Category: supplies

Colourfast

I’m often asked whether I can guarantee that my hand-dyed threads are colourfast.

hand-dyed silk thread

The short answer is: no, I can’t. Domestic dyeing is different from commercial dyeing and the results can never be guaranteed.

The longer answer is: with due caution they probably are, if you’re careful – by which I mean (obviously, I hope) no boil washing and no bleach. A gentle warm hand wash will *probably* be fine, but no promises.

I dye my threads with Procion fibre-reactive dye, and after dyeing I wash them in the machine, on a mixed load setting, at 30 degrees with regular laundry detergent. I don’t use Synthrapol, and I don’t use a hot wash. Silk threads are delicate, and agitating them at temperatures over 30 degrees could be damaging. I set the machine to do an extra rinse after the standard mixed load wash.

Incidentally, people sometimes express disappointment that the threads aren’t dyed ‘naturally’. The reason I use Procion over natural dyeing is that Procion is quick, easy, reliable, and doesn’t require additional energy resources, as in simmering or steaming, to set the colour. I don’t own a microwave, and at today’s gas and electric prices, I’m not willing to simmer/steam several pans of thread for an hour each time – as well as the environmental impact of using additional energy for heating. All dyeing takes energy and resources, as does all textile production, but if I can keep the energy use to a minimum I’d prefer that. Many people do great things with natural dyes; I’m afraid I’m not one of them.

hand-dyed threads, two similar samples

Anyway: back to the Procion, and I did a little experiment of my own.

various hand-dyed threads before and after washing

I made two (awfully rough) stitched samples with various silk and cotton threads, all hand-dyed with Procion, on white brushed cotton. I soaked the lower sample (in the above photo) in hand-hot water with regular laundry detergent for half an hour, and then rinsed it in hot water. I can’t see any noticeable colour escape. I don’t know whether water quality affects colourfastness – the water in our area is very hard indeed. Soft water might make a difference.

hand-dyed DMC 6-strand floss

And exactly the same process above, with this DMC cotton floss. I’ve listed a few of these in the shop, just to see how they go – as usual, unique and unrepeatable colours, but I’ll hope to make some more soon. Ish.

I did expect some trouble with the magenta sections of this space-dyed thread (above), but no – not as far as I can tell. Red and magenta are notorious for leaching colour, and which of us has never accidentally dyed a load of washing pink because of an errant red sock?

So there we are. I still don’t guarantee colourfastness, and if you really need to wash something that is stitched with my hand-dyed thread, then I would advise testing it first. Mostly my threads are intended for purely decorative work, which will rarely, if ever, need washing.

New: DMC 6-strand cotton floss

And if you have washed anything that I’ve supplied, I’d be interested to know how that went.

Busy

When I left the day job eight months ago, I thought I’d have loads more time to create. Hooray, I thought, at last I get to be a full-time artist. All that extra time for stitching and drawing and designing and sketchbook work…

The reality isn’t quite as I expected. I have a lot of tasks to complete, sometimes simultaneously, before I can get anywhere near anything I want to do for myself. This definitely isn’t a complaint. I love being my own boss, and I love the freedom that gives me. I also enjoy working, and I like to be busy.

It’s a good job because at the moment there is So. Much. To. Do.

There is a little heap of fabric scraps to sort into packs for the shop:

fabric scraps old and new, ready for making into packs

There is another pile of fabric scraps for my Stitch a Little Landscape course, waiting to be made into packs (and thank you everyone who’s purchased one, I hope you’re making beautiful landscapes with them)

Stitch a Little Landscape fabrics

There’s another pile of undyed fabrics for painting, also for the online course, also for making into packs:

luscious textures

And then there’s the thread mountain. Newly-dyed threads that need sorting, photographing and listing:

cotton and silk hand-dyed threads – some lovely colours this time

And thread taster sets, which take days to assemble:

thread taster packs coming soon

Everything takes twice as long as I think it will – I am optimistic by nature – but all of it is more pleasure than work. And dyeing is a kind of artistry too, I guess. So is curating fabrics and threads, and also creating any kind of online course. Interesting how the universe interprets and delivers your dreams into reality. It’s better than anything I could have anticipated.

I will take a break when all of this is done. But in the meantime, thank you for keeping me busy.

