dharma order and weaving thread info

 

Wow my Dharma order sure came in fast, I put in the order on a Monday and it got to me by that Friday! Note ordered from Western Canada, so that's pretty good shipping time, it came by UPS which was the lowest price shipping option and that seemed to work out great.

 

This was my birthday present to myself, or rather my second lol! I also ordered a couple of spindles, some cotton and merino roving to try my hand at spinning my own thread/yarn, that will be another post though, spoiler alert it is hard! lol! Just like everything it takes time, its been almost 6 years so I guess I have forgotten how frustrating crochet was when I started, and these recent not so good results with my dye projects in the summer have humbled me on my dyeing skills lately, so back to practice, practice, practice!

First attempts on the drop spindle

Some to die for roving that I'm too scared to spin lol

 

But that's also the reason I took the jump and ordered a set of dyes from Dharma, until then I had been using the small 2/3 oz Jacquard dyes from my local art supply store [note for those looking to get started see my first posts on dye supplies] Jacquard is good solid procion mx fiber reactive dye, it doesn't have as large a range of colors as Dharma, but mainly the small amounts leave me wary to practice more as each jar comes to about $7.00 CDN each, with about 2x as much dye and roughly half the price for most colors Dharma is just the step up I need to keep practicing.

 

8 jars of 2oz of procion dye!

 

My Dharma order included the following colors - Nebula Navy [a green looking kind of Navy], Deep Yellow [which I hope will adequately replace my golden yellow], Hot Hibiscus [for a nice hot pink], Fuchsia Red [classic primary] Cobalt Blue [for some interesting mixing options] Coral Pink [a hard color to make for me] Terracotta [same as with coral, tough color to make] and Celadon! I actually waited until Celadon came back into stock to make my order as I really, really, reaaallllyy wanted it for a color palette that I had hoped to make back in the spring but just couldn't mix on my own with Jaquard colors.

I also threw in an N95 dust mask to go legit from my covid cloth masks, a printed color catalogue, a pair of Dharma's new cotton spandex bike shorts, I love wearing these in the summer under dresses and jumpsuits as it cuts down on chafing. I did some quick tie dye on them just to get it finished before I have to pack up and move.

Lol, I had just soaked these in soda ash and took them out for pictures on the same surface that I had the Closed! jars on see next pic for results

I guess there was some residual dye dust molecules on the jars cause this little guy soaked them all up lol!

Tie dye done in Celadon and Coral with some accidental splotches of Nebula Navy dye particles

Spiral done in Nebula Navy and Hot Hibiscus

In all but 1 of the colors I went ahead with the Dharma dye yield estimator and put all the dye recommended in 50 ml of water for each color.

Hot Hibiscus, 1gm in 50ml

Coral Pink, 1.5gm in 50ml

Nebula Navy, 3gm in 50ml

Celadon, 1gm in 100ml

On my first try with Dharma dyes I used the estimator for the Celadon color, see my Murky March Sunrise Elune post, and found that I had to dilute the dye stock quite a bit. So I figured that because I am effectively painting the color on thread and here on fabric, that the amount of water should be doubled but the amount of dye as per Dharma should stay the same in order to get the desired color to match their color chips. Hence why I used 100ml in the Celadon color, just to test if I was right, and I think that I was. The Coral is a bit too orange and could do with diluting, and both the navy and the hot hibiscus as well.

Still they are pretty and I will enjoy wearing them under dresses. Have to say though, when dyeing what is essentially underwear I felt a little limited on the colors, can't use yellow or brown lol!

I also ordered their sample card that had all the cotton yarn/thread samples they carry, mostly I did so to compare the difference between weaving cotton and crochet cotton. I'm always on the look out for a good economical way to get large amounts of white cotton thread for dyeing my projects and wondered weather or not weaving cotton would be a good substitute for crochet thread. 

All 15 types of cotton yarn samples

 

Spoiler alert, I'm gonna stick with buying the Jumbo Ball of Aunt Lydia's size 10 crochet thread at Walmart, its the best price for the most amount and for the right type of thread. The right type of thread for me is 100% cotton mercerized thread with a bit of bounce to it.

