in 2011 and we want to make a special raffle quilt for that year. My hand dyeds were spread all over the place including hiding away in project boxes matched up to commercial fabric for some unknown quilt design! Janet G. picked up 27 yards from my stash with a promise that I would do some gradations of other colors if they need them as they get further along in design. It is going to be a Baltimore Album type of quilt designed by club members.

I must say that looking at the pictures, it looks like I have a relatively modest bunch of fabric but pictures do lie!! Besides this "solid" bunch, I have a couple of very large boxes of prima donnas (those ones that are shiboried, dye painted, snow dyed, salt dyed and sprinkled with colors). Even the boxes of solids look much larger in person and I swear it would be hard to find a color that I don't have at least a 1/4 yard of! I may have to go back to selling a bit of this but at least now I know where my future dyeing efforts should be made (I must add that I have a whole bunch of yellows and oranges already set aside for a lillies quilt I am working on so they don't even show up here!). Anyway for your viewing enjoyment!


This is the box of reds, purples and some oranges and yellows.

This was my blues and greens boxes. All those folded over pieces are full yards with 1/4's and halves hanging about on top. A lot of the greens are also in my lillies box right now meeting up with the yellows and oranges. (I can never have enough greens.)

This was my "neutrals" box. Each of those thin slivers is a full yard of fabric! Lots of grays and browns here. I get a kick out of the browns as they definitely change color dramatically when the light shining on them changes from daylight to incandescent light.


These are the ones I called my earthtones -- as you can see, they are a bit on the warm side. As before, each piece is a full yard at least.


I must say that looking at all this, I think I am going to concentrate on doing some simple brights the next time I do dyeing although I can't help mixing up some earthy greens as well. And here am I also hoping for a bit of snow (no stones thrown at me please) before we head south for awhile! I am anxious to get back to my snow dyeing!

A Scorcher Out There..

So what better day than this to do some more dyeing. I got expelled from the garage so am making do with the driveway and hoping that the expected showers don't come until later.

This time I used more concentrated dyes to see if I like the results better (or even if I get results). I made up some Intense Blue, Navy, turquoise and golden yellow in about a 5% solution instead of the usual 3%. I am going to keep trying to increase the intensity to see where the salt effects stop (if they do). So far, they are going like gangbusters!! I might add that the humidity is about 80% and the temp is close to 90. At this point, they are acting like the paints do -- the colors move as parts of the piece start to dry out a bit. Of course with dyes I can't let them get completely dry. I also created some ridges as I observed that where I got the greatest movement with the last pieces was next to the edge where it hung over the table a bit. So I will create a little movement. I would like to accordion fold the whole piece and may do that the next time around.

This is the overall look of the piece while it has just been painted. Even in ten minutes the salt had caused movement.
This is a closeup which shoes the tracks beginning. I have no idea why I find this so fascinating. Now there are some more things I would like to get done with my dyeing -- effects that are easy with acrylics.

Piece number 2 for the afternoon is still using the more intense dyes (and I may ratchet it up even more tomorrow) and I used sponge style. First I sponged on golden yellow and then I sponged on some green made with the golden and intense blue and then some turqouise and then intense blue over the turquoise.




The next couple of pictures are slices of the sponged dyed pieces. The colors didn't move as fast and there are places where there is a lot of dye on these pieces. I was afraid when I didn't see movement in ten minutes like the other that all was lost. It just took a little more time!




My process is to let one piece get a bit dryer, cover with plastic and then layer another piece of fleece and then another piece. This keeps them the prerequisite moist until I am ready to rinse. Haven't yet decided whether to remove the salt before I do that. So many options and so little summer! I had to roll up the pieces in their fleece and move them inside as we are expecting rain which would be okay but didn't want the wind to blow them down the street!

I have a guest coming this weekend but looks like she will find out why her daughter in law (my youngest) is such a bad housekeeper. Who wants to clean when there is dyeing and color to be done! It's safe to eat in my kitchen and the bathrooms and sheets will be clean! QBL is coming up at the end of the month as well and I will be doing 5 days of marbling with Elin Noble! I really look forward to a week of just playing this way. I have two boxes of paints to take with me with which to experiment!

More on the Salt Dyes -- What Not to Do

My favorite begonias are going crazy in the planter on the front steps. I just loved this pinky/orange/yellow one.


