Ok, well after a long weekend of dyeing gradient balls of thread I was left with a bunch of left over dye, some of which got used on some tie dye t-shirts for my dads birthday and a pair of Tulip dyes dyeable socks. All I can say about that endeavor is that tie dyeing is a lot harder than it looks lol! But after al of that even I still had a lot of warm black and lilac dye left over, so I thought I would try a new experiment.
In the past I have frozen dye stock into ice cubes which I successfully used to dye some gradient thread balls. At the time I used up all my frozen dye cubes so didn't have the ability to answer a question.
If frozen dye stock can be used effectively after being frozen for a day, how long could you keep frozen dye stock before it lost its strength?
Well there was only one thing for it I guess, better use up this left over warm black and lilac dye stock and freeze them then test them out over a series of a few days-weeks to see how long they keep.
 |
| I really should have labeled these lol, was hard to tell which was purple and which was black! |
So, I've frozen up 21 ice cubes that I would wager are about 5ml each, there's only 5 in warm black which i will test last, and the other 26 cubes are in lilac purple, which turned out a lot darker than I would think of lilac being. Anyway, both dye stock solutions were made to 5% DOS with 5gms of dye in 100ml urea water, then frozen over 3 days.
 |
 |
| After melting in about 30min |
So here is the first test after 3 days of being frozen how well do 3 cubes of lilac - about 15mls - turn out after thawing back to liquid. I painted up a 10gm skein of beige Aunt Lydia's size 10 crochet thread after having washed it and soaked it a soda ash solution, I did not dilute the melted dye stock it is at full 5% DOS here.
 |
| Post painting |
Next up I added 100ml plain water to the remaining dye stock so that I could try and salvage a gradient gone wrong. I wasn't happy with how pale these pinks and purples turned out and the aqua at the last layer basically just washed out completely. So now I'm overdyeing it with this diluted experiment in hopes of making a better look for it.
What I seem to have ended up with is a change from turquoise to a more midnight blue, which I rather like, we shall see how it turns out in the rinse tomorrow.
I have decided to go weekly, so last week was April 16th, washed out pretty dark and good DOS.
This week April 23,2021 seems still very potent.
And one more week and the color overall seems about the same strength. I had more cubes but then a friend in need ran out of some yarn I dyed for her before finishing her project so I sacrificed my remaining experiment to get that all fixed up for her, the yarn turned out wonderfully.
 |
| From right to left the 1st week to the 3rd week, all basically the same color result after about a week of freezing in between |
 |
| My friend's knitted top, front piece with the the original yarn I dyed for her but that ran out |
 |
| The wash out of the extra yarn we dyed up with remaining purple and black cubes with some fuchsia and blue thrown in there to match the original |
 |
| After drying, so lovely! |
 |
| And all wound up and in use to happily finish up a project! |
I think it's safe to say for now that its possible to freeze left over dyestock and it will remain potent for future use for at least a month, which is good news for me and others who don't want to waste dyestock.
I have found that claims of dyestock staying good, in its liquid form, so long as the dye has not interacted with soda ash and is kept in a sealed container in a cool or refrigerated place to be hit and miss. In the past I might not have kept them in a cool enough place or a tightly enough sealed container so, who knows. So I'm pretty happy with the knowledge that I can freeze any of my left over dyestock and use it again in at least a month or so.
