The Process 003: Dyeing Cotton Lint the Best Way

So it happened. I dyed cotton lint and it actually came out the intended color. Some other folks, including yours truly, have tried and failed to get decent color out of dying raw cotton, and then told ourselves that it was still pretty enough. I pretty much followed the same steps as I did before in the cold-batch direct application method, only using less dye. To recap, here's how you prepare:

Intructions

1. Don't even bother washing your fibers unless they are really dirty, and in that case, I don't know how to help you without creating tangles. Yes, the fibers are coated in a natural waxy cuticle, but it just doesn't seem to matter whether you wash that off or not.
2. Carelessly comb your fibers into loose logs or card into loose rolags. Loosely, so that you have an easier time getting the fibers saturated in dye. The rest of these instructions assume you have one ounce of fiber prepared in this way.
3. Put your safety gear on, including but not limited to goggles, gloves, and face mask.
4. In a container that is easy to pour from, dissolve 1 1/2 teaspoons of urea in a 1/2 cup of water.
5. Measure 1/2 teaspoon of dye into a small dish. (With the exception of dyes marked * or ** Scroll to the results section for an explanation.)
6. Add a little bit of the urea-water to the dye and use a palette knife to paste up.
7. Add the paste-up to the urea water and stir until complete dissolved.
8. Dissolve 1/2 teaspoon of soda ash to the dye mixture.
9. Pour the mixture into a quart-sized resealable bag.
10. Stuff some of that cotton in there.
11. Overcome your emotions, such as doubt, regret, and fear. You will make it all fit. Try prodding it and squishing it with your gloved hands as you go.
12. Seal the bag while carefully squeezing out the air.
13. Massage the bag gently without ripping the bags. Make sure you penetrate all fibers. You can check by opening the bags, but be prepared for a mess.
14. If your dye has turquoise in it, put the bag in a pot of warm-hot water to bring out the greener hues.
15. Let those bags sit overnight.
16. Rinse fibers until water runs clear. Please consider methods to save water. I actually took a shower with my fibers in a wash basin. After the first rinse to get the bulk of the excess dye out, I let the fibers soak with some professional textile detergent for about a day before doing a final rinse.

Let the fiber dry. Once that's done you could probably just spin directly from what you've got, but I'm going to re-comb everything again.

The above graphic might give you a little insight into my process and what sort of supplies you will need to gather. Speaking of which:

Supplies

Consumables:

• Cotton lint, either still in the boll, on the seed, or ginned. No sense in buying it already combed since you are going to make a mess of it.
• Fiber reactive dye
• Soda ash
• Urea
• Professional textile detergent (optional)

You'll notice that the minimum amounts offered are not only cheap, but more than enough to complete this project, so I don't know why people even bother with the sub-par dyes available at craft and grocery stores for what is going to end up being a pretty labor intensive endeavor. It's worth it. Get good quality materials.

Non-consumables:

It should go without saying that these materials should be dedicated to art and never used again for food.

• Pourable container: Should be able to hold at least one cup for this particular project, but maybe more if you're planning to do larger batches. Glass is best because it's super easy to clean, but plastic is okay.
• A small dish: This is to paste up the dye. My little orange dish is silicon. It was okay. As you can see, there was a lot of waste. I think next time I'll try to get a hold of some watch glasses.
• Teaspoon set
• Palette knife: Two or more would be nice. They are great for leveling your teaspoon and for making your paste-up.
• Sealable plastic freezer bags: Don't go cheap. These need to withstand a certain amount of abuse otherwise you'll have a mess on your hands, floor, and every other surface. I find the quart size to be most manageable. If you are making larger batches you can either use a gallon size, or separate into multiple bags. These can be rinsed and reused until they fall apart.
• Plastic bucket: Just to stabilize the bag while pouring the ingredients and cotton. Quart size for a quart-sized bag, gallon for gallon.
• Metal sieve: to rinse your dyed cotton.
• Tub: To soak your dyed cotton.
• Safety gear: Goggles, face mask, gloves.
• Cleanup supplies: I have one big cellulose sponge and then several sheet sponges (seen in yellow in the above photo.) I like to set my materials on the sheet sponges so any drips get absorbed instead of dripping onto the counter. (Which I failed to do in the third photo.)