Well, the night last night was super humid and that combined with some dyes that I think were over the hill combined to make a nice piece really ugly! The final words are not in but it didn't look too good this morning when I went out to the garage. It was soaking wet, the humidity had been so high which of course caused the dyes to migrate even more than I wanted and made the trails disappear and just become lighter smudges of mud. Hopefully, the trails were well established and that the further migration won't obliterate them completely.

Well, after washing it didn't turn out super ugly as some of the trails returned and if I split it into fat quarters, it will be interesting. I think that a little less humidity and more heat would work better.


So back to some safe colors today -- the blues and blues only! No more of those three primaries even though it looked pretty good to begin with. I think the humidty was just too high and there needs to be some drying for this process to work properly.

Now my other piece that I was trying to make for a quilting buddy is about as ugly as you can possibly get so my cure-all for that is to just overdye with blue! Something will come out of it!! I suspect that I am not going to be able to meet her requirements! I will make one more try with a smaller piece today and see what happens. The color she wants is a muddy very pale beige which then becomes more yellow as you move to the top of the cloth (and even paler). My attempt using the colors that worked in the gradation produced the ugliest color of green mud you have ever seen!

Well, true to my word, I only did blues for this first piece today, trying out all the blues I have!! So it is turquoise, then intense blue, basic blue and finally deep navy (the pure navy). I didn't use the mixing blue as I know that works but had no idea whether the navy or intense blue works. Twenty minutes have passed and already some deep trails in the intense blue so looks like that will be a wonderful choice as well. We shall see. Of course now dear husband is whining about blocking the garage door with my tables. The weather has not been cooperative though so I haven't been able to depend on the weather outside the garage all week and I had made up the dyes on Monday. I know they wouldn't last with any strength at all much longer. Tomorrow will be the last of this batch I think.

The green mud piece has now been unceremoniously dumped into navy blue and mixing blue where it will stay until it behaves better! I have learned the hard way not to use basic blue and intense blue as my overdye as intense blue doesn't discharge at all and basic blue discharges to an ugly beige that is not at all interesting.

This is one area of the piece I did yesterday. Looks very faded to me but in small doses, it was acceptable.


This is a second area. I have no way of photographing the whole piece outside yet but looks better in small doses anyway.



This is the newest piece on the two tables. This was taken about 10minutes after I put the last dye on. It is turquoise on the edges, going to intense blue and then basic blue with navy in the middle. I know that basic blue and turquoise don't go together well without something splitting them as turquoise is a very green blue and basic blue is the only red blue of the Procion MX dyes.



This is a closeup where you can see the salt has already started acting. I just swept up the rest of the salt as there was enough movement for me so now I will let it dry which hopefully it will do. It is still pretty muggy out but the blues almost always turn out well.

This shows the trails already starting pretty well. Double click to see it bigger!

Very Short Glossary of Fiber Terms, Beth Style!

Well, I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about fabrics in general, having been sewing for almost 60 years but obviously, I can be mistaken too as I was in my recent shibori workshop. I did some online searching for some of the fiber and fabric terms we were throwing around quite blithely!

So here goes for my attempt at clarification:

1. Pima Cotton -- pima cotton is a long staple (long fiber) cotton which because of it's fiber length is perfect for making high thread count fibers. However, this doesn't mean any particular thread count, just that the fiber is a special high quality cotton.
2. Pimatex -- this is a brand of tightly woven poplin made by the Robert Kaufman company. One of the "colors" is pfd white which is sold by Hancock of Paducah. It is a firm high thread count fabric that produces nice results.
3. Egyptian cotton -- again, this is a type of cotton (like Pima) that used to be grown only in Egypt but now is grown in the Southeast US. It is an extremely high quality cotton (probably the best) and lends itself to high threadcount applications.
4. Kona cotton -- this again is a brand name sold by Robert Kaufman and is a relatively low threadcount but has good firm threads. It may be made from pima cotton.
5. Cotton Lawn -- this is a very soft, finer quality cotton which is the basis for the Hoffman batiks for the most part. It is most likely made from high quality pima cotton as well.
6. Cotton Sateen -- this is a weave of cotton. The highest quality sateens are made from pima or Egyptian cotton and are combed cotton. It is almost impossible to get the highest quality here in the US but a couple of manufacturers are making a decent sateen these days.
7. PFD or Prepared for Dyeing -- this is fabric that doesn't have any finishes that interfere with the dyeing process. Some of these finishes might include permanent press or optical brighteners. Being labelled PFD does not guarantee that it will give you the wonderful bright crisp colors that you might like. This requires that the fabric also be mercerized.
8. Mercerized cotton -- this is cotton that has been treated with a very strong base during it's processing (seems to me I read that it was lye in combination with some other things). This process causes the fibers to appear to hold more color because of the surface. You can kind of tell if a pfd fabric is mercerized as it has a very slight sheen to it when held in the light. I have found many fabrics not labelled as pfd but which were mercerized and dyed beautifully. I have found others identified as pfd which don't dye well at all!!

