Shibori

There was a Shibori-Workshop at the university, originally planned only for the Textile-Designers, but I managed to get in also. It was great! And I will definately try this again . The teacher was the owner of a Shibori-Shop in Düsseldorf, called Suzusan. Each of us got a piece of silk, a hook and cotton-thread wound on a peace of wood and tried to get the technique right, which is kind of a tye-dye-thing. Afterwards it got dyed with black acid dye and then dried before all the cotton thread was removed. The samples they showed us where much prettier than what any of us managed to do, but it was our first try.

Letzten Freitag fand ein Shibori-Workshop an der Hochschule statt, eigentlich zwar gedacht für Textildesigner, aber letztendlich durfte ich dann auch mitmachen. Und es wäre auch schade gewesen wenn ich keinen Platz mehr bekommen hätte, denn es hat großen Spaß gemacht. Der Vortragende hat selbst einen Shibori-Shop in Düsseldorf, Suzusan genannt. Jeder von uns hat ein Seidentuch bekommen, einen Haken und ein Holzstück um das Baumwollgarn gewickelt war. Die Technik ähnelt dem Tie-dye, wenn auch die Ergebnisse (nicht meine, die von den Leuten die das wirklich können) garnicht danach aussehen, dass das gewickelt wurde. Unsere mit Baumwollfaden gefesselten Tücher wurden dann mit Säurefarbstoff gefärbt, getrocknet, und dann befreit. Nagut, sonderlich ordentlich ist die Musterung innerhalb des tye-dyes nicht geworden, war ja aber auch der erste Versuch.

I found a video on youtube. In Japanese, but I think even without understanding a word it shows a bit of what shibori is.

 

How to dye noro-ish (sock blanks)

After all the spinning in the last 2 weeks I felt the urge to dye something. Luckily I had 2×150g sock yarn with me, already knitted into a long tube. Right now I have no particular project in mind, but I think it will be socks or gloves.

Unlike the KnitPicks sock blanks I don’t knit the tube with yarn held double because I fear that I might get white undyed spots and I also dislike knitting two things at a time. So I have 2 tubes, every one done with 70g of yarn and dye them lying side my side. For making the tubes I use my Prym Maxi-Strickmühle (I wouldn’t have the patience to knit them by hand, no way).

Before I start spilling the dye anywhere I weight the wool and then soak it. I fill the pot I normally use for space dyeing (in a clean state!) with lukewarm water + vinegar ( enough to get a pH 3.5-4) and let the wool sit in it for about one hour (you can also use your sink for this). Especially when using non superwash wool be careful not to felt it (You don’t need to squeeze it, it will get wet enough without any help).

If you haven’t done it so far you will need to make stock solutions from the dye powders. I prefer a concentration of 5 %, but it’s up to you. I normally prepare about 100ml and fill it in screw-top jars because I don’t use it all up directly. The best way to make these solutions may be specific to the dye you are using (Ashford, Wash-Fast ect). In general you use hot water and a little acid. Add only a few drops of this acidic water to the dye powder and paste it. Then slowly increase the amount of water. (avoid clumps by any means. Clumps in dye solutions can lead to really unpredictable results)

Now a little math is needed to calculate the necessary amount of stock solution. ( I won’t get into color-theory here, but you might need to mix a few solutions to get the color you want. This is only about the total amount of dye you use for the yarn).

When dyeing bold/vibrant colors (what I do most of the time) about 2 % dye is sufficient (this means: If you have 100g wool, you need 2 g dyestuff). Note that the amount may vary depending on the color. Up until now I never got a deep black with only 2 %.

Now look at the weight of your yarn and calculate the amount of dyestuff. If you want to dye it with 3 colors, divide the amount of dyestuff by 3. Then calculate how much of your stock solution is needed.

Take the yarn out of the pot and press most water out of it (never wring it) If there is too much water still inside you may end up in muddy colors because the yarn will sit in a sea of water + dye.

Take plastic wrapping and cut a piece of it, about 50cm longer than your knitted tube. Place it on the counter and place the tube on it. If you divided the yarn to avoid white spots or if you don’t like two-socks-at-a-time don’t forget to place both tubes alongside each other to get the same color patterning.

