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Dye tests – calibrating the PH meter

PH is important to dye results – particularly with reds – and I never did get the hang of reading PH test strips that I’d just dipped in a dyebath,

As far as I can see, the strips turn the colour of the dye, which isn’t much help in figuring out the PH. Also, they come in packages of 100 or more, and are good for about a year from the time the package is open. I don’t do dye runs often enough to use the test strips up by their best before date, so I’d have to toss most of them and order new each year, which is a pain.

So I bit the bullet & ordered a PH meter on Amazon.

It needed to be calibrated; though the directions were in instructionese, they were reasonably idiot proof. The meter came with two little packets of powder and a tiny screwdriver. The powders, plus distilled water, provided the required acid & alkaline test solutions and the tiny screwdriver fit an equally tiny screw that let me adjust readings up or down.

So, now I’ve got scoured fabrics & yarns, and a working PH meter – preparing the sample swatches is next!

By | February 8th, 2016|dyes, equipment, ph testing|Comments Off on Dye tests – calibrating the PH meter
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Dye tests – scouring linen

This linen will be red. What shades of red, I don’t know yet – a series of tests with madder, cochineal and brazilwood is my current dye project.

Playing with the colours is fun&exciting, but much as I’d like to get right into weighing out the madder and grinding up the cochineals, I first need to scour the fabrics & yarns. Less entertaining, but necessary – before the colour goes in, whatever is inhabiting the fibre has to come out, and there’s a surprising amount of gunk on even the newest, cleanest, whitest textile!

Of the three fibres I scoured – silk, wool, and linen – the most dramatic was the linen. Though the yardage was new and clean and very white, the water turned this dirty yellow from the waxes and pectins from the linen, plus whatever was added in the processing.

In this case, I suspect there were optical brighteners – the fabric started out bright white. Now it’s still white, but with a more “natural” tone.

…

The PH meter I ordered just arrived in the mail! Now to calibrate it…

 

By | February 3rd, 2016|dyes, fibers, linen, scouring, silk, wool|Comments Off on Dye tests – scouring linen
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Knitted silk stockings, first attempt

Raspberry-mousse coloured knit silk stockings - first attempt

My first attempt at knitting the Eleonora stockings in silk was an education! (My first-first attempt was in wool, which I’ve had lots of experience with – and the gauge was way too big, so I abandoned it.)

To get back to the silk: I wanted to dye the yarn a true red with cochineal.

Since cochineal is sensitive to ph – an acidic dyebath pushes it toward red and a basic one towards purple – I used neutral ph distilled water for the dyebath and added vinegar in an attempt to shift the colour towards red.

Though I’ve gotten bright reds with cochineal & vinegar on wool, for some reason the yarn refused to become red no matter how much vinegar I added.

It settled to a raspberry mousse shade and refused to budge, so I worked with that.

When I started to knit the cuff, I discovered that it knit up to significantly fewer rows per vertical inch than the swatch I’d made. This squashed the detail so badly that I could hardly see it, which surprised and puzzled me.

I asked a friend who had knitted in the round with silk, and apparently this was due to the fact that, unlike wool, silk has no “memory”. Wool springs back to its original size; silk stays stretched.

To make the pattern look right, I knit each pattern row twice. This made the pattern a little longer, but that was better than squashed.

For the swatch, I just knit on the needle part of a circular needle, back&forth with very little pulling, so it didn’t stretch. Working in the round on the stocking, I was pulling the piece around the whole needle, so it did stretch.

The other disappointment was that the surface of the yarn scuffed, spawning little balls of purple fluff. If this happened during the knitting, the finished stockings would probably get scuffed & covered with purple fluff when worn, obscuring the pattern.

Which would make knitting so much complicated detail kind of pointless.

So my next attempt will either be in wool or a wool/silk blend, depending on budget & availability, and if it comes out on the purple end of the scale when I dye it, I’ll try overdying it with madder to get a true red.

Live&learn!

 

 

 

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By | December 3rd, 2014|costume, dyes, knitting, silk|Comments Off on Knitted silk stockings, first attempt
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