encouraging

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Last night I got very mildly high (a really great thing about being middle-aged in this new era of legal weed is that it’s really easy to get very consistent and reliable gummies with very consistent and reliable doses of THC so you can get yourself very mildly stoned, not enough to freak out or like lose time or anything, just enough to be Altered and take a little mini-vacation from your own brainweasels, and wake up refreshed the next day instead of hung-over) and scrolled Tumblr until I saw that post about multi-vortex “dead man walking” tornadoes again, and that got me to go search up the one they mentioned by name and then go into a wikipedia spiral about destructive multi-vortex tornadoes. (The post, shockingly, isn’t totally accurate, but isn’t like. wrong-wrong. For the record though the dead man walking bit of the tornado wasn’t as deadly as the just wall-of-black that came later.)

And actually while it was terrifying to see what kind of destruction the weather can wreak, it was kind of… encouraging. Reading the accounts of historical storms and more recent ones, there’s this throughline of learning, of new regulations and guidelines, of science being done. The old historic tornadoes, not only were the casualties high, but the aftermath horrible, people missing, fires wiping out survivors, local economies irrevocably destroyed. The newer tornadoes, often the weather itself was more severe, but there are fewer and fewer casualties, better warnings and advice from meteorologists, better government response. I didn’t track any of my sources on this and I’ve closed the window so I’d stop reading about it, but I read with interest about how in 1991 a news team sheltered under an overpass during a scary but relatively weak tornado, and broadcast footage of this, and then in a much stronger early-2000s tornado, a number of people were killed sheltering under highway overpasses, and then by the 2010s the advice to avoid highway overpasses had become common knowledge, and people are no longer being killed this way. (Also I finally had my question answered, having been on the Thruway during a tornado warning: why not shelter under an overpass? Well! Because of fluid dynamics. Just as water pressure intensifies when going through a sudden narrowing in a pipe, so too does wind going through a narrower space, so if you’re hiding in that narrow space you are gonna get sucked out of it. So if you find yourself out in the open, do not shelter under a bridge or overpass! Shelter instead in a ditch if you can find one, or a hollow in the ground, something open to the sky so the wind will not intensify passing through it. Now You Know. ok fine I reopened the tab to cite this: NOAA’s page on this topic https://web.archive.org/web/20120107153850/http://www.crh.noaa.gov/ddc/?n=over)

Another one was a storm in the 20s where several of the casualties were farmers out in their fields, taken unawares. Normally farmers are weather-savvy, the article said, and would know to shelter from storms, but this tornado had an unusual appearance, and took them by surprise. Contrast that to later storms, where mobile radars were deployed, where meterologists and broadcasters had protocols already in place, where local inhabitants knew to listen and knew how to respond– there are still instances of bad advice, like an Oklahoma TV weatherman telling people to get in their cars and evacuate which led to gridlock on the local highway which would have resulted in hundreds of casualties save for the tornado missing that area, but mostly people know now what to do. The casualties are much sparser, and many of them now are, instead of people making fatal mistakes, instead people doing the right thing but the storm just being too powerful. (No less tragic, but I suppose it’s slightly less heartbreaking to know it was just bad luck and not also poor information.)

And you see examples like in 2011 the 12 oil rig workers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_El_Reno%E2%80%93Piedmont_tornado#Interstate_40%E2%80%93El_Reno, who sheltered in the change house, which due to new information about tornadoes had been built with tie-downs, which nearly failed but did not and all twelve souls were spared, and the company improved construction of future change houses as tornado shelters based on this information.

Anyway, it was a weird thing to fixate on for the evening but in the end it did leave me with a feeling of hopefulness. Like, this is a thing where science and good government actually can concretely improve outcomes.

Let’s not extend our worry into climate change making all this worse, just yet, and leave it at this.

LOL this is so poorly cited I’m turning reblogs off, and hopefully I’m done obsessing about tornadoes for a lil bit now. Well, we’ll see if that resolution sticks, I reopened tabs to put in at least minimal citations here and haven’t closed them yet. (Your picture was not posted)

Acid Dyes In Squirt Bottles: kinda a tutorial

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So I bought some silk scarves with an eye toward dyeing them to use for giftwrapping for Christmas, and I’d idly meant to research techniques but suddenly realized I’m running out of time.

Almost all the tutorials on dyeing anything at all that I can find lately are for ice dyeing. Which is cool and I love that that’s so trendy now. But some of the ones I’ve watched…

Well, see the point of ice dyeing is that powdered dyes often split into components and so you get really cool edge-effects where the different pigments in the dye penetrate the fabric differently because of the slow wicking action of the melting ice etc. I watched a tutorial where someone just had three primary colors, which are generally pure pigments, and did this, and I was like, you could have put those into squirt bottles and saved yourself about 8 hours plus all the time you spent making that ice. It did give a nicely feathered spectrum effect but the ice mostly did not contribute anything to the process.

But what I did learn from that tutorial was some advice on how to get acid dyes to strike in a cold low-immersion process. So I’m going to write up what I did, since that’s what I was actually looking for, and every bit of information I can currently find is contained in overly-long videos that spend most of their runtime on irrelevant stuff.

Mostly this is for my own reference later, as I’m now old enough that I keep stumbling across things I’ve made and being like “wait I don’t remember how I did this. I really made this? I have to have, nobody else lives here. How did I do this??” So anyway, overly-long and underly-technical writeup below the cut. Pictures to follow in a separate post.

What do I mean, cold low-immersion process??