Results

Here comes the payoff!

What you see above includes three dried and combed examples from my latest experiment and one from the lightest result of my previous experiment. The dye I used was Dharma Trading's fiber reactive Jade Green (50). In the bottom photograph, I placed the fibers against the Jade Green swatch for comparison. From these photos it seems clear that the far left example is the closest match, but I'll add that in person, that batch looks washed out (and that may be what you want). The most vibrant and closely matched to the swatch is actually the second from the left, though in the photograph it doesn't look much different from the second to the right sample. All I can say is, look in the highlights and not the shadows, otherwise they all seem too dark.

Speaking of too dark, ha ha, check out the far right. Holy moly, what a waste of dye that was!

Jade Green
¼ tsp dye per ½ cup of water 1:96 ratio	½ tsp dye per ½ cup of water 1:48 ratio	¾ tsp dye per ½ cup of water 1:32 ratio	1 tsp dye per ½ cup of water 1:24 ratio

In conclusion, I will be using a 1:48 dye to water ratio (1/2 teaspoon of dye for every 1/2 cup of water) in most further projects. It gives the closest match to the swatch. It should be noted that not all of the colors require the same amount of dye. If you're buying from Dharma, colors marked with * require double the amount of dye and those marked ** require four times as much dye. If I did another batch of Cobalt Blue, that means instead of a half teaspoon, I'd use a whole teaspoon.

Bullshit Crafting Product 003: The Boneyard Skeletons Collection

Get ready, here come the holidays. Fair warning, I'm a grump, but I understand, especially when it comes to crafting, so I'm not even going to complain that it's only September and there's already Christmas stuff on the shelves. When I was working for my mother's craft business, the beginning of my summer vacation was when we started making the Christmas inventory. So, if you're going to be needlepointing a stocking for your new grandbaby like my grandma did for us, or quilting a one of a kind tree skirt, well, you needed to have started yesterday.

Let's Bone!

However, there's no excuse for ready-made Christmas decor to be out. You need 30 minutes at most to put that shit up, not three months. Anyway, the Halloween crap was harder to ignore. When I was a kid it was all about sitting down with a McCall's, Burda, or Simplicity catalogue and convincing your mother she could totally make you the most complicated costume you could find in there. It looks like there are plenty of kids still getting the pleasure of that experience, but there's a lot more ready made costumes and decorations than ever before. For the last few years, I've noticed a lot of decorative plastic pumpkins that already have been decorated with ribbons, glitter, or paint, or have already been carved. Like, what's the point? If you don't want to make things yourself, there's one of those seasonal Halloween shops right next door! This article was going to be about the damn pumpkins, but I found something so much worse.

Welcome to The Boneyard. (I'll rightfully attribute this quote to a bro I went on a date with as he tried to coax me into his apartment at the end of the night.) You might be wondering, what's so bad about a crappy plastic skeleton decoration? Sure, it's not physiology class-level accurate, but what does it matter? Well, as I said before, it's not really a crafting supply, but that's not enough to rile me up to write an article about it. In the same Boneyard Collection, we have some other organisms that make me raise an eyebrow.

Apparently cats and dogs have ear lobe bones, and dogs have nose bones. At the store I said to no one in particular, "Ear lobes don't have bones!" The creators went as far as to make sure the skeletons were at least digitigrade, why ruin it by adding ears? I know, without the ears, idiots would have a hard time recognizing these things as cats or dogs, and we need to sell garbage product to stupid people, so good job Boneyard Collection.

 It gets worse. Apparently these birds have human-like sternums. The bird sternum, called a keel, needs to come way the hell out so that their bulky pectorals can attach there, you know, so they can fly. Maybe they can compensate with their bone feathers? I don't know what the thought was here. Most of us have eaten chicken wings before. Bird phalanges are fused together to make a blade-like shape suitable for swimming through the air. These birds have like, one long finger with a bunch of other bone fingers growing out of them. It's so, so wrong.