I know a lot of people knock Aunt Lydia for it's quality but honestly I don't see it, I've never used the DMC pearl cotton or it Ceblia thread which people rave about because it comes in such tiny quantities for such a high price more often than not its coming in at 50gms/300yds for 2x the price of Aunt Lydias! Ouch, that's just not going to work for me when I work on projects with yardage that is at least 500yds. To each their own though :) 

But weaving thread or weaving yarn enticed me because I figured that weaving would take up so much more yardage that they were bound to sell it in larger quantities, for a good prices and they are sold on cones which would make winding them into skeins before dyeing a little easier.

Well, from the comparison picture below you can see the difference in size between the standard 3 weaving cotton sizes, 5/2, 8/2 and 10/2 thread vs my Aunt Lydia thread Size 10. The 5/2 is about the closest match in terms of size and diameter, so there, I hope that helps everyone like me who was looking for the comparison without having to go out and buy a cone of each size to compare.

 

3 sizes cotton warp twist, left to right 10/2, aunt lydias in orange, 8/2, 5/2

 

Aunt Lydia's size 10 vs 10/2 cotton warp twist

Aunt Lydia's size 10 vs 8/2 cotton warp twist

I'd say in terms of size its a toss up between 10/2 and 8/2 vs Aunt Lydia's size 10 cotton crochet thread.

Still I'll be sticking with Aunt Lydia, as has been noted before by others who have been asked the question about the difference between crochet thread and weaving cotton, the ply/twist direction on crochet thread is different from that of most yarn and weaving cotton, crochet cotton thread has a Z twist while weaving cotton and most other yarns have a S twist. The Z twist makes for a really strong thread for crochet thread which is often twisted and turned in many directions to make decorative stitches, that properly hold their shape and ply. 

Whats more the weaving cotton also seems to have a rather loose twist and is not as stiff as I would expect for a mercerized cotton, not as much sheen, I'm sure I could go for higher quality to get that though.

fairly loose twits, even the thread itself was not twisted tightly together

 

In any case it comes down to price in the end, I guess crochet actually does eat up yarn and thread more than any other are because for the same amount of weaving cotton thread vs Aunt Lydias size 10 thread the price is also about double. So maybe weaving doesn't use nearly as much thread as I though despite all that yarn being sold by the cone. 

Ah well, now I know, and now you know too. If I ever find a cheaper source for crochet cotton thread I'll be sure to post it here for all you other would be indie thread dyers! Oh Spoiler agian on my spinning post, any illusions I had about being able to spin my own cotton thread, well hahaha, spinners are not lying about how hard a fiber it is to spin.

 

Elune - Murky March Sunrise

 Elune color way Golden Yellow/Bright Orange/Celadon

 

 

 

Approx pattern thread needs 135 - will make up 140gms + 40gms extra celadon thread

This color way I wanted to make in the spring, based on a murky looking sunrise I caught in March this year that looked like a big yellow/orange egg yolk in a misty blue/green sky.

 

Dharma Celadon 157 Contains Turquoise

I tried and tried to get this color with my jacquard aquamarine by diluting it and mixing in some more blue and warm black, but they all came out too black or too green so I ditched it until I was able to order Celadon from Dharma. I did write them a note asking when it would be back in stock just looking for a possible eta, they said they did not have one as of yet but within a couple of weeks it was back to being available. I don't know if that was just for me lol but I will take it as a sign that Dharma is a great place to get dyes from. 

I decided to go with Jacquard Golden yellow and Bright Orange and  Dharma Celadon to try out a 3 color experiment instead of just mixing some golden yellow with bright orange as per the picture above. Elune is a big enough pattern that it will hopefully showcase the 3 colors nicely, but based on the wash out so far I may end up cutting out a bunch of that orange, its taking up a lot of space.

Based on some less than stellar experiences with 3 color pour on this spring I decided to try my hand on splitting up a skein into 2 smaller skeins to dye half of each color, 1st skein gets half dyed golden yellow and half dyed bright orange, 2nd skein gets dyed half orange and half celadon. Hopefully this will create longer color change ways as the colors are not so crowded, and its easier to estimate half a skein than 1/3 a skein.

