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| The magic of overdyeing! |
Showing posts with label overdyeing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label overdyeing. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
Procion dyeing - science or alchemy? The magic of overdyeing
It doesn't matter how many times I do it, moving a pile of yellows, greens and blues to purples, pinks, reds and browns just feels like alchemy, not science! So glad I did Carol Soderlund's color mixing class. Magic is easier to perform when you have a great road map.
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Procion MX overdyeing fabric - results part 1 - getting all sciency(ish)
Dyeing with Procion MX is so stable and successful because it is a fiber reactive dye, which means there is a chemical reaction between the fabric and the dye which creates a very strong bond. Unlike paint, that sits on the surface of the fabric, the dye forms a covalent bond with the fabric. If you want a good scientific explanation relating to Procion MX, go here.
If you want a quick word picture here it is (I can imagine my daughter, the chemist, rolling her eyes..): picture the fabric with lots and lots of cute little hands, fingers waving in the air. Make sure your mental picture is cute, or it starts to look like a horror movie - zombie fabric is coming to get you, run! Now imagine your dye stock also has lots and lots of cute little hands, fingers waving in the liquid.
When the dye stock meets the fabric, the hands reach out to one another and the fingers intertwine, making bonds between the fabric and the dye. The number of hands (technically dye sites) on the fabric depends on the type of fabric you have chosen. The number of hands in the dye stock depends on the strength you have mixed, i.e. the ratio of dye powder to water. While you can bump up the ratio of dye to water, after a certain point you are just wasting dye because the number of dye sites on the fabric is the limiting factor. After all the dye sites are filled, there is no way additional dye can react with the fiber and it will just wash out and down the drain.
This is important for overdyeing. If all the hands on the fabric are already holding corresponding dye stock hands, the overdye color will have no impact. However, if you have used a diluted dye stock for your first dye, there will still be fabric hands without dye partners and they will reach out and grab the dye hands of the second dye stock.
Now I have to step away from my analogy for a moment to point out that dye is transparent. Unlike paint, which covers your first color, dye will not completely mask your first color. Moreover, the base color will influence the second color.
It sometimes gets confusing when people talk about overdyeing. Some people use overdyeing to mean dyeing a value gradient from light to dark, or dyeing a mixture of two colors from pure color A through increasing amounts of color B till the last color is just pure color B. However, what I am doing here is dyeing and washing out a base color, then dyeing a second color over the first base color.
Next post: analyzing the results of my experiments.
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| Overdyed fabric |
When the dye stock meets the fabric, the hands reach out to one another and the fingers intertwine, making bonds between the fabric and the dye. The number of hands (technically dye sites) on the fabric depends on the type of fabric you have chosen. The number of hands in the dye stock depends on the strength you have mixed, i.e. the ratio of dye powder to water. While you can bump up the ratio of dye to water, after a certain point you are just wasting dye because the number of dye sites on the fabric is the limiting factor. After all the dye sites are filled, there is no way additional dye can react with the fiber and it will just wash out and down the drain.
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| Overdyed fabric |
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| Diluted base colors overdyed |
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| Neutral overdye |
Next post: analyzing the results of my experiments.
Sunday, June 14, 2015
No longer threadbare!
Procion MX continues to rock my world with color! I love to add hand embroidery to my fiber creations, so what could be better than dyeing my own thread? Quilting Arts Aug/Sept 2014 had an article by Melanie Testa and Carol Soderlund on dyeing your own thread. I bought the thread winders they recommended, but when I came to do the dyeing, I couldn't find them. You know how that goes...But it was all good, because I like my way better, although there is some winding and untangling at the end.