There are also many different weaves and thread counts of cottons. I cheated above as sateen is a weave as well as a "finish" which makes the surface highly reflective.

Old damask in many cases makes for a great dyeing surface (check out those thrift stores). Also, if you can find those sheets that were all cotton and made back in the 40's and 50's, they tend to be mercerized as well. Before the advent of optical brighteners, mercerization was the process used to insure you had nice bright whites!

Many times you can find sateen or Egyptian cotton sheets made in India or Pakistan that contain no optical brighteners and therefore dye beautifully. I have found that optical brighteners make the white fabrics look vaguely pale, pale lavender under the store lights. You have to look really, really closely. I have found for some reason that the sheets made in Thailand or Malaysia almost always have optical brighteners!

My personal opinion is that viscose (NOT acetate) rayon dyes more beautifully than anything else. It rarely if ever has any finish on it but is hard to find except from pfd vendors in 100 % rayon. You have to be careful with it when it is wet though as it tends to be a bit fragile. However, any combination of rayon/cotton or rayon/linen that you can find will dye beautifully as well, even if not pfd. When you get the mixes, be careful that there are no permanent press finishes though. I love the 55% rayon, 45% linen fabric from Joann's. It is great for clothing and dyes wonderfully.

Silks dye wonderfully using the same processes. Lighter weight silks will just not hold as much color so a 3mm silk will not be as colorful as a 10mm silk just because there is not as much fiber to dye. Charmeuses and silk blends (with rayon, cotton or linen) dye beautifully using the MX dyes and soda ash. Pure silk can be dyed beautifully with MX dyes using vinegar or citric acid as well.

Day 2 - Shibori Dyeing

This was a visitor to our dyeing venue who had taken up residence on my gloves overnight. He had to climb up a table to do this!
You can see that the day turned out beautifully and the lawn was covered by our product by mid afternoon.

Well, it turned out to be a beautiful day and fairly warm so perfect for dyeing. We managed to go through another two complete iterations before some of us older folk were just too tired to proceed any further.

I took less risks with the colors I mixed today going with some tried and true mixes. I have moved so far away from mixing by volume measuring, it took some time to get the proportions right. I always measure by weight now in my dyeing as I like some predictability in colors (never guaranteed though).

There were definitely some lessons to be learned from the last two days which are as follows:

1. You can get totally different results using the same pole, fabric and dye pot depending upon where in the dye pot the particular fabric falls. I had three pieces of fabric wrapped on a pole and the top piece was very different than the bottom piece. Cause: not enough agitation of the dye bath!




2. Different fabrics act very differently when compressed. My pfd sateen resisted color far more than the Egyptian cotton in the same dye bath. Where I had clamps, it was actually white without dipping in water first.




3. Just using plain old clothespins or clamps right on some fabric that you have sloppily accordion pleated and then folded will yield some wonderful results.




4. Clamps on plexiglas in a group setting just don't work. Using rubber bands was easier on the clamps and a lot cheaper in the long run.




5. Going a little heavy on the dyes in the dye bath will increase the likelihood that you will get better overall patterning in your shibori especially when you are using a big piece of cloth wrapped around a skinny pole. It is better to go a little lighter on the concentrations when using big fat poles as it is more difficult to get the good compression.




6. You can shibori silk successfully if you compress well. We had many excellent examples from one of our dyers in the group who was willing to try anything.




7. You can use a Bernina sewing machine to sew through many layers of fabric and actually prevent the dye from migrating into the center of the sewn piece; i.e. , if you sew a square through all the layers of an accordion pleated piece of fabric, you will have nice resist marks for the stitching but will also have lightly dyed squares all over the piece of fabric.