 

3 color pour on, on one single ball left little room for color transition

 

I also decided I would test 2 different pour on methods to see the difference, the first is my most recent method of pouring the 1st color on, wrapping it up tight then loose and pouring on the 2nd color. The second method was to pour on the first color, let it batch then re-wrap it and do the 2nd color the next day, hoping that giving the 1st color more time to absorb and penetrate the ball would result in more color mixing when the 2nd color is poured on the next day. 

Previous dye job using 2 balls, one ball in golden yellow/carmine red and second ball in carmine red/navy allowing for lost of color transition room

Doing it this way also allowed me to see how the Celadon and orange would play together, being a blue/green color Celadon is not likely to play nice with orange and come out with some brown/muddy results. So by doing the 2nd method and dyeing the balls with yellow and orange first, if the Celadon/orange ball in the 1st method didn't pan out I could maybe mix up some Carmine red for the 2nd method instead for a nice yellow/orange/red colorway.

 

Method 1 initial rinse out Celadon/Orange

Method 1 initial rinse out orange and golden yellow

Rinsed and dried extra Celadon skein

I'm happy to say though that the Celadon/Orange mix has actually worked out pretty nice! There's some muddy look to the transition but its not too much, its also really worked well for the transition of colors I think it looks good.

Unfortunately I must not have been in my right mind when I started doing my 2nd method because I ended up doing it backwards. The way to do it is to wrap up half the ball tight and then wrap the other half up loose to get a nice even pour with the first color. Unfortunately what I did was wrapped it up loose 1st and poured on the 1st color, then wrapped up tight. This is making the 1st color start to penetrate quite far through the ball but hey I won't know how I feel about it till the final rinse and dry later this week, so stay tuned for that.

But the 1st method of pouring on one color on top of each other all at once seems to have worked out well, although as I said I may end up cutting out a large portion of the bright orange since that's quite a lot of orange. After running out of thread on a couple of patterns I decided to think ahead and dye up some extra thread in just Celadon in case I ran out at the end of the pattern, so I can make up from there I hope.

I would have liked to see more golden yellow but it seems to have mixed nicely with the slightly diluted orange, maybe next time I will stick with an orange/yellow mix entirely, that bright orange is reaallly bright. The Celadon actually ended up being too dark for what I wanted at first and I had to double my water to dilute it to what i hoped would be the color I wanted, which it was! 

In the past I estimated how much of the thread I would be dying in that color, so for this example I was dyeing a 70gm ball in golden yellow and orange, so I would make up 35ml dye stock for each color as that is half of 70gms. But I found that I was left with more streaking and white spots by being so exacting so this time I mixed up 70ml dye stock in each color for the full weight of the ball to try and use up as much as possible to really penetrate and soak in past the resist of the ball.

Dye amounts;

4* 70 gms skeins for 2 experiments, 2 balls per experiment to be divided up between colors, 1 ball yellow/orange and 1 ball orange/celadon. + 40gms extra skein of Celadon only just in case.

Golden Yellow, 2*70gm balls = 140gms = 140ml dyestock needed

140ml*5% DOS = 7gms [I went for 5gms because that's all I had left] = 1tsp

Bright Orange, 4*70gms balls = 280gms = 280ml dyestock needed

280*2% DOS [tried to reduce how bright it was, more or less lol] = 5.6gms = 1tsp

Celadon, 2 70gms balls plus 40gms extra = 180gms = 180ml

180ml*5%DOS = 9gms = 2tsp [however, when I opened the jar I saw how dark the dye looked and I wondered if 2tsp was too much so I started with 1tsp/5gms instead and boy was I glad I did because that was waaayyyy tooo dark for what I was going for. In the end I doubled the water on even that shade up to 360ml to dilute it, even knowing how colors often rinse and dry much lighter that's what I was going for]

 

Test color swatches on paper towels, golden yellow, orange and celadon after diluting

 

If ever you buy fiber reactive dye from Dharma, they have a handy tool on their site, a dye yield estimator, this can help you do more accurate dyestock estimates because it is taking into account their actual DOS as per their products vs how much dye powder is needed to achieve it. Note, this tool is for Vat dyeing or full immersion dyeing not painted or pour on dye like this method, that may be the reason the dye still came out darker than the color I wanted. I will have to test that theory out some other time to see the difference. In any case for now it seems that 5gms is what the calculator would recommend for dyeing 180gms fiber as well, but just the method may have tweaked the color result.

