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acid dyes in squirt bottles
Dec. 24th, 2023 08:25 amimmersion dyeing, let's be real here, dharmatrading, acid dyes
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I didn’t take great pictures. I thought I had but I’m going back through and I just didn’t take the ones I thought I had.
So, to start, I used the bottles you can buy from dharma, because I was ordering stuff from them anyway. I’d also gotten one of their kits on a clearance thing so I had gloves and rubber bands and such to hand.
what photos I have are behind the cut.
[image description: A silk/wool blend scarf, folded in half and also slightly scrunched along its length, lying on top of a slightly crinkled length of aluminum foil, on top of a plastic bag, with the bottoms of a few bottles visible at the top of the frame, and a plastic container with some dye in it and a plastic spoon.]
So here’s the only one I photographed in-progress. It’s a scarf, about eight by 32 inches or so? To the left it’s pale yellow, then it’s orange, then red, then fuschia, and then black at the far left end.
I had four bottles, so I had yellow, red, fuschia, and black in the bottles by this point. But I had two different colors of yellow dye, and I wanted a very pale color on the extreme end of this one. So I mixed up some of the pale-pale yellow in a plastic takeout soup container and dabbed it on with a spoon. I kept the right end of the scarf slightly elevated, so none of the darker dyes would run along under the underside of the scarf into that yellow section.
I’ve found that squirting two colors next to each other doesn’t blend them very smoothly– which is an effect to play with, but. I wanted a gradation, so I experimented, and smooshing the scarf around with a spoon carefully can do it, but the thing i settled on for this one was putting a lot of yellow and a tiny bit of red from the squirt bottles into another plastic soup container and then applying drops of that mixture with a spoon in the middle where I wanted them to meet, to get a better orange. (My motivation was partly that the intended recipient of this scarf loves orange, so ymmv with this technique.)
I did do one scarf where I did not attempt to blend colors but squirted them as standalones. I’d done a tub-dye in a pot on the stove of a brilliant blue, and I’d done some shibori-tyeing of scarves in that bath earlier, and they were out and drying while I did this. one of them, i’d tied far too well, and it had large expanses of white and then some very dark blue banding, and I decided that was too much white left for me. So I took that one and overdyed it with the squirt bottles, in all the white areas, in random splotches. To get green for this I did just get the tiniest amount of green dye powder and mix it up in a soup container and apply it with a spoon, because I did not have another squirt bottle.
[image description: here’s that scarf, after steaming and drying but before ironing. An expanse of wrinkled silk fabric lying atop a metal drying rack is mottled with dark blue, and then is softly colored in splotches of pink, yellowish-green, green, and purple.]
A bit gaudy but kind of cool, I’m giving it as a gift to a preteen girl whose wardrobe I think it will compliment, but would have worn it myself. Couldn’t get a pure yellow because the white areas had backstained pale blue in the rinsing, but the sort of violent chartreuse here is fun.
The black dried to a purplish-gray color, so next time I should do actual math on the dye amounts. I do own a kitchen scale and had intended to use it to weigh the fiber and the powder, like the tutorials say to do, but jazz hands my kitchen is tore upppp and everything I own is in boxes, so where that scale ended up the sweet lord only knows and I will find out before I do my next batch of this.
(the reader can swap in whatever entity they prefer for “the sweet lord” because i am actually not specifying, I don’t want to know what kind of entity is tracking the belongings nominally in my possession because obviously they are not on speaking terms with me and won’t tell me where any of that stuff is no matter how nicely and desperately I’ve implored, over the years, so I just assume we’re not friends. I will reciprocate the disinterest, politely, as that seems wisest.)
And finally, for a bonus shot, here’s a shibori-dyed silk/wook scarf I’m very pleased with, which I achieved using the blocks of wood the kit came with, accordion-folded it between and rubber-banded around it, simmered it in the acid dye according to directions, and then rinsed it. It was originally a really striking white in the excluded patches, but one of the other scarves it was rinsed with had a lot of excess dye still in it, so it backstained the white of this scarf, which I actually prefer somewhat.
[image description: a length of fabric, translucent, stretched over a drying rack. It is a dark navy blue with big splotchy white shapes connected by wiggly strings of white.]
The blue dyebath, I hadn’t measured the pigment into and it had way too much. So I came back the next day and threw in some habotai yardage, loosely gathered and folded and then rubberbanded along its length, and then I had a wool/nylon dress that had become stained so I threw it in too, scrunching and rubberbanding it because I knew it wouldn’t dye evenly. (There was already some acid in the dyebath from the previous use, which I think encourages it to strike fast, that’s why they have you put the item in and simmer it a little before adding the acid? this is something I’ve surmised, so I might be wrong, but I just felt like I wasn’t going to get a good solid color from this bath so I’d better tie-dye on purpose and hope for a cool accidental result.)
I was busy, so I turned the heat off after half an hour and let the goods sit in the bath until it went cold, and when I went to pour it out, the dyebath was completely, entirely, one hundred percent clear, clearer than the previous day’s rinse water.
The yardage came out glorious:
[image description: my mother-out-law’s immaculate basement (trust me, it really is) bisected by a slightly translucent length of silk habotai, gently mottled in deep blue and white, hanging from the laundry line in gentle folds.]
I might buy another batch of scarves, I have a ton of stuff I need to do fiber-reactive dyes on but I have the fever and want to get better at silk scarves.
But I have. So many muslins I have made out of real cotton muslin, and I can’t really wear them until I’ve made them be some other color. So. (Your picture was not posted)