8. Give a group of 10 creative women some color and fabric to play with, and you will have 20 new ideas by the end of two days and one heck of a lot of fun! We had some interesting experiences today and things that I learned!

The most favored colors were the navy blue and my blues mixes. I use the Procion MX Deep Navy which is one of the pure blues. I mixed up turquoise with the navy for one mix and mixed mixing blue, turquoise and intense blue for another. Also very well received were the two greens made with (1) intense blue and golden yellow and (2) navy blue and golden yellow. They yield nice earthy greens. My purple lovers loved the Pro Chem Blue/Violet and a purple made with their Deep Black and Fuchsia. I made a nice red with mixing red, strong orange, some golden yellow and a dash of mixing blue -- it was a deep earthy red. Everyone loved just the black mixtures as they would of course break down into their components and move at different speeds. Of course the yellows and turquoise do this as well.

Some things to remember:

1. You need to clamp and tie pretty tightly to get effective patterning.



2. Don't wrap your poles too tight or you won't be able to compress the fabric down.



3. If you want more patterning and more white areas, soak your fabric for about 10 minutes ahead of time in plain water. The water will act as somewhat of a resist (depending upon the colors you are using). Turquoise and the yellows seem to wander just about wherever they want, regardless of how tight you clamp. Use this to your advantage.



4. You can always discharge! Most of the time this is true; however, intense blue, golden yellow, fuchsia and turquoise don't discharge. Basic blue discharges to an ugly beige. (I use the ProChem color names -- one of my earlier blogs has a conversion for those who use Dharma dyes). Random dyeing like this is apt to give you some real "dye dogs" but they are opportunities for discharging, painting with paints, rubber stamping with paints and just plain overdyeing!!

These were Barb's from the second day. She had overdyed some of the fuchsias that she didn't like as well as one of the yellows.
These are two pieces that were created just with folding and clamping the fabrics. The top one is one of the blue mixes and the bottom is the navy and golden yellow mix.
This was the lawn where we were drying the fabrics before bundling them up to take home. Believe it or not, this is mostly my bunch from the second set of pots. Because Bev has well water, we decided to only rinse twice and then dry the fabric. This would ensure that no color leached between pieces (even though the Synthapol would more than likely have taken out the stain). The weather cooperated and pieces dried in probably a half an hour so while we were cleaning up, everything dried.

Preparing for Shibori Dyeing Day!

Well, finally back from North Carolina and getting ready for a two day dyeing session at a friend's house. We will have about 10 intrepid dyers gathering by her barn with poles and clamps in hand. Hopefully, the weather will cooperate and we won't run out of water before the two days are through -- who needs showers anyway...

The preparation consists of getting all the dyes together along with some measuring cups and spoons. Because we are doing regular immersion dyeing this day, we will also need A LOT of salt. While in North Carolina, I found quite a bit on grocery shelves. It is difficult to find the uniodized salt in any appreciable quantity around here except at the Mennonite run bulk food stores. Hopefully with the 50 lbs I have gathered we will have enough. You don't need the salt when doing our regular low water immersion dyeing although I do use a little! I also have scoured the local stores for sodium carbonate which we will need to get the pH right. A lot of the local stores carry sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) instead of sodium carbonate (washing soda) as their pH+ for pools so watch your labels carefully!

I have gathered pvc pipe in 2 to 4 foot lengths with many different diameters (Lowe's even has the hard to find 6" pipe now) around which I will wrap and scrunch fabric. I even found some nice deep 5 gallon pails at Lowes today.

To get the best results, it is best not to try to scrunch more than a fat half yard of fabric at a time (a fat half is a full yard cut in half lengthwise). You really want to have a fairly even look to the whole piece (IMHO).

I have also gathered a lot of clamps (the kind you squeeze with your hands) in different sizes which I will use to clamp the fabric between two pieces of plexiglas that I have cut down to reasonable (3" x 4") size. I found a lot of very small clamps at Harbor Freight which will do the trick nicely and not take up so much room in the "pots".

Tomorrow will be spent taking the fabric, labelling it appropriately and scrunching, wrapping and squeezing it! I may even do some hand stitching tonight as that leads to some very intriguing patterns that you can't obtain any other way.