"But Lou," you say, "it's just a bunch of silly decorations. Who cares? Lighten up! You're being a crabby bitch Lou!"  Well, screw you. It's ridiculous how ignorant people are of basic physiology, and this kind of inaccuracy only makes it worse. If there were some parts of the figures that were sort of vague and lacked detail, that would be fine. It would also be fine if there were some parts that weren't to scale, and even some minor inaccuracies would be tolerable. Still, as bad as these models are, I still wouldn't have bothered with this article if it wasn't for this asshole right here.

Do you hear that sound? That's me. I'm still screaming. Here, let me re-explain basic biology to you. Read the following very slowly with a patronizing tone:

Spiders don't have bones. Spiders have an exoskeleton. Exo- means outside. Spiders have a protective covering that acts as a skeleton on the outside of their bodies. The exoskeleton is made out of a special substance called chitin. Chitin is very hard and indigestible. Humans, mammals, and other vertebrates have an endoskeleton. Endo- means inside. We have bones made with calcium on the inside of our bodies.

At least some people get it. Glen reviewed this product here.


***** Glen
Everyone knows that a spider has an exoskeleton and is not made up of bones. Other than this obvious inaccuracy, I find this spider rather charming. It was the perfect addition to my annual Halloween party.



Thanks for the review Glen, but really Glen? That doesn't bother you to spend money on such a hot mess, Glen?

That's it,  I gotta get out of here and move on.

Bullshit Scorecard

Not a craft. I guess you could add glitter, I don't care.	-3
I hate holidays	-3
Number of shits given for accuracy	-5
Grand Total	-11

Quick Tips 001: Color Swatch Keyring

I have this really rad poster of all of the current Procion fiber reactive dye colors, and it has been really helpful in making color choices for my projects, but it's not exactly easy to see what colors complement each other. In the following example, I'll show you how I solved this problem by turning my poster into a set of swatches.

First, I suggest that whatever poster you're using, you buy two of them. One of the posters you will keep intact, and the other you can make into swatches. Sometimes it's nice to have your colors still displayed as a poster.

At Dharma's they have these two posters available:

Fiber Reactive Dyes
Acid Dyes

Depending on your craft, whether you use glazes, paints, or dyes, often times you can even find free brochures that have color swatches printed on them.

The first thing I do to my poster is have it laminated to enhance the durability of the swatches. If you don't have access to a laminator or it's too expensive to have done, I have some other tips for you which you can do later.

I then draw lines across the poster in between the swatches. I measure carefully to make sure the lines are evenly spaces so that my swatches will be the same size.

For my project, my swatches were 1 ^3/8" tall and 1 ^5/8" wide.

 Next I cut the poster into long strips following the lines I drew.

 I finally cut the strips into individual swatches.

 *I you haven't laminated your poster yet, now might be the time to do it. You might be able to fit trimmed-down strips or individual swatches into a smaller laminator. The benefit is that all sides of your swatches will be sealed, making them a little more water proof. The drawback is that you have to cut them out again! If you're looking for a cheap hack, use packing tape. Unroll a length of packing tape sticky-side up, and place your swatches on the tape. Unroll another length of tape and carefully apply to the other side of your swatches. Now you can cut them up again!*

 To keep all the swatches organized, I decided I wanted to keep them on a keyring. I punched a hole in the corner, not less that 1/4" from the edge.

I used the first swatch as a template for marking the location of the holes on the remaining swatches so that they would sit evenly on the keyring.

 After all the punching, I discovered a secret. The hole makes a nice window to see how colors look together! 

Don't attempt to secure your swatches with a traditional spiral keyring; you'll damage the holes! Either use a threaded key ring, a hinged key ring, or a small decorative carabiner like I did.

 Now you have all of your swatches protected, organized, and ready to play with!

