Set of six additional photos from last week's dyeing experiments. This one shows cochineal on wool yarn, with color variations resulting from use of four different mordants. The mordanting compounds were, from top to bottom: potassium aluminum sulfate (alum), potassium dichromate (chrome), copper sulfate (copper), and stannous chloride (tin).

For the rest of the images, click here and use the thumbnails on the right of the linked screen to scroll through the list.

Tags: dyeing, spinning
Current Location: At work, alas
Mood: artistic

Colorful Day's Work Some of the results of about 8 of us playing with wool, silk, and natural dyes on July 11, 2009. There are more colors, but they were hanging over the porch railing and outside the frame. The rippling pink and violet stuff in the foreground is a pile of silk "handkerchiefs" which are not actually woven, but merely stretched sheets of raw silk ready for dyeing and spinning. These were dyed with cochineal, using various mordants. The nearly black and charcoal wools were dyed with logwood, the red and burgundy samples next to the left with cochineal. The brassy colors at the far left of the table were dyed with fustic. The pale bluegreen yarn at the top left has not yet been dyed at all. That's the color left by using copper sulfate as a mordant. Photo courtesy of Barb Bundick.

Tags: dyeing, spinning
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: artistic

No, not dying. Dyeing. With colors.

I spent a good chunk of the day cataloging Spanish language kids books. Never a fun exercise, that, but these were really yuck. Books spun off from Hannah Montana and then translated into Spanish. Talk about rotting kids brains twice, there it is. Then there were the High School Musical ones, no better. No wonder no one in the entire US had bothered to catalog this junk before.

Argos' appearance at the library has made it onto the website. Look quick if you want to see, after Wednesday it will disappear.

Now the dyeing. Tomorrow my spinning group is having a session on natural plant dyeing. I chose curly dock (Rumex crispus) as my color source since I happen to have a lot of it around. I also gathered daisy fleabane for a fellow member who is going to make dye from that. We have to chop up the plants and simmer them in distilled water for 45 min. or so, then let it cool and strain. That will be the dyestock, which we pour back into the distilled water bottle to take to the workshop tomorrow. The other thing I'm doing is preparing some small samples of white wool yarn by treating them with a mordant. The mordant is the chemical agent that helps the dyes bind to the fiber. The most common and least toxic of mordants used with wool is alum, but the workshop leader is going to provide samples prepared with that. I plan to do mine with copper sulfate, which produces what are often very different hues from the same dye. With daisy fleabane, for instance, alum yields yellow, but copper yields green. Copper sulfate, or copperas as the old dyers used to call it, is a poisonous substance that was once used in pesticides. It is also known as blue vitriol, and has to be handled with care. Fortunately I have dedicated enamel coated kettles to use for dyeing, so that's not a big problem. Other metal salts sometimes used as mordants include iron sulfate (non-toxic, but it dulls colors rather than brightening them,) and tin in the form of stannous chloride (brightens and intensifies color but it is both toxic and caustic, so no longer used much.) There was a chromium salt used at one time, but I don't even know where to get that one, it's so nasty. (Oh, yeah, I remember, it's potassium dichromate, and you can get it from chemical supply places but not from the pharmacy or grocer.) A few dyes require no mordant, or will work with common chemicals such as vinegar, ammonia, or washing soda.

I'm expecting a rusty yellow or a greenish beige from the curly dock, depending on the mordant. If it works, I'll have photos in a day or so.

Gary will be gone with Rob to a Civil War event all day tomorrow, so I am animal care, grocery shopping, AND get to attend my little class. It's going to be busy.

Tags: dyeing, fursuiting, spinning, work
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: busy

I've said enough before that you know I'm not fond of having internet computers for the public to use. Inevitably we are asked to "teach" people how to use a computer, and they know nothing. Worse, when they can't get something to work, it is always our fault as far as they are concerned. Our machines or software must be defective.

Today, two at once. One who "couldn't access his e-mail". That one turned out to be because he didn't know either his user name or password at Yahoo. Sorry, not our fault, no we can't do a thing about that. No, it isn't our machine that's causing this difficulty. Just because your machine at home "knows" your id and password, that doesn't mean that ours would know it.

The other was, against repeated advice that we give, purchasing tickets with his credit card on our public access workstation. This is not a secure place to use your credit card or access your financial records. Period. But they will insist on doing it. Once the transaction was completed, he couldn't print the receipt or the tickets. The job kept going to the printer, but would come up with "0" pages. He was sure it was our fault. It was because our stupid machines have Linux instead of Windows and a proper browser (by which he meant IE, duh.) So finally he was allowed to use a staff machine with Windows on it. The tickets still wouldn't print. Same symptoms. Turns out that the website is using Flash (!!!??) to handle the receipt and print operation. Jeez! How stupid can you get. Flash is insecure, unreliable, and bug ridden.

This time it wasn't an airline. He was buying tickets for an amusement park. Why he didn't just call their 800 number and buy them, I have no idea. Somehow the computer is "easier" even when it doesn't work and he doesn't know what he's doing. We often have similar problems with airlines though. People buy tickets online and want to print boarding passes, which in some cases just doesn't work. Even on a Windows machine, the things won't print. My only guess is that they assume a printer directly attached to the PC rather than a network device. Or maybe the airlines are using Flash too. How incredibly stupid can they get?