Thread

Dyeing this week, which means at least another week to ten days of sorting, winding, twisting, grouping, labelling, photographing, describing and listing. I no longer announce shop updates, but I’ll be quietly adding these into the shop in the next week or two, if all goes well.

hand-dyed threads fresh from the washing line

It’s a lot of work, and it takes a while to sort through. Just as well I enjoy every bit of it. There are some really pretty colours this time.

a rainbow of silk thread sets

Lucky me, I get to choose some of the leftovers – all the odd yards that aren’t needed for a full skein. Just right for a line of daily stitching.

thread ends, dyer’s perks

Apparently we have hot weather on the way here in the UK so I’ll be in a darkened room somewhere trying to stay cool. Enjoy your weekend if you like it hot 😎

Threads again

There’s nothing like a well-stocked shop, and at present I have nothing like a well-stocked shop. If you did manage to get your hands on some of the latest batch of hand-dyed thread – thank you so much, it’s on its way. If you didn’t, don’t worry – there will be more.

So now I need to start all over again. It takes a long time to hand wind every skein in preparation for dyeing. I wondered if a yarn swift would help to make the process a bit more efficient. They’re designed for hanks of thicker knitting yarns, and I was sceptical about whether it would work for finer embroidery thread, but so far I’m impressed. In the photo below there’s a textured yarn skein in progress, but it also works perfectly well for threads.

Yarn swift, newly installed and working very well

For the next batch I’m going to try dyeing larger skeins initially, and then wind them into smaller skeins after dyeing. I’m still trying to figure out what works best here, both for me and for everyone else. I’m not sure that I will continue with so many different textured yarns indefinitely and will probably instead start to focus on just embroidery threads after current stocks run out. I might make an exception for silk boucle, which is one of my favourite textured yarns.

Cotton and silk threads in progress

Also I’m not sure that I’m going to do the big announcement thing when threads are ready. While I’m really grateful that there is so much demand, selling everything in a matter of hours is exhausting. Ideally I’d like to keep the shop stocked at all times, so I will add threads as they become available. If you’re interested in buying thread, please bookmark the shop products page here and keep checking regularly. It will be at least a couple of weeks before there are any more, but I’ll be working on it in the meantime.

In other news, March has begun, and the theme for this month is windows.

Early March on the stitch journal

You can see that I skim off a few of the threads for my own use. Dyer’s perks, I call it. They’re just skein ends and seconds really. The purple cotton slub has a few white bits in it where the dye didn’t quite find all the yarn. This does happen with thicker yarns, and you can easily cover the white bits with couching stitches.

The first two days are based on images seen through windows. The cherry blossom, along with so many other signs of spring, seems very early this year. The wheel is turning and time carries the colours of spring and the changing light.

Early March: twigs, buds, and cherry blossom

New book, old cover

This week I’ve made a notebook using some light weight cotton rag paper – somewhere to collect colour palettes, swatches, and notes about colour.

Sketchbook page with colour notes

The paper signatures were easy enough – just folded pairs that could be stitched to the spine of a cover. The cover itself literally dropped through the letter box one day. I cut a corrugated cardboard mailer box to size and painted it white:

Free! Corrugated cardboard mailer cut down to size

The depth of the box turned out to be exactly the right size for a spine to fit the pile of signatures:

Signatures stitched to cardboard cover

I painted some abaca tissue paper with acrylic inks and collaged/stencilled it a bit and used that to cover the white cardboard. I’ve reinforced the spine with another layer of painted tissue.

Little book of colour (front)
Little book of colour (back)

You can still see the texture of corrugated cardboard underneath the colour but it’s functioning pretty well as a book.

Next job this week is to find a way through these, when they’re dry:

Hand dyed threads – it’s like waiting for thread to dry

If I can get through them all (and if I can stop myself from keeping them!) they’ll be available from next week.

Threads

While I’m waiting for more thread to arrive in the post, I’m compiling for myself a thread catalogue. This is really just somewhere for me to organise and categorise the various types of thread that I will be stocking and dyeing.

Handmade notebook, about 5” x 7”
Notebook, back cover – acrylic ink, Posca paint pens, various mark-making tools and textures

Initially this was just going to be a notebook and cover, but, well, these things often get a bit out of hand, and now it’s slightly more complicated than that.

Book wrap – couched threads and yarns on hand-dyed silk noil

The colour palette came about by accident, after I dyed these thick cotton boucle yarns, which will wrap around the whole thing to tie it shut:

Chunky cotton boucle yarns

I really like the way this very thick-and-thin dimensional cotton slub yarn can be flattened when it’s couched with long stitches:

Anyway, back to over-complicating things, and now it’s a notebook in a wraparound cover, with a pocket for index cards carrying samples and information about the various threads. The pocket came from a silk shirt that I dyed.