Common Problems with Procion MX Fiber Reactive Dyes

There are a number of things to make your dyeing experience less than positive. As time permits, I will try to discuss a few of the things I have learned along the way. Sometimes just keeping things organized in your dye area can help. I am constantly amazed by the amount of misinformation there is about these dyes floating around the internet. I am certainly not an expert but have about 20 years of dyeing under my belt and know when I am in over my head!!

First, my list of five things you need to make the dyes work:

1. The dye powders. Preferably these are less than 2 years old but I have used many that were much older. The results are not as predictable but they still can work if they have been kept in a cool dry area, tightly sealed. Be cautious about the ones you might find at your local art supply store in very small jars as these can have quite a bit of age on them.
2. Water. This needs to be warm but NOT hot. I have seen a number of dyers recommend hot water to dissolve the dyes. These dyes will will react with water quickly and become much less reactive with the fibers. So keep the water between 80 and 90 degrees if you can. The exceptions to this are turquoise and ProChem's basic blue (the only blue that tends to red) which can tolerate (and even like) a warmer temp.
3. Soda Ash (also known as sodium carbonate and often found as pH+ in your local pool supply store). This is needed to provide the environment in which the dyes can attach to the fiber. The reaction requires a "basic" environment to react.
4. Environmental Temperature above 70 degrees. These dyes will behave very sluggishly below 70 degrees so especially when doing direct dye applications, the ambient temperature needs to be above 70 degrees.
5. Prepared For Dyeing (PFD) Fabric or Fiber. This means that the fiber contains no fillers or finishes. I very much prefer mercerized cottons to those that have not have this process. It makes the colors appear to be much clearer and brighter and darker. However, I have used non-pfd fabric and even fabric with finishes. If you are dyeing something with just a hint of color, these seem to work just fine but don't expect those showy pieces!

Given that you have put a check mark to all the above, these are problems (or opportunities) that seem to come up:

• Splotches of color on the fabric -- this is usually from two causes: (1) the dyes have not fully dissolved in the water and (2) transfer of dye from one surface to another. There are three ways to improve on the first which are to (a) use urea as an additive to the water into which you are dissolving the dye powders. Best to do this by dissolving the urea in the water ahead of time and then dissolving the dyes into this urea water. Urea water is made with 5 1/2 tbsp urea to one cup of water. (b) make your dyes a few hours before you want to use them to make sure the powders are dissolved. The solution should look clear and not cloudy. Cloudy means undissolved dyes. Keep adding urea until the dyes fully dissolve. (A friend uses rain water and it is so soft that she never has to add urea.) (c) if all else fails, strain the dye liquids through those old pantyhose that you will never wear again! The solution to dyes transferring from one project to another is basic. I am a sloppy dyer and I rarely if ever have that problem anymore (but I used to). I now always have a bucket of fresh water next to me and I rinse my gloved hands constantly when moving from one thing to another or before I pick up a piece of fabric.
• The fabric looked great until I washed it - There are several causes of this but the most prevalent is that you forgot to put the soda ash in. Make sure you are using sodium cabonate instead of sodium bicarbonate. Some pool stores are now using sodium bicarbonate as their pH+ so make sure you check the labels. A second set of causes is that you didn't let the fabric stay in the soda ash long enough or the water was too hot or too cold. Another problem occurs if you are using large amounts of water as in vat or washing machine dyeing. You have to use uniodized salt equivalent in weight to the fabric in the dye bath. Otherwise too much of the dye reacts with the water instead of the fabric. Lastly, the dyes may just be exhausted and have no more umph so save them for coloring paper. I have also found that some pfd fabric has been mislabelled and is not really pfd so I get a pale result instead of the brilliance I expected.
• The colors are not what I expected - The biggest culprit here is mixing fuchsia with just about any blue and expecting purple! This is most pronounced with the combination of fuchsia and turquoise. If you are doing vat dyeing and you are stirring like a madman, you might get some decent results. Using low water immersion with fairly hefty percentages of dyes will result in fabric that is mostly fuchsia, a few spots of purple and lots of blue filling in between. Fuchsia does not play well with others in low water immersion applications. Turquoise compounds the problem by being very slow to react as it does like the warmer environment. I have found results more to my liking by doing two things -- for fuchsia I rarely use more than a 1% or 2% concentration and I usually up the concentration of the turquoise by 2 and use warmer water. I also manipulate the fabric a lot more than I would normally.

To be continued.

Not All Dyes are Created Equal

Just one more picture of all the pretty trillium. With the cold wave that is coming next week, who knows whether they will be covered in snow or not.

