Testing 1 – 2 - 3
My next projects will be two more wedding shawls. One with the working title "Something Blue" and the other will be "Blushing Bride."
The loom is warped, the white shawl is done, and it's time to dye the yarn for the weft. My dye process starts with my computer - also a cup of tea.
Once I have the numbers, I test dye 10 yard skeins, each weighing about 2 grams. For the darkest shade of pink, the "recipe" called for just .2 milliliter of dye stock solution. To measure that, I use a little syringe. The paler shades required me to dilute after measuring. The palest skein has just .025 ml of dye stock!
The lightest skein is still not as pale as I would like, so I'm doing two more test skeins (in the little plastic cups in the photo). I use a jeweler's gram scale to measure out tiny amounts of the fixative chemicals I need - salt and soda ash.
Different dyes strike with different intensities. I got the blue I wanted on the first try. Looking at the side-by-side comparison on of the blue and the palest pink, you can see that the pink is visually darker than the blue by converting the color photo to black and white. Yet the pink has just 1/8 the dye concentration as the blue!