Wraparound book cover with notebook and pocket for index cards

I find it very useful to round up information for comparative purposes, so that I can see at a glance how (for instance) silk and cotton threads compare in terms of weight or thickness. Thread weights are sometimes given as an nm figure, which I don’t find particularly helpful. Broadly, this system translates as the number of meters per 1g of thread (the first number) and the number of plies or strands in the thread (the second number). So the silk thread pictured below has a nm of 8/2, which tells you it’s a 2-ply thread, and you get about 8 metres of it per gram. For comparison, standard sewing thread (the kind you would use in a machine) is usually something like 60 or 70/2, which is a lot finer. As a visual thinker, I find it much easier to picture thread weights in terms of wraps per inch – I’m not certain but I think this is a system that is more commonly seen in the knitting world, to help with substituting yarn weights in patterns. I find it much easier to understand that the silk thread below has about 23 wraps per inch (the number of times you can wrap it around a one-inch strip without leaving any gaps).

Silk thread wrapped around card, 23 wraps per inch

Finer silk threads, which have an nm of 16/2 and 30/2, have wraps per inch of about 29 and 44 respectively. I find this easier to visualise.

Thread index cards

I’m using commercial cotton perle threads as controls, just to see how the weights of my various hand-dyed threads will compare. And even that isn’t as ‘standard’ as you might expect. I’ve used DMC perle 3 to 8 to count wraps per inch, but I didn’t have enough DMC perle 12 so had to use a Valdani perle 12 instead. And here’s the surprise – there isn’t a huge amount of difference between DMC perle 8 (43 wpi) and Valdani perle 12 (44 wpi). I can see by enlarging the photos that the 12 card maybe isn’t wrapped as closely as the 8, but that would only account for another 3 or 4-ish.

Commercial cotton perle threads

This is turning into quite a rabbit hole, isn’t it? I expect somebody somewhere will tell me I’ve got too much time on my hands, but I find this kind of thing really fascinating. Ultimately I suspect this will end up being a self-referencing closed system that only I will understand, and I think that’s probably ok. As soon as thread reinforcements arrive, I’ll be able to start winding skeins for dyeing again – but in the meantime I’m enjoying some quite reasonable down time.

On Work

Approaching the end of my first month as a self-employed artist, there is a lot to reflect on. Briefly, I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard, and also I don’t think I’ve ever been happier. ‘Work’ means something different now. Primary goal for next month is to get better at managing my work/life balance, which is difficult when work and life have essentially become the same thing.

‘Work’ means this, among other things:

Thread dyeing in progress

It also means wearing a variety of different hats from one minute to the next. Some of the jobs I’ve done so far this month are Sales Manager, Marketing Manager, Accountant, Goods Inwards Manager, Customer Service Manager, International Relations Manager, Tech Support Assistant, Logistics Manager, teacher, photographer, copy writer, proof reader, film director, video editor, sound engineer, dyer, content creator, and researcher. Haven’t had time to do any actual art yet.

But it’s a glorious feeling to wake up every morning filled with excitement for the working day ahead.

There will be thread in the shop soon (ish) – when I can get all of these skeins wound and sorted:

Textured threads
Cotton threads (they’re not all green!)

Here’s my Heath Robinson style skein twister. It’s a tiny hand drill I used to use years ago when I made miniatures, with a bent paper clip where the drill bit should be. The board is thick foam with a pencil stuck in it, clamped to a stool so it doesn’t move. I should probably patent it.

Unpatented Heath Robinson skein winder

I think some of the Teachable teething problems have been resolved now, and so far people seem to be enjoying the online course – I’ve been assured by several students that it isn’t only for beginners, which makes me very happy.

I’ll let you know when threads are available – it will take as long as it takes, but probably (I hope) some time this week. The shop will be temporarily closed while I list the threads, but it should only be down for a day or two. I aim to have threads in the shop every month from now on, if I can. The first batch will be UK post only, just until Royal Mail gets through the backlog of delays caused by strike action in December and the cyber attack earlier this month. From next month I hope to return to international shipping.

And on that note, it’s back to work for me.

Vintage cloth, December days

Over halfway through December, and heading towards the darkest days of the year here in the UK.

Darker days

I’ve learned such a lot through making this stitch journal. I no longer think of it as a journal though; it’s become more a collection of daily stitch meditations. I will certainly make something similar next year, though probably not exactly this design. If you want to try something like this, you can download a PDF with templates and notes here.