This has been a day for two separate questions around dyes so thought I would address them in my blog which was supposed to be about dyeing anyway, not flowers!

There are basically several different kinds of dyes and even paints that are mislabelled as dyes upon occasion. The kinds of dyes that most quilters are using these days are called cold water fiber reactive dyes. They were invented not all that long ago but the patents have run out on them. There are several sub-types under that but I won't attempt to describe the differences as I claim just enough chemical knowledge to be a little dangerous. There are far better experts out there like Doug Wilson on the Dyerslist and Paula Birch who has her own website with lots of information. These cold water fiber reactive dyes work well with "cellulosic" fibers -- i.e., linen, rayon, bamboo, and cotton. They happen to also work very well on silk which has the properties of both animal and vegetable fibers with respect to these dyes. The most popular of these dyes are the Procion MX dyes which is what many of us use exclusively with cotton. On other posts, I have described some of the differences I see within that group of dyes known as MX. Even though they work the same way, each color has it's own individual properties.

A second type of dyes and one that is most popular with dyers of wool and silk (and also nylon) are the acid dyes. They require heat and an acidic medium to set the colors. This is accomplished either on the stovetop (or crockpot) or by steaming. I literally know nothing about this class of dyes as I actually use those aforementioned MX dyes to dye silk.

A third set of dyes are the direct dyes. I liken these to paints as they don't form any kind of real bond with the fibers but sit on top of the fiber (or maybe even surround it). If you see a dye that requires no heat (except for an iron) or other chemicals, I would suspect that it is a direct dye.

The popular RIT dyes are a combination of an acid dye and a direct dye. Therefore they work pretty well on silk, wool or nylon. You will get some color on the cellulosic fibers but this will wash out every time you wash the fabric, fading more each time and fading rather rapidly.

Then there is the class of dyes which people call "natural". I think this is a bit of a misnomer as the chemicals used with many of these dyes are far more deleterious than anything you would find in the other dyes! I think they are called natural as the color elements are obtained from naturally occurring plants and animals but unfortunately, for these dyes to "take", they need a mordant, alum being the safest. These dyes also do not work well on cellulosic fibers but create some beautiful colors on silks and wools.

Haven't you always wondered why people think that "natural" is better somehow? Chemicals are chemicals, whether they are natural or manmade.

Just some more spring flowers for your viewing pleasure!


Even I have taken enough pictures of trillium for this year!!

Gradation Dyeing with Procion MX Fiber Reactive Dyes

This is the pile of fabrics I got using yesterday's methods for overdyeing. Can't remember right off which one it is!

Well, you could probably use this gradation dyeing method with about any kind of dye but I use it with my Procion MX dyes. It is based on a method that I first learned way back in 1992 at a class taught by Don Wiener at Pro Chem. Elin Noble was supposed to teach the class but she became very ill at this time with what turned out to be a very severe case of Lyme Disease.

Anyway, I do this using low water immersion methods. I usually do an 8 step gradation for the deepest colors (navy, intense blue) and a 6 step for some of the lighter colors (turquoise, basic blue).

May I start by saying that I always look at color two different ways -- one is the actual color itself (blue, blue/green, yellow/orange etc.) and one is the concentration of the color (.05% or 6%). So when doing the gradations, you can pick any color (either a manufactured "pure" color or a mixture of pure colors). For illustration purposes, assume that there will be one yard of fabric weighing about 100 gms in each dyepot (in this case I use gallon sized zip locked bags -- only the good ones which I use over and over again - I like the baggies better than other containers because you can message them so easily).

I make one cup (250 ml about) with 10-12 gms (about 2 tsps) of dye. I then add a cup of water to that to make 2 cups. I arrange the baggies in a tray, each with one cup of water with 1 tbsp of salt (optional). I start with the baggie furthest from me in the tray and add one cup of the two cups of dye. I then fill the 2 cup container back to two cups. I go to the next bag closest to me, put one cup of the new more diluted dye in and then repeat the adding water step. This is repeated through all the baggies. You will have one cup of diluted color at the end. I then put the fabric in each baggie starting from the one closest to me. I message the baggie to make sure the dye gets all through the dry fabric. I smoosh the bags several times during the next 15 minutes. At the end of the 15 minutes, I add a cup of soda ash water to each baggie starting at the front again (lightest to darkest). I message the bag very thoroughly, get as much air out as I can and close the baggie up. I do this for each bag. During the next 15 minutes, I will frequently message the bags but then won't touch them the last 45. If I want more mottling, I will not message as much but I do want to get the soda ash throughout as I hate white spots or pale spots. After an hour, wash out.

