|
Big Boss
in the Hexenküche |
(click on any picture to get a bigger view)
Painter‘s Threads are produced exclusively by Tentakulum Manufaktur and are pure hand work only. The dyes used are fiber reactive colors. Reactive because they react with the fiber ,i.e. they build a new chemical compound. Thereby they guarantee for a rather good colorfastness, a good reaction with the fixative and a good out-wash of the surplus color.
This is also the explanation why each material takes the color differently. Silk e.g. shows the color brown usually as a reddish clay tone, while cotton shows a lighter brown than rayon. For vegetable fibers you have to use a alkaline fixative, an acid one for animal fibers, this also enforces the different looks of colors of e.g. silk and cotton
However the word "good" in combination with colorfastness is not very reliable when talking about hand dyeing. If you do hand dyeing one is not allowed to use chemical additives like the industrial dyers do. And even they are not allowed any more to use certain chemicals to fix the colors due to their harm for the environment. Industrial dyeing "shoots" the color into the thread with high pressure thus penetrating the fibers evenly, "inviting" more molecules to start a good relationship. When you do hand dyeing the color is put “on top of the fiber” and pushed into it with only as much strength as the human being has to offer. So in hand dyeing more molecules stay in their old relationships. Somehow contrary to relations between human beings….. These molecules appearently do not really like to stay in the thread, not having be able to form a lasting relationship with their counterparts in the fibre, and simply let themselves be washed out…. Again there is some similarity to human behavior…. Of course light embroidery surfaces and white T-Shirts do not very much like this behavior of the fiber reactive dyes...!
You can best tell hand dyed threads from industrially dyed ones by cutting them. It is best seen on thicker threads as the core of the thread most of the times looks a little bit lighter or sometimes even white since the color does not penetrate the inner fibers of threads.
Humans also can never apply the same precision as machines usually do – fortunately so! Isn't it a wonderful artistically inspiring moment, if I can discover different colors over and over again, although they would have to be actually alike? Heide Stoll-Weber, an internationally renowned textile artist, who developed a beautiful collection of hand dyed fabrics, once told me: and then it is always so exciting, if one is waiting in front of the washing machine and does not know, what the fabric will look like this time!
Hand dyers are artists like those, which use their products. Most dyeing artists do not like their products to be looking as perfect as machine made ones, that is always looking exactly alike. They also try to make as many needle-workers be inspired by all those variations and possibilities one has with hand dyed materials. And the individual results, which can be obtained hereby.
In times, when globalization means that I find MacDonalds or H&M or Aldi even in the most remote corners of the world, we should all reconsider that everybody has an individuality of its own and can find some of it in doing small and large pieces of art. To work with hand painted materials is one way of doing this.
Each of the materials takes the colors differently, even fibers of the same material look different depending on their make (spun, filament, twisted a.s.o.). Red in the color "Frida" for example is a very dominant colour, taking away most of the blue. For "Kandinsky" we use blue, yellow and ret in one skein, making it difficult to keep the yellow "clean", i.e. to still have yellow spot when it comes out of the washing machine. Humans also cannot put on the colors onto the materials as accurately as a machine. If for example one puts three colors on thread, one can keep the distances relatively alike … I can however not prevent the color to run very fast into a part of the thread which I actually already dyed with another color or still wanted to dye. And what was meant to be yellow and red becomes orange, or yellow and blue becomes green.
One can of course not really control the effect of the application of the fixative and the “after-wash”, water always runs down the hill! During this process dyes will be transported into parts of the materials where they are not supposed to be. This will change the colors yet again. The closer the different colours are together in a skein, the more they will mingle with each other.
Dye powders often contain pigment parts, which are not really perceptible for our eye, however upon washing they „unfold full“. Then suddenly a brown mark sits in the middle of the red or a blue mark in the middle of the brown. With our dyeing method, which is more like „painting “ threads each item is effected individually by the dye, not in bunches as with many other dyeing techniques. That is why the colors varies from skein to skein, hankie to hankie or whatever we are just dyeing. Since there are however no repeating patterns on the thread and each one of the items contains the same colors, they always match with each other. Even if it turns out to be a dark blue this time and a bright blue next time or a red looks pink this time and more like magenta next time. They can also be used in combination with solid colours that match most of the time even if the tonal value of the hand dyed thread varies.
Note: If you want to have the same colour for a project always buy a skein or two more than you think you need. Then you will not end up missing just a few threads of a certain dye lot. With the "leftovers" you can work small works of arts with a few stitches (like for example artist mailing cards), for yourself or someone you like. |
|
|
There are many things, which affect the result of a dyebath, which do not have anything to do with the artistic creativity of the dyer: the condition of the water (soft water results in stronger colors), humidity (high air humidity lets the colors penetrate better into textiles material), the pretreatment of the yarns (with e.g. cotton the portion of the mercerizing liquid can vary on the fiber and affect the color reaction) and not least the cosmos: root days are completely badly, bloom days very good for cotton, fruit days for silk.... Believe me, I put it to months of testing!... and much more besides.
There is also the dyeing powder: it changes from time to time as well. Today the color „Jade “ might be blueish, with the next lot we receive it could be more greenish, “Lemon” might be yellow this time, greenish next time. These are just two examples. The make of the colors might change as well: one that felt like colored sand one time might be more like flour next time. Many hand dyers do not work by gram, as the measuring accuracy is very difficult to achieve with regular scales and very time consuming. So most use spoons or similar measuring devices. However: a spoon of sand is much heavier than a spoon of flour and flour resists dissolving much more than sand ...there you see all your trials to achieve a certain colour going down the drain….
Many of you know the fiber reactive colors „Procion MX “- MX stands for mixture. There are only few pure colors. Although these mixtures are made by machines, they can vary as well. In order to obtain a certain color nuance, we do new mixtures with the mixtures get our favourite colours. Now just imagine: we used a mixture of two sand-like colors, and one of these two colors suddenly turns out flour-like…. the mixture has to be re-tested and will never be the same. It is also difficult to keep the mixture evenly mixed, since the heavier color tends to sink down in the container and if you do not shake it enough before you use it…... Most of the time the colour solution looks the same to us each time, but the final result is nevertheless somewhat different…. |