1. Immersion is how most dyeing works. You make a dye bath, and you dunk your fabric into it. Low-immersion means you lie your stuff all out on some flat surface, maybe over a wire rack maybe over a sheet of plastic, and just put enough dye on for it to soak in. That’s low-immersion, and generally is how you’re gonna get multiple unmixed colors on one object.
2. and cold? Well, acid dyes, which work best on protein-based fibers like wool and silk, need heat to strike, or actually bond to the fabric. If you just dunk some silk in a dye bath and then rinse it, the dye mostly rinses out. You need heat to set it.

Let’s back up a second– acid dyes?? So there are two main types of dyes you use on fabric. Acid dyes are called that because you add some vinegar once the dye has soaked in, to get it to stick. (Yes, you need acid and heat!) The other kind, which you usually use for ice dyeing, is fiber-reactive dyes. Fiber-reactive are what you want for cotton, linen– plant-based fibers, and some synthetics. (Nylon works with acid dyes for some reason, rayon needs fiber-based. I don’t remember why but the Internet surely knows, it’s surely very simple.)

So anyway. Fiber-reactive dyes are applied to fabric that’s been pre-treated with soda ash and then set without much heat, though they do need to “cure” at a high temperature– it doesn’t have to be as hot as with acid dyes though. (A black plastic bag in the sun, an electric blanket lying overtop the bag they’re in, that level of heat at most.) So they’re the usual, traditional type of dyes you use for tie-dyeing, which is normally done on cotton t-shirts, and which very often is done with low-immersion methods to let you get a bunch of colors on there, are fiber reactive dyes. Many many many tutorials exist for this, including how to tie them. Very cool stuff.

I wanted that effect on silk though.

(*the alkali pre-rinse is fine for cotton and linen and such. alkali on silk is Generally Bad News. This is another reason people generally don’t do fiber reactive dyes on silk. Silk shrugs off acid reasonably well but alkali is no bueno. Also for the record never ever try to bleach silk for any reason, that dissolves it. Now You Know!)

So. I did find this tutorial from Dharma Trading https://www.dharmatrading.com/home/space-dyed-yarn-with-acid-dyes-tutorial.html, about space dyeing. Remember when space-dyed stuff was trendy?? Many of you whippersnappers probably don’t. It used to be cool and is probably what led to the invention of ice-dyeing, which clearly like A Person invented but I have no idea who and I bet finding out would be difficult so my ADHD ass is NOT going down that rabbit hole right.

So i tried that. I used aluminum foil instead of plastic wrap for the simple reason that my kitchen is currently torn apart and all my worldly goods in cardboard boxes but I had a roll of aluminum foil in the basement for some reason. I put down a vinyl tablecloth on my washing machine and used it as a work surface. And I found a broken old steamer insert and set it in an old aluminum pot that lives in the basement.

I mixed up squirt bottles of four colors of acid dye in approximately the proportions from the Dharma tutorial. I don’t have measuring implements currently, see above re: kitchen (I’m planning on retiring a number of my measuring implements to serve in fiber arts, and keeping only the nice ones for the new nice kitchen, but that hasn’t happened yet) so it was all very approximate.

And then I just lay each silk scarf out on the aluminum foil on the dryer and went to town.

I learned to be careful and sparing with the amount of dyes, to keep them from pooling underneath the material– silk scarves aren’t very absorbent. Any excess dye pooling on the aluminum foil will of course spread and get muddy. So what I wound up doing was working from right to left (on my left was the laundry sink), and doing my lightest color on the right and my darkest on the left, and then when I was done, I used an eyedropper to apply white vinegar to lock in the pigment, and then I picked the whole works up very carefully and tipped it to the left and let everything extra run off into the sink. So having my, say, fuschia run across the back of what was supposed to be a dark purple section didn’t lead to any notable color contamination. One colorway had bright lemon yellow in it, and I was incredibly careful not to let any smudges or drips touch that– kept it on the right of my workspace, propped up slightly. The yellow draining across the red and purple of that colorway didn’t cause a problem, but I did wind up with a fingerprint of darker color in the yellow area (I think that’s what caused the blot anyway).

Anyway, once the dye was all applied, and I’d let it drip into the sink for a moment, I then folded up each scarf into its own packet, careful to still keep the lighter end upward, and put it into my busted-ass steamer basket which made this easier because one of the legs has fallen off it, see, so it tilts anyway, that’s why I retired it, and put the lid on and steamed each packet for about half an hour to 45 minutes.

At the end of that I pulled each packet out (there were overlaps, where I’d put a second packet in halfway through the first one. Most of the Strict Rules About Steaming Silk don’t apply to this process because drips aren’t a problem, dips in temperature that might lead to uneven mottling aren’t a problem, this is just meant to be pretty color splotches with random patterns so literally none of the intimidating stuff you have to do to achieve perfection are a problem here), I let it cool off a bit and then unwrapped it and rinsed the scarf. Not much color came off them, and I was able to reuse the foil, which it’s not that I’m being eco-friendly so much as that I only had the one roll of foil with not much left on it and this was the last day I could really do this, so. Not very scientific, but in the end I really was very thrifty LOL. Yes! I was being eco-friendly, that’s why i’m like this.

I then let the scarves dry on my drying rack overnight, and came back the next day to collect them. I brought them all back to my mother-out-law’s to wash them in her washing machine since mine is currently not properly hooked up (additional nightmare, love it)– I figured this wouldn’t be messy in her impeccable laundry room and I was right, very little dye to rinse out. Gave them a wash with dharma’s professional detergent, then a rinse with milsoft, then an extra rinse, and I’ve now let them dry again, ironed them, and have them in a plastic bag with some perfume because the detergent smells kind of awful LOL. I’m letting them sit like that for a day or two and then I’ll get them out and package them up for gifts. (Your picture was not posted)