Dharma Procion Dye Estimator Calculator

A note on Dahrma dye, they look like very high quality dyes, not saying Jaqcaurd isn't, it's just that the dye particles look much finer vs jacquard, this may be due to the dye being fresher having not sat on an art supply shelf for a few years, still happy with the colors in either brand though.

The extra skein that I dyed up came out a bit darker than the color on the orange/Celadon skein, probably because I soaked that sucker in everything I had left of the dye to use it up lol, but darker at the end is better than lighter at the end, so far so good.

Now all I have to do is wait for the dry out and work it up to see how this looks!

The 2nd experiment had gone pear shaped from the beginning, see above, but I was actually happy with how it turned out and maybe learned a few things too, but again will have to wait and see the difference between how it works up on the doily itself.

 

Method 2 initial rinse out orange and yellow

Method 2 initial rinse out orange and Celadon

 

However I think in the future in this 2nd method I will start to tweak my pour on sequence, dark color first, lighter or brighter color second. Pouring on the celadon over top the of the orange really seemed to darken up the orange in this method, that may also be because I let it sit in the dye for a bit as well. Pouring the orange over the yellow didn't darken up the yellow too much but it did take up lots of room and came out very bright, again might be because I let it sit in the orange dye as well, must learn to be more consistent!

I just find that the second color that gets poured on in the 2nd split batch method ends up taking up more room, but mixes very nicely with the the color.  This is good though if I want to make a good estimate between the middle and ending color. So for example the orange yellow ball, the orange took up more room than the yellow, but in the Celadon and orange ball the Celadon took up more room allowing for more of its color to show which is good for that color as it will be at the end of the doily as the doily gets bigger and eats up more thread, this may present a more balanced looking color transition once worked up, but again will have to wait and see how it all works out.

But in my usual all at once method I may in the future have done the color combo a bit differently, the orange/yellow ball I would have poured the orange on first and the yellow on second, and for the orange/celadon ball I would do orange first and celadon second.

Again all this will have to wait till the doily is worked up to see how it all works out in the end.

Whoohoo! I am almost finished a doily with the method 1 pour on all at once thread and I am super happy with not only how the colors turned out but how well it has worked on the Elune pattern itself. I cut out about 12gms of the first ball at the end of the orange bit and continued on with the next ball, I had actually gotten all the way up to the round 49 where the edge is finished on the petals but I wanted to start those with the transition into Celadon color, so I cut out that bit of extra orange from ball 1 and that seems to have done the trick!

 Okay folks here she is!

 

Pattern Elune by Irina Maleeva

 

The second test balls came out with much more saturated colors, probably because I let them soak in the 2nd colors so I think I'm going to ball those up and keep the separated for another project, still happy with how both colors came out though!

 

Glow Up Hera - May 2021

 Glow Up Hera - May 2021

 

Well, I can't say much about this lovely darling since I took so long to finish it that I think I lost my notes on the dye method, but I do remember making the second color Chocolate brown a lower DOS than the others to help with the transition between colors. 

Pattern Hera by Grace Faeron

 Colors used were Golden yellow in the center at 5% DOS, Chocolate Brown at 2% DOS and Warm Black at 5% DOS.

I think this turned out pretty lovely, however Hera is a big pattern, I think I used a good 170-175gms of Aunt Lydias size 10 thread to complete this pattern and comes out to a decent size over 25". It makes for a nice center piece on a round kitchen table. 

The size and amount of thread this pattern uses I think is one of its biggest advantages in making a 3 color pour on gradient ball of thread, theres plenty of thread space for the 2nd and 3 colors to transition, so it doesn't become so stark of a color change between the two.

I haven't been doing much dyeing, unless you count tie dyeing some sheets and pillow cases, nor crocheting, in a bit of a funk here I think. The weather where I live has just been so godawful, I live in Western Canada and July was scorching hot and dry, then August has been so smokey with all the awful forest fires and hot. Nothing like being too smokey to open your windows during a heat wave, or opening your windows and your apartment smelling like an ash tray :( 

But the weather seems to be finally letting up lately with some rain, still stinks but hopefully this will clear up the smoke for the rest of the year.