At least once a week someone asks me what the foundation fabric is. It’s this, a vintage French bed sheet, cotton/linen blend (sometimes called metis):

French vintage cotton/linen blend bed sheet

I will stitch on this fabric again next year. I probably have enough fabric here for another four daily stitch scrolls, if I stick to the long/thin format. I find it an easy shape to work on because you can roll up the ends as you go along, which keeps it fairly compact.

The sheet holds a few memories of its previous life, one of which is a hand-stitched seam down the centre. I’ve assumed that this was a sign that it had worn well enough for a previous owner to have turned it, because parts of the sheet I’ve been stitching on (a strip torn from the outer edge) had worn very thin. Turning is where you extend the life of an old sheet, which tends to wear most in the middle where you’ve been lying on it, by cutting it down the centre and then swapping the edges – so you then sew the original outer edges together, creating a central seam and letting the worn parts become the new outer edges. Someone from the past has hand-sewn this seam down the middle:

Hand-stitched central seam

BUT there is also a darn on the outer edge, which is clearly a selvedge – so, given that the sheet appears to have been turned, but the new outer edges are selvedges (and not hemmed raw edges) I’m deducing that the fabric was possibly hand-woven on a home loom because it’s taken two widths to make one sheet. Hand looms created fabric with narrower widths than the big commercial looms, so the only way to create wider fabrics was to stitch narrower lengths together.

Vintage bed sheet with original darning

The sheet has been hemmed with impossibly tiny, regular stitches. I had assumed that this was machined, but I’ve unpicked a tiny bit and it’s just one single thread so has clearly been done by hand. It’s a very good quality fabric so will have been stitched and mended carefully.

Tiny stitches on a hand-stitched hem

The only thing I’ve been occasionally dissatisfied with this year is that the fabric is white. Sometimes I have wanted to stitch with white thread, and it just doesn’t show up well enough. The rule that I made for myself was no painting or dyeing, no added fabric or applique, just thread on a foundation. I don’t want to dye or paint it, because then I’d have to predetermine the colour, and I think that would create more limitations. I may, however, give it a very quick dip in some weak tea, just to knock back the whiteness but not enough to colour it too much.

I’m looking forward to revealing the whole thing at the end of the month. Yikes, that’s a week on Saturday! Hope you’re looking forward to seeing it too. In the meantime have a wonderful, peaceful festive season, and thank you for your friendship and support during 2022.

On storing thread

A few people have asked about how I store my embroidery threads, so I thought a brief tour of my collection might be helpful.

I use a wide variety of threads, from very chunky cotton yarns (mostly for couching) to very fine silks, and pretty much everything in between. I will write a post some time about the various weights of thread that you can get and what you can use them for. For now I’m focusing on how to organise thread. This jumble of blue threads doesn’t look very organised, I know. I guess all things are relative.

Blue threads

When I dye threads, I dye them in skeins. They look really pretty in skeins, but I find them difficult to use like that because they very soon get horribly tangled, especially if you keep them all in the same box. I find the only way I can make them useable is to wind them somehow. I went through a phase a while ago of winding threads from skeins into little balls, but these also get tangled quite quickly.

Skeins of thread

I used to use sections of plastic drinking straw for winding threads from skeins after dyeing, which works quite well if you cut a little snip in the ends to anchor the thread before you start winding. The straws were left over from the olden days before we knew how damaging they are, and I figured it was better to use (and re-use) them than to let them end up in landfill.

Drinking straw bobbins

Some of my threads are still on straws, but these days I tend to use little squares of regular 80gsm copy paper, about 3” square, and roll them up.

Squares of copy paper ready to roll

Again you need to snip the end of the paper tube so that the thread has somewhere to anchor itself to stop it unravelling. I find you don’t need to glue the roll of paper; the thread keeps it rolled quite securely.

Purples. That horribly tangled black thing (top left) is coton a broder and needs winding

I find it quite therapeutic to wind threads from skeins onto tubes, but it can take a long time depending on how fine the thread is.

Green threads. Some of these are commercial threads; most are hand-dyed cotton and silk

The only time I use the commercial card bobbins (the kind that you can buy from embroidery shops) is for winding DMC stranded embroidery floss. I don’t like these card bobbins much because when you get to the end of the skein the thread ends up with permanent creases from being wrapped round the flat edges of card. I find there is no other sensible way of storing these though – I can’t see colours clearly enough with them piled up in skeins, and you need to label them in case you need to buy that particular colour again.

DMC stranded embroidery thread

So there’s a little tour through my threads. I know lots of people who use sticks and twigs, and the old-fashioned wooden clothes pegs, to store thread. They look lovely, but I imagine would be bulky in large numbers. So – how do you store your threads? Let me know if you have any good tips.

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