{"id":822,"date":"2011-10-21T21:42:52","date_gmt":"2011-10-22T05:42:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.snapdragonlace.com\/?p=822"},"modified":"2012-03-29T21:11:54","modified_gmt":"2012-03-30T05:11:54","slug":"dye-lot-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.snapdragonlace.com\/?p=822","title":{"rendered":"Dye Lot #1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A couple weeks ago I decided to try dying some of my own thread.\u00c2\u00a0 Actually, I decided quite a while ago that I wanted to give it a try, but hadn’t gotten around to it.\u00c2\u00a0 Then a couple weeks ago I had a dream in which I was wearing a dress decorated with hand-dyed-thread of a very specific color.\u00c2\u00a0 The next day while teaching my tatting class at Piecemakers in Costa Mesa I found that they had two random boxes of r.i.t. dye, one of which looked like it was exactly the color I dreamed about.\u00c2\u00a0 Of course, I had to get it and try it that very night.\u00c2\u00a0 Nevermind that I was visiting my parents that night or that I got to their place after 10pm.\u00c2\u00a0 Luckily they were out of town that night and wouldn’t be back until late the next day so I was able to stay up until 5am dying thread.<\/p>\n

I already had a bunch of skeins wound up because I had a couple balls of a not-very-good white thread that I wanted to use up, but didn’t know what to do with.\u00c2\u00a0 I figured I’d sacrifice them to my dying experiments since I wouldn’t be very upset if they were wasted.\u00c2\u00a0 So I had a couple skeins wound of size 30 of some unknown brand and a bunch of size 10 in Royal.\u00c2\u00a0 Years ago I bought 3 of the gigantic skeins of Royal in white and I’d only used about a half of one.\u00c2\u00a0 By the end of the night of playing with dye I’d finished that one off and made a pretty good dent in the second.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I also wanted to try dying thread with food coloring so I did that first.\u00c2\u00a0 Didn’t really work for me.\u00c2\u00a0 I added a few drops of food coloring and vinegar to the hot water (the way that I dye eggs), and when I rinsed the thread all the color washed out and I was left with some very pastel colors which weren’t really what I was going for.\u00c2\u00a0 I left it out to dry and even though I thought I’d gotten all the color that was going to wash out it still left a faint bit of color on the papertowels when I went back to look at it, so I think it will probably still fade a bit more with time.<\/p>\n

After the food coloring failed I switched to the real fabric dye and not surprisingly it worked great.\u00c2\u00a0 :)\u00c2\u00a0 Mostly I was just experimenting and trying things out with the amount of dye and the length of time the thread was left in the water.\u00c2\u00a0 I tried a couple variegated skeins and they worked pretty well.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>My modest dying bucket was a cottage cheese container. I put it on a piece of plastic (actually a old cearal bag) that hung over the sink so when I made the varigates by hanging the skein over the side it would drain into the sink. \u00c2\u00a0I ended up making a lot more than I intended to, but I figured as long as I had dye left in the water I should just keep winding up skeins and playing around with it.\u00c2\u00a0 Seemed like a shame to waste the dye so I just kept adding hot water and going and going until it was 5am.\u00c2\u00a0 The dyed thread kept getting fainter and fainter and finally I left one last skein in the water and went to bed.\u00c2\u00a0 When I woke up it had soaked up the rest of the water and the dye and looked pretty nice.<\/p>\n

They dried pretty slowly just sitting on the counter so I ended up taking a hair drier to them to try to get my parents kitchen back to normal by the time they got home.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve done a bit of tatting with the thread since then and I like the way it came out.\u00c2\u00a0 It wasn’t very uniform and I have a lot more respect for all the thread dyers out there who are able to make an exact science out of it and end up with a uniform product.\u00c2\u00a0 Since I wasn’t really going for any specific colors or variegates it all looks great to me.<\/p>\n

I used only a really small amount of the dye so I’ll definitely play around with it some more.\u00c2\u00a0 Last time I was at Piecemakers then I bought the other color of dye they had which is a golden yellow.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not big on multicolor threads, but I’ll probably give it a try or two at some point.\u00c2\u00a0 Luckily I bought a huge amount of white thread on clearance when all the Joanns in Southern CA stopped carrying thread so I’ve got a lot to use up.\u00c2\u00a0 Problem is that all this thread is going to take a really long time to tat with and I’m trying to shrink my supply stash.\u00c2\u00a0 I guess I’ve figured out what to give to tatters for Christmas…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple weeks ago I decided to try dying some of my own thread.\u00c2\u00a0 Actually, I decided quite a while ago that I wanted to give it a try, but hadn’t gotten around to it.\u00c2\u00a0 Then a couple weeks ago I had a dream in which I was wearing a dress decorated with hand-dyed-thread of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hand-dyed-thread"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.snapdragonlace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.snapdragonlace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.snapdragonlace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.snapdragonlace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.snapdragonlace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=822"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.snapdragonlace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1204,"href":"https:\/\/www.snapdragonlace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822\/revisions\/1204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.snapdragonlace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.snapdragonlace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.snapdragonlace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}