the seventh day of the seventh month

 happy tanabata      🎋🎋🎋🎋🎐

have a good weekend

neki desu

 

the summer of the res

re read, revisit ,re study re try and everything else in between. this is no laughing matter. after so many years of using my to go weaving program i have discocered many other functions to work with paralell threadings and networks.

i even went back to alice schlein's seminal network book and re read it discovering many ideas that i had just glossed over. i am re studying it in depth this time. 

as with dyeing all these years i had gotten results but the depth of it had escaped me. i am at a curious point now  revisiting what i thought i knew .

on the other hand not related but in a way it is i have started looking up words in the dictionary directly from japanese. at first i'd look up a word in english to get the japanese equivalent. now after countless dramas i hear an unfamiliar word,stop the streaming and look it up. it's a great reinforcement and after hearing it a couple of times it's already set in the  hardisk of my  mind.

i am planning my fall weaves with all those madder and benibana dyed silks. the anticipation is building up. novel ways of using my weaving program promise summer fun.

neki desu

 

the red

finally red. the way to get it is to raise the PH to 11 with soda ash.

then putting a piece of open weave cotton in it to absorb the red dye. notice i say dye as there's a lot of confussion on the internet between dye and pigment. do yourself a favor and get the butrop/ellis dye book. you'll never dye the same way again. ask me how i know.

 the photo gave me a chuckle as it looks like the painting flaming june which is in the ponce museum of art in puerto rico.

after a 24 hour soak the cotton blanket has absorbed the red and is this gorgeous shocking pink. so far excellent. maybe it doesn't need to soak for that long, need to check on that.

 right. now i want to dye silk. silk put directly in the bath absorbs both the red and the traces of yellow still in the petals and dyes corals. so the trick is to disccarge the wonderful schiaparelli pink in acidulated water. you're aming PH6. bless the inventor of litmus paper, a great deal more efficient and precise than my digi PH meter which has to be calibrated every time and sometimes gives incorrect readings.

 you need to rinse the color  blanket before putting it in the acidulated bath or else yellow will transfer to the bath as well.

et voila mesdames! a soft pink silk skein. have some other skeins waiting to be dyed, aiming for deeper color. that's why one needs plenty of dyestuffs.

neki desu