Thursday, July 8, 2010

Workspace


Since I do my dyeing in the basement, and I have an awful lot of other stuff in there, I have to make do with what I have. This is a picture of mixing up various dyes for several items I dyed last night. I know I don't have the nice diagram that Dharma has on their site. But then my drawing skills aren't as good as the person that made the picture.

The wet paper on the washer works well to capture the dye powder. Then you don't worry about it floating everywhere and getting on things you don't expect. Did you notice it also helps with keeping the spilled dye liquid from going everywhere. It is blank newsprint, regular newspapers work well also.

The cheapo measuring cups I got at the dollar store work well to mix up dye. You can do a lot of colors all at once.

I'm still working on how to 'paste up' my dye powder. Not sure if it is my technique or my tools. Do I need higher quality plastic spoons? I don't do so well and end up having a lot of particles in the filter. But I fix that by pouring the urea water I'm mixing with the dye through the filter after the dye mix to dissolve the powder completely. It works for submersion dyeing since you need a fair amount of liquid to put the item in. But not so well if you want to use thickened dye. to control spreading. That reminds me, I need to check my container of sodium alginate and make sure nothing is growing in it.

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