Came home, had dinner, hurried out to the garden to get in the last hour before sunset. Mosquitoes out in force. Did get 18 more tomato plants set out for late season crop if it doesn't freeze too early. I love tomatoes. If I can't get anything else from the garden, I want my tomatoes. Blueberries are starting to ripen, I see.

Looked around for suitable dye plants to use for a workshop on Saturday. Found large quantities of two that I didn't realize I had: curly dock, which is a noxious weed that produces zillions of seeds that no one seems to eat, so it spreads like mad; and fleabane daisy, which is pretty but can take over huge areas. Cut several ounces of each. According to my sources, the curly dock is in fact edible, seeds, leaves and even root. It's in the buckwheat family. A black dye was once made from the roots, but I'm after a deep yellow from the seed heads.

Tags: dyeing, gardening, work
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: busy

Back on July 22 I posted about dyeing cotton poonies yellow and blue. I'm now about half finished with the job of spinning them and plying the resulting thread into a lace weight yarn for knitting.

Here is a photo of the Bosworth book charkha I am using to spin the dyed poonies into thread. Two strands of the thread are then plied together in the opposite direction using a spinning wheel. Note poonies on the right, finished 2-ply yarn on the left. This yarn is coming out to about 2400 to 2800 yards per pound and I plan to knit a lacy scarf from it.

Tags: dyeing, knitting, spinning
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: cheerful

These rather bedraggled looking cotton poonies (punis) were dyed last night by dipping them in solutions of Procion MX fiber reactive dye with sodium carbonate and salt. They are still just slightly damp as the photo is taken, but hopefully will be dry enough to spin by tomorrow. Colors were selected to fit blue sky or water, sunlight, white sand, and green for seaweed or foliage. I plan to spin a fine yarn from them and then make lace, either knit or crocheted.

(See yesterday's entry for a description of the dyeing process.)

Tags: dyeing, fiber, spinning
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: artistic

No, not "ponies". (And get your mind out of the gutter, too.)

Poonies (or punis) are cotton prepared for spinning by carding it and then rolling it tightly into thin cigar shapes. I've been meaning for a while to experiment with dyeing some prior to spinning. I've seen some commercially dyed poonies and they look nice but the prices are just too high. So tonight I took a 100g bundle of Indian poonies and divided them into smaller groups, loosely tying each with pieces of yarn. Then I soaked them in a solution of warm water and sodium carbonate (washing soda.)

I used Procion MX fiber reactive dyes (bright yellow and navy blue) to prepare two small cups of stock solution (50 ml of warm water and about 3 ml of dye powder for each color.)

When the poonies were soaked through, I squeezed them out gently and set them aside while I prepared the first color bath by adding the yellow stock solution to 1.5l of warm water into which 10g of ordinary salt and 5g of the washing soda had been dissolved. The pale yellow stock solution blossomed into a brilliant orange yellow. I stood the poonies on end in this solution, sloshing them up and down gently then letting them rest for about 20 minutes with one end in the dye, and the other in the air, so that the dye only soaked up through about 2/3 of their length, leaving the top ends still natural colored.

When the yellow seemed intense enough, I rinsed them in running water until the water ran clear and squeezed them gently again.

Then I prepared the blue dye solution from the same proportions as the yellow, and repeated the process, but dipped the undyed ends into the blue dye. The end result after rinsing and washing out with mild detergent was poonies that varied in color from bright yellow at one end through green and then to sea blue with white flecks at the other end. This was more or less what I'd hoped for. Now if they dry out without being so matted that I can't spin them, I will be able to make cotton yarn in "bright beach" colors: yellow sun, green foliage, natural creamy sand and foam, and shades of blue for water and sky. I'll photograph the dyed poonies tomorrow when they've dried a bit. (Photo now available in next entry.)

Tags: dyeing, fiber, spinning
Current Location: Rainy oak grove
Mood: blue and yellow

So I was dyeing that silk necktie this morning, and the dye bath was still dark when I finished, indicating that I had used nowhere near all the dye. Rather than waste it all, I scrounged around looking for some wool yarn or something that I could use in that color (dark forest green.) Came up empty handed.

Then a light bulb went on in my horsie-head. A quick search through a drawer found me the white t-shirt that had a couple of mud stains on it. Very faint, coffee-colored blotches from being kissed by a horse with mud on her face. Several washings later, they are still visible. I grabbed a sack of those little rubber bands you use when braiding manes, and went to work. When the t-shirt was in adequate bondage, I soaked it in warm water, squeezed it out, and eased it into the dye. I was afraid the rubber bands weren't tight enough when I saw how well the dye was penetrating the fabric, but... it worked!

Shirt is now in the washer to get the last of the dye out. A genuine 60s throwback, and I don't remember when the last time was that I had a tie-dyed t-shirt. Probably at least 30 years ago. It looks good too. The design turned out pretty much as I planned it. ;p

(Oh, and the mud stains are now invisible. Unless maybe you put it in black light, but I don't have one of those any more.)

Tags: dyeing
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: nerdy
Music: The Beatles - "Back in the USSR"