Now take your dyes. You need to mix the measured amount of stock solution with water. Enough water to get the dye all over the section of the tube it was meant for, but not that much to create puddles of water on the wrapping. I like to use small beakers (100ml) to mix the stock solution with the water and then pour it over the yarn. Now it’s time to press the yarn down a bit to get the dye everywhere. Just let it sit where it is and use your hand to press it down a little.

When you did this with every color it is possible that there was a little bit to much water and you see small puddles. If so take a piece of towel and carefully absorb the excess water. There shouldn’t be too much dye left in this water because you soaked the yarn in acidic water and so the dye will be on the fiber right now.

Now wrap the plastic around the tubes (one side, then the other) and place it all in a steamer for about 40 min. If you are using non-superwash wool be careful to let the fiber sit afterwards until it is cooled down. If your wool is superwash, you can be a little ruder and proceed when your yarn is still warm.

Finally it’s time to wash out any excess dye. To do so place the yarn with the wrapping around it in a sink and remove the plastic. Let lukewarm water pour over it and rinse. You may get better results when using a mild wool-detergent (z.B. Perwoll) because the loose dye will be washed out more easily.

Press the water out of the tubes and then roll them in an old towel to get a little more out. Then place them on a clothing line and wait until you can frog to knit them

 

Blown up Self Striping

Getting self striping in a noro like manner was something which got me thinking. I love noro, but for all the vegetable matter needed to be picked out of the yarn while knitting it’s too expensive. I have absolutely no problem if you love this yarn, but besides the slow color transitions there is nothing which draws me to it. Sadly, I couldn’t find many good alternatives, and often the colorways weren’t exactly what I looked for. Thanks to the internet I stumbled upon the technique of knitting the undyed yarn in a long tube and then dyeing it. Afterwards you rip it and wind it into a ball.

Luckily, I had a undyed skein of Wollmeise Twin 80/20 at hand and used a Prym Strickmühle ( a small knitting machine where you have to turn a crank to knit ).

The gauge of this thing is comparable to the what I get when knitting with 4-5mm needles. I decided to divide the skein in two balls and then knitting two separate tubes so that the fabric would be as open as possible so there will be no white spots. To dye the tubes I soaked them in acidic water ( app. pH 4), placed both tubes  on a long piece of plastic wrapping and pured the dye solutions over it. I was to lazy to calculate the accurate amounts of dye needed so I just went on until I was satisfied with the result. I think it’s really important not to pour too much water on it. Otherwise the colors get muddy because there will be a see of dyesolutions on the wrapping. When I was done I wrapped the plastic around it and placed it in my steamer. 40 minutes later I opened the steamer and let the wool cool down a little. Then I got the wool out of the plastic and hand washed it with perwoll to get rid of not bonded dye. It was quite a bit because of my not calculating anything. Then I pressed the wool against the wall of the sink to get a good portion of the water out of it. Afterwards I placed the tubes on a old towel, rolled it in and pressed a little more water out of it. Please, do not wring the still wet wool. You might get a few more drops of water out of it, but the wool will not appreciate this treatment.

After about 5 hours on a clothing line both tubes were dry so I could rip them and wind them into a ball.

I’m so curious what the cinished socks will look like!

 

A nice place to sprinkle dyes

Because of my boyfriend having to work in another part of Germany for quite a while I had time to take all my dyestuff and put up a little studio in my parents basement! They don’t need the workplate for a while so I can leave all the stuff there sitting like it is. After dyeing in my really tiny kitchen this is like heaven!

As you can see on the photos its quite handy! The two sinks are perfect for soaking the skeins as well as washing them afterwards. It’s not on the photo, but there is a long clothline above the stove so I can hang up the yarn when space dyeing. You can see the piece of yarn which is knotted on the clothline going into the pot.

 
I managed to dye 5 skeins, all still not completely dried. So maybe I need to wait until tomorrow to skein them and take a few pictures.

.. and a few hours of warm weather later….

     

The other three colorways can be found in my ravelry stash….

 

A bit more … dyeing

Thanks to pentecost I had time to dye a little in my parent’s basement and it was soo much better than doing it in my kitchen.

