#dyeing

I’m working on dying some tigers for the coolest pair of pants in the WORLD and I am SO EXCITED about how they’re looking

EDIT: the pants are DONE https://www.tumblr.com/scifi-centaur-arts/816184136657174528/tiger-pants-tiger-pants-tiger-pants

Another thing that had been on The Pile for a long time was this space waistcoat! I dye painted this piece of cotton back in 2015 when we were doing silk painting in Textiles class. I think I started cutting the waistcoat about 2 years ago, covered the buttons, and then got distracted. I had to piece part of one shoulder because I'd already used up part of the fabric to make a couple of handkerchiefs, but I don't think it's too noticeable. After dyeing the cotton I had splattered some fabric ink on it and painted a few stars, but after lining the fronts recently I painted a lot more stars on, and then painted glow in the dark ink on top.

It was a bit tricky to get photos of the glowing, and the first two are brighter than it looks in real life, at least with the small amount of charging it had when I took them. I also did a running stitch around the edges with glow in the dark thread which I've had for at least a decade and never used! Then I accidentally melted part of it with my iron and had to redo that bit.

also me, when trying to think of ways to advertise my etsy:

Hello everyone, please buy my wool! I have ideas about doing a Project Hail Mary collection but I cannot currently afford the amount of yarn needed to make that dream a reality.

Here is my wool

Here is my shop!

I am also open to taking custom requests of either fibre or yarn, just send me a message and we can discuss what I can do for you!

Because I never posted it, here is the completed palette project!

48 colors of Jacquard acid dye, with 5 depths of shade of each color. The DOS are (darkest, on the bottom of each bundle) 2%, 1%, 0.5%, 0.25%, and 0.125% (lightest, on the top of each bundle).

Each sample is 10 grams, so this is, overall, over 5 pounds of wool dyed. 240 samples total, so 2,400 grams approximately. I did this all in Merino top, purchased from RH Lindsay Company Wool Merchants. Great place to get bulk (they sell by the pound) undyed top. I have found that the sliver has a little too much VM for me to be comfortable dying as is, but still great for other projects.

I used citric acid as my acid after finding I couldn't (efficiently) get to a suitable ph with vinegar. I purchased 8 pounds online after seeing the cost of an 8 ounce container at the grocery store, and I believe I used about 3 pounds of it for the project.

May I present: "Children's Hospital (Color Theory)" on Perendale

Getting mixed reviews in chat 😂

And of course:

I think the confusion here comes from different pigments being used for different purposes. Also it's important to note that historically purple didn't really mean what it means today, like a violet, but rather a deep sort of aniline red, like wine red or scarlet red.

Purple of Cassius was a pigment used for coloring glass, painting porcelain and glazing. It's formed by reaction of gold salts and tin chloride. The colour is very much what we'd consider red today. Here's purple of Cassius glass and porcelain saucers painted with it.

This was not used to dye fabric though, but purple pigment for fabrics was very expensive for entirely different reasons. The most deep purple in the ancient world was called Tyrian purple. It was extracted from shells of sea snail from the family Muricidae. It required a lot of shells and a lot of labour, which is why it was so expensive. The dye was originally created as early as 1200 BC by Phoenecians of Tyre, where the name comes from, and it's production was continued by the Greeks and the Romans. The method was still known by the Byzantinians after the fall of Western Rome, but was lost in Europe after Byzantine fell in 15th century. Before the invention of the synthetic mauveine pigment in 1856, there wasn't similar colourfast deep purple pigments like Tyrian purple for centuries. Of course there were still purple fabric, the shades were just less bright and deep and they often suffered a lot from colour fading.

The shades that could be produced with Tyrian purple were also mostly red to modern eyes, here's some sample recreated in modern times.

The custom of purple toga worn by male Roman citizens was likely adopted from Etruscans. Here's first a fresco of Etruscans in purple toga-like garments and then a fresco of Roman purple toga. Byzantine royalty continued to favour Tyrian purple. The last example is a Byzantine mosaic.