I'm hoping for my birthday to try out the Fiorie doily pattern bundle as a treat, tee hee, but I also bought the Elune pattern and have tested it for its thread needs, so I'm looking forward to dyeing some thread up for that bad boy too.

Tie Dye Fixes Everything

 Whoops! I spilled tea on my cotton bed sheet, it won't come out, guess I'll have to go buy another one.....Or Not!

Tie Dye it instead!

My first go around with ice dyeing, at least the traditional way for cotton fabric, so it was a bit of a learning curve here.

The tie up, I went for gathering it up from the center and then a bit of twist before adding the elastic bands. I had soaked this in soda ash and hung it out to dry before tying up.

I've seen tie dyer's put a kind of tinfoil wrap around their work before putting ice on it but wasn't sure at first why they do that.

Since I don't have a sink to spare I opted to put my peice on a roasting rack over a roasting pan then put it in the bath tub, next time I'll just do without one of my sinks since it was way messier

The colors picked, teal, raspberry, deep purple, medium blue, midnight blue and navy

I ended up using 2 full bags of ice to get it all covered

And this is why you use a little tinfoil band around your piece, that's a lot of ice

All covered in dye, wish i had taken a picture half way through, the dye melts right through the ice pretty quick and then the ice is clear on top to keep it wet overnight

The sight that greeted me this morning

Left over run off in the pan from melted ice. This was resting on an old plastic tarp in the bathtub, but it still was quite a mess to dump out. But on the bright side my bathtub got a very thorough clean this morning lol!

And the result!

Hindsight;

1. Do this over a sink, having the ice melt directly into a drain seems like way easier clean up. Or a more sturdy container that can be carried over to a drain to pour out.

2. Make a sturdier tinfoil band around the piece

3. Don't skimp on the dye, I sprinkled it over with my finger tips, wearing gloves, but I probably could have used more. And I was a little hesitant in using my navy since its so dark, but I would have like a more saturated look over all.

4. Get a book or take a class on tie dye cause it's way more complex than it looks!

Still I'm happy with my newly dyed and totally not stained sheet!

Glow-Up Fairie

 Glow-Up Faerie

Whelp, new Glow Up post for Faerie!

Really happy with how this one turned out, maybe its the pattern that makes it so easy to use for a triple color dye job but it always just works out so lovely! This time around I went for a spooky colorway in Golden yellow, Lilac and Warm Black. Really worked ut quite nicely in terms of color pentation and cross over between colors, no white streaks!

The beginning 

The sketch, didn't end up using any extra orange just golden yellow

The first rinse

The Wind up

And the result, ain't she lovely!

Faerie Pattern by Tamara Ganzha

Glow-Up Tegan - May 2021

 Glow-Up Tegan - May 2021 

So last months dye job was great for some of the colors, but not so great for others, hey it was my first time trying it out on so many patterns, so its essentially a first draft. Now onto the second draft!

The pattern I was most unhappy about from Aprils batch was Tegan, the color transition from the 2nd to the 3rd color was just to short and made it look like I had started to use a completely different thread from fuchsia to lilac. And guys, I love the Tegan pattern! She's one of my all time favorites to make, she's got it all!

So after figuring out the thread amounts for my Hera doily, Glow-up post to come soon, I decided maybe I will just use the extra 85 gms of thread I had left over and dye it the same color way with a few differences in technique to see what works best. Not the most scientific because the patterns call for very different amounts of thread, Tegan is about 80gms and Hera is supposedly 165gms, I' doubtful of that last amount but we shall have to wait and see lol!

 

beautiful result, but breaks up the design.

 

Anyhow, I decided that I would try and deal with some mistakes or poor choices made in the April batch with this lot.

In this experiment I used Golden yellow, chocolate brown and warm black as my colors.

1. The DOS for all the dyes used was the same amount, they were all 5% DOS. Very saturated colors which I like but maybe the layering of the colors on top of each other was occasionally darkening the one underneath. Or I could just make the 2nd color a lower DOS than the 1st and 3rd, this looked rather nice on my Idunn doily that went from saturated fuchsia to light peach to a saturated emerald green.