They have a huge room with two sinks, hot water and a workplate with clothlines above, so I could hook the yarn up on it to space dye. Due to the warm weather the skeins dried incredibly fast…

I have 6 undyed skeins left so there will be definately a little more dyeing in the next weeks. Maybe with photos and a little how-to.

 

Spilling (a little less) dye in my kitchen: Part 2

I dyed a little more today and I came to the result that I like dyeing in a pot much more than dripping dye over it without water and heat around it. There is so much dye in the water that will not bond to the yarn at all so I drove to a near supermarket to buy a pot I could use for dyeing. Before I considered seriously using my only cookingpot I have around here but even I got to thinking that this was not a good idea at all. Another advantage beside the more efficient dye use is that dyeing like this is much less messy. My kitchen didn’t look much different afterwards than before! I hate cleaning the worktop, the sink, the stove everytime I dye something.

I didn’t thought of using a pot for dyeing because I held that I would get only solid colors but I really should have known better. After I had placed the yarn in the water and put the vinegar in I just poured the dye over it and the resulting yarn is not solid colored at all.

The only thing which really annoys me is the awful long time it takes to dry a skein at the air. I put it next to the heating (bad gal, read in 2 books that this is no good idea at all) but it was no great use. Still much to damp to wind a skein. Hey, dyeing doesn’t needs so much time at all, but drying is soooo boring and tedious. Hate it.

Here they are: (one day later)

 

Spilling dye in my kitchen: Part 1

I actually tried to dye wool. I wanted to wait for a little time to do it at my parents house because there is so much more space than in my tiny 14 squaremeters students room but I couldn’t hold back.

So I prepared the stocksolutions and spilled blue dye all over the worktop in really really small kitchen because I wanted to shake it a little to dissolve the dye even more but the lid wasn’t properly screwed on and so… SPLASH ALL OVER THE PLACE. In that moment I thought feverishly about what I will say to the owner when I move out of here, but fortunately I could remove the deep blue stains with lots of scrubbig.

The dyeing itself was really easy and fast done. I took the hanks of yarn and immersed them im lukewarm water with a little detergent for about half an hour, than I removed the water and filled water mixed with citric acid in the bucket with the yarn so the dyestuff will bond better to the wool. After a few minutes I removed the water and mixed my solutions. Thanks to my new scale which didn’t work at all (I bought it because of the 0,01g minimal weight) I needed to take my kitchen scale which only gets 1g s. So my measurements might be a little vague, but hey, the colors will be unique! I’ll never be able to get them again.

For each hank I did 2 separate dyesolutions in different colors and poured them slowly over the hanks. I needed to squeeze a little to get the dye everywhere but it was overall really easy.

After that I pressed the excess dye out of it and placed it in my steamer for about 40 minutes. Afterwards I let it cool a little and then washed it cautiously with a little perwoll.

Actually it took 2 days to dry.. and here are the results:

A blue one for a dear friend of mine (I intended to dye it a little lighter shade, but the lack of practice produced it differently)

And here is the one for me:

I hope to dye more tomorrow because it was such fun.

 

dyeing for books

I can’t say no to books. So there are 2 new ones I will talk about a little.

 The first one is the

Dyer’s Companion

 

 It’s a small ringbound book which teaches the basics on dyeing with respect to the most used fibres. Moreover there are are useful sections on equipment and safety precautions.  This book is a overall approach on  dyeing and useful when you search for a summary on what to dye with which dyetype or really basic dyeing techniques. Don’t expect it to be complete with every information, a load of pictures  or a little more uncommon ways to get multicolored yarns. But as I said before I don’t think that this was the intention of the authors.

Dyeing to knit

 

This books is a more artistic approach. There are huge chapters about inspiration and even design of the goods which are knitted out of the yarn. Contrary to the Dyer’s Companion this book only covers the dyeing of wool, silk ( and nylon ) with acid dyes. What I really like about this book is the huge variety of dyeing procedures to achieve different looks in the dyed yarn. I don’t think it would be a big problem to use this methods on other fibres or dyetypes as long as you stay with the chemical conditions necessary to the choosen dye. And a last one: there are lots of photos inside!