A variation on the above that I really enjoy is using one color as a gradation so that you have different intensities in each baggie as above. Instead of using the plain cup of water though, I will make up a second color (say yellow) in a 2% solution and add one cup of this solution to each baggie. You will get a nice gradation that moves from one color through a series of colors sometimes to another color. For those of you who have had Carol Soderlund's class, you kind of get the rows or columns in her book. It is a little tricky to figure out the concentrations of each color but a little arithmetic and you are all set! You will love the results of this one!



Forgive these being un-ironed!! The left side is a gradation of greys using a no longer produced mix from ProChem called Mixing Grey. I have achieved almost the same color using navy blue and orange in a 2:1 ratio. The one on the right hand side is one where I used a navy blue gradation but added a constant 2% solution of a mix of yellow and mixing red.

Extreme Overdyeing -- Dyeing with Procion MX dyes

Well, a very fruitful day of dyeing -- a little like getting back on a horse after a long absence. My back is killing me and I am tired but I have a big pile of newly dyed fabric to admire and pet. And then, what to do with it next. Of course, usually I would be right down in the basement dyeing more and more (I tend to go on dye binges dyeing perhaps 200 yards of fabric in a week). However, this time - like last year - I am heading out west again for a short trip to Las Vegas to meet up with friends for a few days.



Anyway, for those of you well versed in different dyeing techniques, my version of overdyeing is based loosely on what Katy Widger did with her sequenced overdyeing where she took fabric through two sets of dye baths, each one a gradation from light to dark of one color. I did several of these early on in my dyeing career but wasn't overenthusiastic about the range of colors I got with this. It was okay but I wanted yardage and I wanted to experiment efficiently with overdyeing. So my version I will call Extreme Overdyeing as you will get 35 different colors of all about the same value (depending on the colors you choose) with just ten dyepots. 10 of these are the colors from each of the dyepots and 25 are the overdyes.

This is the worksheet I create before each time we do the overdyeing.


The theory (hope you can follow this) is that you put six yards of fabric into each of 5 different color dyepots (say sun yellow, golden yellow, mixing red, fuchsia, strong orange -- all Procion "pure" colors). You can use either regular immersion or low water immersion for this. I prefer low water immersion. After you batch these for their prerequisite hour or so, you rinse them out, wash them and then sort them into a second set of piles. These piles are created by first eliminating one yard from each of the five colors and setting those aside (and calling them finished).



Then you take one yard from each of the pots in the first step (so you would have one of yellow, one golden, one red, one fuchsia and one strong orange) and put into the first pot of the second set of pots (say basic blue, intense blue, navy blue, blue/violet, turquoise). You do this for each of those five pots. Then you add in an additional yard of white fabric into the pots so again you have six yards in each pot. (Of course you will have labelled everything ahead of time!!) Repeat the first step and you will come out with a wide variety of colors (of course my example would yield probably every green you can think of). I use 2% solutions for each of my two steps so that the final colors all have an intensity of about 4%. Varying the intensity would of course yield different colors as well and sometimes I will have one pot with 2% and one with 3% of the same color just to see the difference.



My friend Marcia and I have gotten together several times and done a series of these. One time we overdyed bright colors with browns, one time with all the different blacks and greys, and one time we just took warm colors and overdyed them with cool colors. We generally use "pure" (pure means that they are not created mixes) colors for one step and either pure or mixed colors for the second to try to keep mud to a minimum. It was a great way to see how the new grape and boysenberry pure colors interacted with a wide variety of other colors.




This was one of our overdyes where we used either premanufactured browns or made our own browns using colors we had made in Carol Soderlund's dyeing class (the one where you get 4500 swatches).



Here is one where we tried all the different pure Procion MX blues over the different pure warm colors.


Here is one where we just tried different colors in each batch to see how they would interact with each other. I didn't show all the colors that went into the second set of baths as I have so many yards of those in the pure colors. They were sun yellow, golden yellow, fuchsia, turquoise and mixing blue.


This is another one where we stretched ourselves using browns over warm colors.