...a coupla things…

I spent the afternoon browsing the web, researching yarn dyeing and I kept running into two things, generally offered as assertions, that didn’t make much sense to me.

1.  After you have dissolved your dye in the dyebath, if the color is too strong just add more water.

On the surface, this seems to make sense because if you add more water to your dyebath, your dyebath does appear lighter in color, less intense.  However, assuming that both the quantities of dye and fiber to be dyed remain the same, the amount of water is irrelevant.  Well, you do have to have enough so that your fiber isn’t crowded.  But if you use, say, half an ounce of dye to dye 100 grams of wool, it doesn’t matter whether you do this with one gallon of water or 100 gallons - the resulting color will be the same in both cases.

2.  How do I set my yarn?

This one really confused me because with some small exceptions, I have never had any problems with the dye being fast and not crocking or bleeding.  It seems to me that there are three reasons why this might happen.

1.  Not enough acid
2.  Not enough heat - either too low a temperature, or not applied long enough.
3.  Too much dye.

That said, I consistently have problems with blues and greens in terms of exhausting the dye bath.  Since I usually use Easter Egg dye, my tentative conclusion is that these colors somehow contain more dye than other colors.  The thing is, once the yarn has been washed, rinsed and dried, the color is stable and will not crock upon subsequent washings.

For the last couple of months, I have been responding to comments privately.  I had been responding in the comments section of the blog but, after reading some folks’ thoughts on this, decided to switch over lest someone get the impression I was just doing it to up the comment count.

I have decided this is bullsquat :)

The reason I always answered in comments is because I was trying to foster a conversation.  It didn’t always happen, but sometimes a comment would foster a response which then might, in turn, provoke someone else to share an opinion or an experience.  And I finally realized that if I continue to respond privately in e-mail, that hoped-for dialogue will never happen again.

So I am going back to responding to comments in comments :)

Hope your Friday wasn’t too stressful and that your weekend (daylight savings time, remember!) is fun.