Once my dyes were mixed and my fibers were soda soaked, I took some trusty plastic shelf liner and added three generous dollops (very scientific term..) of analogous colors towards the back of the plastic. For more complex colors I added black or grey. Then I laid the skein of thread closest to me on the plastic. With gloved hands I then drew beads of the dye down to the fiber, mixing the colors in some parts, keeping them pure in others. It is so fascinating to see them blend and change, and this way I could get a lot of color variety because I could adjust the length of the fiber strands. I have several sets of lidded plasticware for batching, and I also used them for soaking each color set in water to get rid of the excess dye when the batching was complete. Three days of changing the soaking water and the dye was gone. The hardest part was getting them dry! They are more tangled than usual because I got impatient and threw them in the tumble drier in garment bags. Luckily my daughter is almost as obsessive as me, and will join me in a winding and untangling fest! Grown up daughters are the best! So companionable!
Once dyed, the threads can also be overdyed, providing you haven't saturated the color receptors the first time around. Great for couching, embroidery etc. Yarn is from Dharma Trading.
The first time round I added a reasonable amount of soda solution, but didn't cover submerge the fiber, and when I came to add the dye, it didn't penetrate all the way in some places. The second time I completely covered the fiber in soda solution, expecting to be able to drain off the excess, but it drank it all in! Greedy stuff. You could probably soak it in water to get it saturated and then just add the soda ash you need for dyeing. Once wet, the dye seemed to travel fine. This yarn takes forever to dry too, but is very rewarding once it is done. The first yarn pack I bought, I cut it into lengths suitable for couching or embroidery and then dyed half in oranges/corals/pinks and the other half in greens. What was I thinking?? These are big packs. No one needs that much green! Luckily it overdyes beautifully. This was a desperately boring pale lilac, but not anymore! Some of the green is now teal and turquoise.
I had so much fun with the first yarn pack, I then tried the shahrazade. Clearly I should not enter spelling bees, that is a word with waaaay too many letters! This yarn has rayon slubs, which also dyed beautifully. The more prosaic thread is DMC 8.
Once my dyes were mixed and my fibers were soda soaked, I took some trusty plastic shelf liner and added three generous dollops (very scientific term..) of analogous colors towards the back of the plastic. For more complex colors I added black or grey. Then I laid the skein of thread closest to me on the plastic. With gloved hands I then drew beads of the dye down to the fiber, mixing the colors in some parts, keeping them pure in others. It is so fascinating to see them blend and change, and this way I could get a lot of color variety because I could adjust the length of the fiber strands. I have several sets of lidded plasticware for batching, and I also used them for soaking each color set in water to get rid of the excess dye when the batching was complete. Three days of changing the soaking water and the dye was gone. The hardest part was getting them dry! They are more tangled than usual because I got impatient and threw them in the tumble drier in garment bags. Luckily my daughter is almost as obsessive as me, and will join me in a winding and untangling fest! Grown up daughters are the best! So companionable!
Once dyed, the threads can also be overdyed, providing you haven't saturated the color receptors the first time around. Great for couching, embroidery etc. Yarn is from Dharma Trading.
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| Procion MX dyed cotton yarn |
The first time round I added a reasonable amount of soda solution, but didn't cover submerge the fiber, and when I came to add the dye, it didn't penetrate all the way in some places. The second time I completely covered the fiber in soda solution, expecting to be able to drain off the excess, but it drank it all in! Greedy stuff. You could probably soak it in water to get it saturated and then just add the soda ash you need for dyeing. Once wet, the dye seemed to travel fine. This yarn takes forever to dry too, but is very rewarding once it is done. The first yarn pack I bought, I cut it into lengths suitable for couching or embroidery and then dyed half in oranges/corals/pinks and the other half in greens. What was I thinking?? These are big packs. No one needs that much green! Luckily it overdyes beautifully. This was a desperately boring pale lilac, but not anymore! Some of the green is now teal and turquoise.
I had so much fun with the first yarn pack, I then tried the shahrazade. Clearly I should not enter spelling bees, that is a word with waaaay too many letters! This yarn has rayon slubs, which also dyed beautifully. The more prosaic thread is DMC 8.
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| Procion MX hand-dyed DMC and rayon/cotton blend |
Lots of fun, and not difficult at all! Give it a shot! (If you haven't used Procion MX dyes before, do some research and make sure you use safe practices. Paula Burch's website is a fount of information )
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