community of dyers

I have a customer (2 actually) who wants me to grad dye 40% silk 60% cotton baby wraps. That is too much fabric to fit into the microwave to steam, and it needs to be grad'd horizontally (they are between 3 and 5 meters long each. I can either grad with acid, dry and steam in a large canning pot to set later, or I can attempt to get the same results that I get with soda ash on cotton by doing my water adds with water from a tea kettle and immersing my dye bath in hot water to keep it hot from the outside. Which of those options would you recommend?
Alison

This turns out to be a very good question! Actually, I would not even use the acid dye method for a 40% silk/60% cotton wrap. Instead, I would dye it exactly as if it were 100% cotton, using soda ash.

Silk does fine when dyed like cotton with soda ash. Cotton does not dye with vinegar. Any staining in the cotton that occurs when dyeing with vinegar will gradually wash out.

What colors do you plan to use? There will be some color shift on the silk, but not the cotton, when you dye it with soda ash, unless you're using one of the pure unmixed MX dye colors. This is not necessarily a bad thing, just harder to predict. Since the majority of the fiber in the wrap is cotton, the shift shouldn't be too major.

-Paula

I have read this term a few times on here and on dharma's website, but Im having a hard time visualizing what this means. Does the color change, or break apart into pigments? Or am I completely off base and complicating this?

Some of the dye colors react more quickly on silk, relative to the other dye colors, than they do on cotton, so it seems as though you are using more of them. For example, when I dyed silk and cotton with an aqua color made of turquoise, cerulean blue (blue MX-G), and lemon yellow (yellow MX-8G), it turned out emerald green on the silk while producing aqua on the cotton. The silk looked as though I'd used more of the yellow. Dharma's "deep purple" mix produces a reddish raspberry color on silk, instead of deep purple as it does on cotton.

When you use a pre-mixed dye on silk with soda ash, it will not necessarily produce the same color as it does on cotton. To get the same color on silk as on cotton, you would need to mix the different dye colors at a different ratio than you do for cotton.

What this means is that when you use a premixed dye on silk with soda ash, you're not quite sure what color you're going to get, until you try it. If you use the acid method, you get less color shift and end up with a color more similar to what you'd get on cotton with soda ash, as Pia Fish has posted about here in the past.

-Paula

Im using straight turquoise on both and a mix of turquoise and navy on the other side of one and a driftwood like gray on the second half of the other. The benefit of acid dyeing these blends (to us as babywearers) is that you retain the luster of the silk, whereas if you soda ash fix it, it looks stonewashed. The are still soft and supple, but they look more like flannel than silk when you're through. I know this much from personal experience, as I did that with my own first wrap. I know that the colors will be more faded as the acid dye will only catch the silk threads, but that is really what at least one of the customers wants. She wants it to look beachy (the turquoise to driftwood). The other one, turquoise to navy, I haven't decide which way to go yet. It has already been dyed and stripped once and so the luster is basically gone. She wants it to be Deep Sea colored, so soda ash may be the way to go with that one. Plus, I really want to get this skill under my belt. It feels like i'm moving to the next grade level in my craft. (I think I'm still in Dye Primary school)
Alison