In this skein and the Hera skein I decided to only make the 2nd color a lower DOS to give it some differentiation from the 3rd, it wouldn't be as pale as the peach from Idunn, but it wouldn't be the same DOS as the 3rd color.

I was too chicken to do a sequence of lower DOS lol! I though at first I would go for 1% DOS for golden yellow, then 2% for brown and finally 5% for warm black. I'm still trying to figure out how to measure out and dilute my dye stocks to a proper DOS, will have to consult those experts on Ravelry soon about it.

Basic problem is that I measure my dye powder with teaspoons not with a special super accurate scale, and I typically work with very small dye lots and dye stock amounts, usually I will mix up a batch of 5% DOS stock with 5gms dye powder in 100ml urea water. For this experiment I wanted to do 2 different DOS techniques, which didn't work out so well. It's one thing to measure 5gms of dye powder into 100ml of water to get 5% DOS stock, its another to then figure out correctly how to water down that stock to a proper lower DOS. My previous pale colors were definite estimates and I was not being accurate or following an instruction, but I want to I swear!

As a result all I did this time was lower the DOS of the 2nd color to 2% DOS instead so it wouldn't be so stark against the warm black.

2. How the ball is wrapped and divided between colors. It occurs to me that perhaps I could improve on the spacing and mixing of colors based on how much of the ball gets wrapped loosely and tightly between colors.

This time around I did no tight wrapping at the beginning of the ball to ensure no or less white spots of color in the center of the gradient. I just wrapped it loosely to start, which made it an ugly little ball of thread but not a lot of tangles in the end anyway.

I also decided to double the tight wrapping between the 2nd color and the 3rd color, I figured this would add a longer transition between the 2nd color and the 3rd color because of course as the pattern grows and takes shape the doily gets bigger and each round needs more thread than the last. 

In my last Tegan the color transition between the colors may have been the same each time but the transition between the 1st and 2nd color looked like it lasted longer and provided a smoother transition because it used less thread across more rounds than between the 2nd and 3rd color.

1st color transition is visible and last for 5 rows to go smoothly between color 1 & 2

last color transition here is barely visible and didn't last a full row to make the transition smoother between 2 & 3 color

 

This seemed to work out well, the jump from brown to warm black was not so stark and the warm black transition for a long time through grey to speckled black to black quite nicely. I would still have preferred to see some more brown mixed in there on the transition or a lighter brown background on the thread, but so far I am happy with this.

 

New Tegan longer transition from 2nd to 3rd color

Would have liked to see more brown on the transition between 2nd and 3rd color but oh well

For Hera, I decided to wrap it the usual way with the exception of the center which was loose from the start then tight then loose and so on, but I'm not going to count that as a success likely because it uses so much more thread so I have a lot more room to work with between colors.

This may have also been the problem, trying to use too many colors, most of them ended up looking like 3 colors even though some used 4-5, mostly colors that were too similar to each other to notice a difference and not enough thread to give them room to play.

Other issues I tend to explore

1. Not using enough dye stock to penetrate all the way through, usually I match the amount of dye I use to the weight of the thread and that seems to be enough to leave it dripping through the layers quite a bit but who knows.

2. Wrapping all the layers loosely between colors, it may be that the colors don't need to be wrapped so tightly between colors to create a good transition and mix and may be inhibiting it in the end. In this way I would wrap color 1 loose, pour the dye on, wrap more loose around it until I get more white than soaked through and then pour on the next color and continue wrapping loosely.

3. Using 2 many colors, maybe for now I will keep my ambitions set to 3 colors as I come to better understand how dyeing in my method works. 2 is almost always succesful for me, but 3 is still hit or miss.

4. Create a successive DOS sequence, start with center color at 1%, 2nd @ 2% and 3rd @ 5% DOS and see what the result may or may not be.

5. Watch out for the color pallets, my latest Camilla is a great example of this, it went from a pale peach to a pale lilac to a full %% DOS turquoise, and again I ended up with a very stark contrast between 2nd and 3rd color, even though the mixing between the 2 colors was extensive and produced a lovely midnight blue color, midnight blue does not transition to turquoise very smoothly.