Dyeing Workshop with Teresa Ruch

Two things that I like about weaving (aside from the actual process) are that it isn’t messy and  it isn’t toxic. You can get up from your loom if the doorbell rings, and you can check on your cooking or pick up a baby without poisoning anybody.  Dyeing, on the other hand, is messy and often toxic. So I only get into dyeing when it is part of a workshop and other people who love the mess and the chemistry can take care of the parts I don’t want to learn and teach me the necessary safety precautions.

The third day of our January 2011 workshop with Teresa Ruch, partially sponsored by the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, was a dyeing workshop. After working with all her luscious hand-dyed tencel and bamboo warps, we were all eager to try our hand at reproducing them.  Unlike the vat dyeing that I had done in earlier workshops, this time we would be applying the dye directly to the fiber in order to get vivid,  blending colors.

My direct-dyed (painted) skeins of tencel and bamboo dyed with fiber reactive dyes using Teresa Ruch's method. The dark purple 10/2 tencel is second from the left and the middle one is bamboo.

The preparations actually  began late  Saturday afternoon at the Academy Art Center‘s weaving room, with the big five-gallon buckets and bags of soda  ash that the dyers had brought. These were not protein fibers, so we were going to use fiber reactive dyes.  People who had finished their weaving (and knew about dyeing) set to work making Tyvek tags out of cut up US Postal Service bags, labeling the sets of bamboo and tencel skeins with numbers for each person, and putting the skeins to soak overnight in a soda ash solution. Two veteran dyers had  brought microwave ovens that they use only for dyeing, and others brought an assortment of quart jars that they reserved for mixing the toxic dyes.

Although we had a lot of fiber to dye, she had told us that if we wanted to dye any of our own materials in addition (either yarn or fabric), we should bring it along and if there were enough buckets, we could dye that as well. One participant brought a couple of Nuno felted pieces that she had made after our Melissa Arnold workshop the previous spring!

I had a pillow case full of skeins of beautiful white New Zealand wool that my neighbor and fellow weaver had passed on to me several years earlier, so I asked if that would work. Teresa said the fiber reactive dyes could be used if I soaked the wool in vinegar rather than soda ash. So I had brought a small bucket and a big jug of vinegar along with  six skeins of the wool. I followed her instructions and soon had it soaking in a vinegar bath.

On Sunday we came in our old clothes and laid out heavy plastic to cover the work tables while Teresa and our resident chemists mixed up the dyes. We all got surgical gloves to wear and the people mixing the dyes also had face masks. Then Teresa showed us her dyeing technique. A skein of yarn was removed from the soaking bucket, wrung out to remove excess water, and then laid out on a work table on top of a layer of plastic wrap. Since some of the warp skeins were five yards long, that required a pretty long work surface. She then poured dye from the quart mixing jars into three or four small paper cups with different colors  of dye.

She poured dye from the paper cups directly onto the fiber, putting different colors in different sections and then working the dye into the fiber with her gloved hands. She showed us how to move the fiber around to make sure the dye was penetrating all parts of the skein, and how to overlap the colors to blend them into nice transitions. Any excess dye water could be sopped up with the skein.

When she was satisfied with the dyeing, the skein was rolled up in the plastic wrap and then coiled onto a paper plate and put into the microwave for 2-3 minutes. It was then turned over with chopsticks and microwaved for another 2-3 minutes.  The paper plate was then removed and left to cool for a while. When the dyed skein was cool enough to handle, it was unwrapped and rinsed in cool water for quite a long time, until the water ran completely clear. Since it was a beautiful day in Honolulu, the skeins were  laid outside in the sun to dry.

After the demonstration we all set to work on the skeins with our designated number on the label. The first one I worked on was a skein of 10/2 tencel. I started pouring on purple and dark blue and turquoise and ended up getting way too much dye on it, so that it was soaking wet, dye was running all over the plastic wrap, and the dark colors were all fusing together. The solution was to grab another warp skein and use it to sop up the excess dye. I ended up with a warp skein of mixed tencel and bamboo that was in lighter shades of purple and turquoise that would go with the dark 10/2 tencel as weft.

