experiment report

Well, the experiment with direct application of activated dye on silk produced a rather pretty veil, but very clearly I did not thicken the dye enough. The colors wandered rather more than I wanted them to.

The black test was a major oops moment... the veil had already been dyed once in a soda ash bath for quite a long time. It apparently "used up" all its dye sites, since the black dye I applied made NO impression on the veil at all! It entirely rinsed off. Really kind of weird experience.

I'll try again in a different situation sometime.

experiments

As long as I'm doing these fire veils, I decided to do a couple of experiments. I took the failed raspberry half-circle (came out blotchy) and I've wrapped it on a pole. Now, the rule of thumb for black is that black procion MX dyes will not give a black-black on silk. Normally when I dye black I use an acid dye, usually Jacquard's, in a pot on the stove.

But I had to wonder, if I was putting black over another color, would it be black enough? So I mixed up some black procion MX with urea water, soda ash, and some SuperClear. Now, here's something interesting... did you know SuperClear could get moldy? I didn't. It does. Don't think I've had the thickener out since I was dyeing cotton last summer. Maybe it should be stored in the fridge. Anyway, I thickened the black and soaked the wet raspberry silk. Tomorrow I'll be able to report just how black it looks.

I also did something I've been wanting to do for a while. I don't have room to paint silk veils. I literally can't spread out three yards of anything anywhere in the house. So some designs that other dyers find very simple, I find very hard. It occurred to me one day that I had never tried the simplest possible option... scrunching a veil only until it fit the largest container I have and doing direct dye application. Sooo... I've got a veil in now, having applied some gray, blue, and blue-green dyes, just out of curiosity. We'll see how it turns out.

emergency silk

Well, Ayperi collected two more students for her class, so first I hustled to make raspberry and grape black-edged veils for R, and now I am anxiously awaiting more blanks so I can do some fire half-ovals for D.

But right now I'm going to send you off to see some really beautiful snow-dyed fabrics on Beth's blog. Go on, go on! They are fabulous!

Immersion

So, between 12/27 and 1/3 I dyed sixteen veils. Sixteen veils in a week! Ai ai ai. Nine of them were in the same dye mixture, which made it possible to dye them concurrently -- not all in one bath, because they were low water immersion, but they could all be rinsed and washed together safely. I did four one day and five the next.

A few new things came into my process this time around. First of all, I switched from vinegar to citric acid solution for my presoak. I definitely noted brighter colors on the 8mm silk with the slightly more acidic citric acid. (And SO much less smelly.) I ordered several pounds more from Dharma right away.

Secondly, I gave up doing so much hand rinsing. On the theory that it used less water, I would spend a lot of time doing initial rinsing in the sink. Well... I don't know that it was actually using less water. It would take a long, long time and many buckets full. And I realized that I would just get a better rinse letting the fabric soak in a bigger volume of water, especially given some discussions on dye forums. So now I just do a short initial rinse in the sink and go straight to a washing machine load with Synthropol -- and I got great results.

I did almost make a grievous error while dyeing the last two veils. Amber had ordered two black half circles with green ribbon edges. I dyed them up green in a bucket, rinsed and dried, and then prepared to mask them and overdye in black. JUST as I was about to put them in the black vat... I realized I masked them backwards! I would have produced green veils with black edges! Whew, that was a narrow escape. That'll teach me to watch Doctor Who while masking veils. :-D