Field Trips in Fiber - Adventures in quilting, hand dyed fabric and fiber art.

An update on my colorfastness post

Back in August I posted about my process for making sure my hand dyed fabrics are colorfast. Since then I have done a little more testing and wanted to share the results.

Briefly, my process involves soaking the fabrics overnight in hot water with Synthrapol (or other detergent) instead of repeated wash and rinse cycles. My experience tells me that the long exposure to water is better at leaching out all of the excess dyes than repreated washign and rinsing.

In that post I talked about using boiling water. I still believe that boiling water is best but I wanted to exxperiment with very hot tap water. Now my hot water heater is set at about 140F. That is a level that requires me to sign a release statement for my plumber before he will set it that high. It's hot enough that we can scald ourselves with water from the kitchen sink. So, I believe that hot water is still key to this process.

But I wanted to test the time element.

I did this test in several dye batches but these two photos are representative of all of them and here's what I did. 

1. I rinse the newly dyed fabrics to remove the soda ash and I put the fabrics in a big basin of cold water while I rinse out the rest of the fabric.
2. Drain the rinsed fabrics, add Synthrapol (or other detergent) and fill the basin with very hot water. I make sure there's lots of water in relation to the fabric. I want the fabric to get easily exposed to water.
3. I agitated the fabric in the water (wearing double gloves for insulation) for about 15 minutes to mimic the time in a washing machine and then took about 1/2 cup of the water for a sample.
4. I covered the fabric with weights 9as in the last post) to make sure all the fabric is under water.
5. I took more 1/2 cup water samples at 3 hours and at 12 hours.

After I had all 3 water samples I stirred them to make sure that the dye molecues were dispersed in the dye and then poured about 1/4 cup of each on a folded paper towel. I let these dry so I could see how much dye had released from the fabrics at each stage. My goal was to determine how much time mattered in the soaking process.

You can see that there wasn't a lot of dye release at 15 minutes. There was some and this is about what I'd expect after a cycle through the washing machine. At 3 hours most of the excess dye has released but you can see that there is a little more after 12 hours. (12 hours isn't magical, it's just overnight for me based on my dye routine.) Can you see that the 12 hour sample is brighter? I think that's the turquoise taking it's sweet time to decide if it's staying or going.

This batch of fabrics had more reds than blues. There's not a great deal of different between the 3 and 12 hour samples but you can see more white areas on the 3 hour sample. That tells me that there is some additional dye release at 12 hours.

In all cases, the water is very dark after 12 hours and that may worry some people. As long as all of the fabric is submerged under water AND you have detergent in the water (I use about 1/8 - 1/4 cup for about 10 yards of fabric), the dyes will not reattach to other fabrics. I rinse bright yellow and pastels with every other color and have never had a problem.

Someone tried this method on a finished quilt recently where hand dyed fabrics (not mine) bled onto white fabric after the quilt was custom quilted. She did this process and got all of the excess dye out of the quilt. It will work on commercial fabrics too.

There you are. I am finally done with this little process! I will not bore you with it again but you can always find the information in my tutorials tab at the top of the page.

February Color Palette Challenge

It's time for a new color palette challenge! Judy has unveiled this as the color palette for February but be sure to go to her post and add a link to your January entry. A name will be drawn from the entries and the winner will receive a fat quarter pack from me. 

The color palette for February is

This is a photo of figs that I found on the stock photo site photos8.com. If you've never visited that site, you might want to check it out. It's chock full of great photos.

For this palette I loved the rich reds that transition to deep, dark purple with the complimentary shades of green. On Friday I will share some fabric options that I found in my stash. 

Airbnb

Are you familiar with Airbnb? We were introduced to it by friends of ours who use it. The Airbnb site has the best description of it:

Airbnb is a social website that connects people who have space to spare with those who are looking for a place to stay. Through their experiences on Airbnb, guests and hosts build real connections with real people from all over the globe.

Guests gain access to unique and distinctive spaces and immerse themselves in the culture of their destinations. We call that traveling like a human! Hosts can effortlessly showcase their spaces to an audience of millions, whether they have an urban apartment or countryside castle.

Our friends rent a room in their flat and they have used Airbnb to find rooms in various American and European cities. They told us about it and suggested that we offer the guest house.

So we did.

Ant it's been great so far! The cool thing is that you can find just about any kind of place to rent from a $10/night futon to a private tree house and everything in between. It works just like other internet-based sites with active feedback so that you can see if it's going to be a place you like.

We listed out guest house in September and are getting a couple of rentals a month. We're making a little mney but we are also meeting some really interesting people. We didn't know what kind of people would want to come stay "way out here" but it turns out there are 2 basic groups. We have the people from DC who want to get out of the city for a quiet weekend and we get people who are driving long distances on I95 and need a place to stay overnight. We are 8 miles off the interstate and about 2 hours south of Washington, DC and it seems to work out to be a pretty good half-way point for a lot of people. Because the guest house is separate people can arrive as late as they want and not worry about disturbing anyone.

Airbnb does a great job with communications and managing the fees and payments. You do have to check with your local authorities to determine any licensing you would need and taxes that you need to pay. Here we have local transient occupancy and federal sales taxes that I pay monthly. The sales taxes are file with my business taxes.  But even that is pretty straight forward. 

Recently I've started using it to try to find places to stay. With my food allergies I have to stay in places where I can prepare all of my own food and where people do not use fragrances. I was able to have some nice conversations back and forth with people and found a great place to stay for my next trip! Check it out for your next trip.

I don't want to leave a post without any photos or fiber content so I'll share this postcard.

I decided that I would give our guests welcome postcards. This is the design that all of our winter guests are receiving!