I did a skein of bamboo in yellows, greens, and turquoise, and then one in mixed bamboo and tencel in the pink and orange shades of the warp I had woven earlier in the workshop. There were some extra skeins for sale, so I bought another 5 yard bamboo and tencel warp skein and also did that in the pinks and oranges.

As we were dyeing, some members were manning the two microwave ovens in assembly line fashion. They even had a system to tell whether they were on the first or second side of the process. Soon the microwave tables were filled with paper plates of dyed yarn waiting to go into the microwave or cooling.  When the skeins were cool enough, their owners claimed them and then began the rinsing process. Outside on the Art Center lawn there was a growing display of dyed skeins.

When I rinsed out my first skein of 10/2 tencel, it was almost black and I was quite disappointed, but more experienced people assured me that the colors would be okay when it was dry.

My skeins of painted New Zealand wool The ones on the left were done with Wilton cake dyes, and the ones on the right with fiber reactive dyes but not microwaved.

Later in the afternoon I retrieved the skeins of New Zealand wool that had been soaking in a vinegar solution. I dyed three of them in green and turquoise, but there wasn’t time to microwave them. Teresa said that any skeins we did not put into the microwave could just be packed into a plastic bag and left for 24 hours or longer and then rinsed out at home.  So I packed up my three skeins of dyed wool in one plastic bag, and put the other three undyed skeins that had been soaked in vinegar into another plastic bag. The dyed tencel and bamboo skeins out on the lawn were still somewhat damp, so when I got home I rigged up a broom handle on my deck and strung the skeins on it to dry outside. The darkest skein that had been almost black when it was wet came out in shades of deep purple when it was dry, so it will work fine as weft with its lighter warp skein of tencel and bamboo.

Teresa’s process of direct dyeing and setting the dye in a microwave was very similar to a one-day workshop I had taken in Michigan in which we dyed wool sock yarn with Wilton cake dyes. The sock yarn had been soaked overnight in a vinegar solution, and we used paint sponges to apply the cake dyes that had been dissolved in a little water. Since the cake dyes were completely non-toxic, we used Pyrex glass baking dishes to hold the plastic-wrapped skeins  and put them in a regular microwave. I liked that process because it was non-toxic, and after some searching I had  bought a set of 12 Wilton cake dyes but had never used them.

A couple of days after the workshop I remembered that I still had two plastic bags of wet wool in my weaving basket. The three dyed skeins had been sitting long enough that they could be rinsed. I put on some rubber gloves and rinsed them in the bathroom sink.  Some dye rinsed out, as expected, and the color that remained was considerably lighter than the bamboo and tencel we had dyed. I did not know if it was because it was wool soaked in vinegar, or because of the process of just leaving them in a plastic bag for two days.

Then I remembered that I also had three more skeins of wool that had been soaked in vinegar. A perfect opportunity to try out the Wilton cake dye method in my kitchen! I laid out some plastic wrap on my stainless steel kitchen counter, mixed up some little cups of green and turquoise cake dye, poured it on, and worked the dye in with my rubber-gloved hands. I was aiming for the kind of strong colors we had been producing with the fiber reactive dyes. I rolled up the dyed skeins  in plastic wrap, put them on a plate, and cooked them in my kitchen microwave. Ah, how much easier it was to work with non-toxic dyes.

When I rinsed out my cake dye skeins, the color was much brighter than the first three skeins. I hung all six skeins out to dry. Later I noticed that the wool yarn seemed to be sticking together a bit, like it was starting to felt. Both the microwaved cake dyed skeins and the non-microwaved fiber reactive dyed ones were sticky, so it wasn’t the heat of the microwave that did it. I then checked my remaining stash of pure white undyed New Zealand wool and discovered that it also has a similar stickiness. It was pretty old wool, and perhaps it was going bad. I took the wool skeins to a Handweavers Hui board meeting to consult with the experts, and they said to just weave it up anyway. I will tell you about what I’m doing with it in another post.

Advertisement