Pintering 001: My Most Popular Pin is Garbage

So far, very few of my pins get re-pinned and that's fine because my boards are for my amusement primarily, and if others enjoy my curations, well, that's pretty rad too. It ends up being a pretty big deal when I get a re-pin as notifications get sent through multiple apps via every device I have. The notifications have been pretty frequent the last few days, but I've been too busy to follow up. I finally did. Here it is:

Some time ago I wrote at length about my disapproval of toilet paper tube art. In doing so I ended up pinning an awful lot of crap I do not even like. What I didn't think about is that people would see my pins and then also pin them. Somehow I doubt these re-pinners are as cynical as I am, and were probably re-pinning because they were actually inspired by this thing.

I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I try really hard to embrace this concept, but really, look at this thing. The painting is sloppily done, it's obvious that it's made of toilet paper tubes, the color palette is uninspiring, the composition is dull, and there are some cheap looking little plastic pearls glued to the flowers unnecessarily. As far as all toilet paper tube art goes, it's one of the least skillfully done projects I've ever seen. It's displeasing to look at. It's just bad. But that's just my opinion. (If I'm being honest, it's not just my opinion. This thing is objectively, not subjectively, bad.)

Yet it has the most re-pins of all of my pins combined.

I get notified every time it's re-pinned and I get to see who's re-pinned it. I click on these people to look at what they pin and sometimes I'm treated to the worst taste ever, and sometimes I find a person who seems to have pretty good taste, and perhaps just had a momentary lapse in judgement. Or maybe they're just assholes like me who enjoy ironic pinning.

It's an interesting window into what people value, and it leaves me feeling lonely sometimes. I've got these pins of people from all over the world doing their craft, and they get very few pins. Maybe it's just the luck of the Pinterest algorithms and not just that people love painted garbage more than the cultural heritage of craft.

Science of Craft: 003 The Structure of Cotton Fiber

Surely you've heard the fairytale of Rumpelstiltskin. Some chick finds herself in a predicament that requires her to turn hay into gold thread otherwise she'll be executed. Luckily some woodland spirit named Rumpelstiltskin comes to her aid in exchange for the distressed damsel's first born. Things turn out pretty much how one might expect. Now, if you know about bast fibers, you might be heckling our heroine from the sidelines. Congrats, you are the real life Rumpelstiltskin. Certainly, you're not going to be making anything out of hay, but our girl is probably mistaking flax for hay. But she's not the only idiot. The king who wanted her to make gold thread was only ever going to get linen, which is a wonderful material in its own right. Too bad they didn't have Pinterest back then, where they could have learned to class anything up with a spritz of metallic Krylon. Anyway, I grew up enjoying Shelly Duvall's Fairytale Theater, and looking back on this scene (10:54), it's especially hilarious to me now. What a good show.

Now, try suspending judgement on our poor heroine for a moment and try empathizing with her incredulity about spinning plant fiber. It does seem pretty weird, but it's amazingly doable as long as you can find a way to get at the cellulose that makes up every plant. In case you forgot, here's what I'm talking about.

One cellulose unit

This is a unit of cellulose, which has such wonderful properties which human beings have found many uses for. It's part of what makes up the fiber in our diet, it's what makes up the lumber we use, the pulp in our paper, and the plant fibers that we spin. However, there are a couple of factors, polymerization and crystallinity, that make any given source of cellulose better suited for one application or another.

Polymerization

Take a look at that cellulose unit again and notice the oxygens (in red) seemingly just hanging off the ends. That's where the cellulose units attach to each other. These attachments are particularly strong bonds known as covalent bonds. That's when a couple of atoms actually share electrons with each other. For cellulose in particular, the connection between the sugar subunits is called a glycosidic bond, and they always occur on the first and fourth carbons, connecting unit to unit, to another unit, and another, and so on, which makes a polymer. Polymers are molecules made of long chains of smaller units repeated together. A good analogy for polymers would be pop-beads. The beads would represent individual atoms and the "pop" part would be the shared electrons.

