Beautiful, Beautiful Blue

Time to wash out the Cerulean test squares! I just love how they look in the sink!

It makes me SO happy!


Here are the squares when they were wet...


And here they are dry...


The steps going up are an 80% progression: the amount of dye in each square is 80% of what's in the previous square. The steps going down are a 50% progression. One of my goals with this test was to see how much dye I need to get a really dark color. I'd like to go darker than this. For the next colors I'll try a 200% as well.

The steps you see above are 100%, 80%, 64%, 50%, 40%, 33%, 16%, 8%, 4%, 2%.

I mixed 1/4 teaspoon of dye with 80 ml (milliliters) of pre-mix (water, urea, and water softener). 10 ml of this will dye a 5"x5" square to 100%, where 100% is 4t of (blue) dye per yard of quilting weight cotton. I also added 1/2 teaspoon of my soda ash solution (1 cup soda ash per gallon of water) to each itty-bitty dye bath.

I need to find out whether I need urea in the pre-mix. Is that just for painting with dye? Does it do anything in a dye-bath?

* * *

I got some more equipment yesterday. At a pharmacy that does compounding (making up formulations of medicine) I got a bunch of syringes for measuring in milliliters. I used them today and they work great.

The sizes are 1, 10, 30, and 60ml, and cost between 75 cents and $2 each. The tiny ones I've had for a while. The vet sent me home with those filled with kitty pain killer and I held onto them.

I got a bunch of stuff (colanders, bowls, towels) at Goodwill, and was especially happy to find two of these cups with good metric units.

What I really want are some graduated cylinders and proper beakers, but I'm trying to put the breaks on spending for a bit.

I had hoped to test ALL my other colors today, but only got to Fuchsia. I'm doing 200%, 100%, 50%, 16%, 4%, and 2%.

For the 200% square I had planned to use 20 ml of my standard solution but, silly me, that won't fit in the cup and I'd already diluted the dye. So I cut the fabric square in half.


I'm also doing some initial tests on dye painting. Here is some fabric soaked in soda ash solution, and I was attempting a 50% progression. I don't think I was mixing it very evenly.


I had to wrap my head around dye amounts for dye-painting as opposed to those for a dye bath. For the dye paint, it's how many little grains of dye vs. how much water. For a dye bath it's how many grains of dye vs. how many square inches of fabric in the bath. (Well technically it depends on grams of each, but whatever.) In a dye bath the amount of water (within reason) doesn't matter, but with paint more water means a paler mark.

For full-strength dye-paint I'm going to try mixing 1/4 teaspoon of dye with either 30 ml (for red dyes), 15 ml (for blue dyes), or 10 ml (for yellow or black dyes) of water. This matches the relative concentrations of different colors that I'm using in dye baths.

I left this sample out for about an hour before I remembered I have to keep it wet for the dye to react! I sprayed on a little water and covered it all up. As I wrote this and uploaded the picture, I realized I have paper, not plastic underneath it, no doubt sucking the moisture away from the fabric! I'll fix that before I call it a night.