The longer the polymer, the better it is for whatever you're doing with it. When making paper, using long cellulose fibers makes a sturdier, more flexible paper. You've experienced this if you've ever noticed the difference between drying your hands on recycled paper towels and using some premium brand like Brawny or Cottonelle. Whenever we recycle paper, those polymer chains get damaged and broken, thereby shortening them. I once had a student insist on using the crummy brown paper towels to make recycled handmade paper. Besides the fact the she wasn't really recycling anything by unwinding the roll of fresh unused paper towels, the paper came out extremely weak and friable, just like I told her it would. There's only so many times you can recycle cellulose fibers until they are too short to do anything with.

It may not be surprising that paper makers often add cotton to their paper pulp to enhance the quality of their paper. I know my interviewers must have been impressed with the cotton stock I printed my resume on. Anyhow, I'm saving the short fibers left over from my cotton spinning and will see if they help a all with my paper making. Of course, the longest fibers are more desirable for spinning, but cotton is notoriously short (usually no more than an inch) compared to animal fibers which intimidates a lot of people, but obviously it's got a long enough staple length because people have been spinning it a very long time. One just needs to use different techniques and make a few adjustments to existing equipment to spin cotton, and someday I will go on at length about it.

Crystallinity

I hope you haven't been equating a single cellulose polymer with a single cellulose fiber. Cellulose fibers are actually a much more complex arrangement of many polymers bonded together more or less in parallel. The more parallel and tightly packed the polymers are, the higher the degree of crystallinity is. This makes cotton pretty strong, especially when wet, a feature animal fibers can't claim.

The hydroxyl groups that are key in dyeing of the fiber, as we have learned, but they are also what gives cotton its high degree of crystallinity, because they are so very attracted to each other. This is due to something called polarity which creates the condition for hydrogen bonds to form. This won't be difficult to understand if you can stick with me. Ha. You know how opposites attract? That's all that's really going on here, and in this case the opposites are negative and positive charges. The oxygen has a slight negative charge and the hydrogen has a slight positive charge.

This unbalance didn't just happen for no reason. Oxygen is a greedy asshole, and in bonding covalently with hydrogen, doesn't share the electron quite fairly. It's like if you were to split lawn mower ownership with your neighbor, and yet it spends more time in your neighbor's garage than yours. The lawnmower represents the electron in this analogy, keep up with me here. Anyhow, electrons have a negative charge, and because oxygen is bogarting the electrons, the oxygen ends up being more negative and the hydrogen ends up being more positive.

If the hydroxyl group from a cellulose polymer encounters a hydroxyl from another molecule, the positive hydrogen is going to be attracted to the negative oxygen of the other hydroxyl group. This attraction forms the hydrogen bond. It's not as strong as a covalent bond, but considering how many potential hydrogen bonds could be formed all up and down a cellulose fiber, overall, that's going to make a pretty tough fiber. The more hydrogen bonds form with adjacent cellulose fibers, the more closely organized in parallel the polymers become. This is crystallinity.

A hydrogen bond between the hydrogen in a
hydroxyl unit and the oxygen in water.

You know what else has Hs and Os bonded in it? Oh come on, do I have to spell it out for you? H two Ohhhhhhhh, now you get it don't you? Now remember, oxygen is an asshole, even in water. It has a slightly negative charge and water's hydrogens have a slightly positive charge. When water meets a cellulose fiber, the water becomes attracted to the hydroxyl groups in the cellulose. That's why I have 100% cotton bath towels. Nothing dries your butt crack better.

Fiber Structure

If you've got good eyes, it's pretty easy to tease out a single cotton fiber and look at it. That is not one polymer chain. It's not even a bunch of polymer chains hydrogen bonded together. One cotton fiber is actually many layers of crystalline cellulose chains arranged in different ways, and this is what makes cotton so splendid and easy to work with. Some of the layers are twisted, which makes the fiber strong. The fiber structure of cotton is pretty consistent, having a diameter of about 12-20 micrometers. The result is a fiber that is smooth, soft, and not irritating like wool is. Fine Merino is comparable.

Cotton is so great. It comes right off the plant this way. You can't just start spinning trees you know, even though they contain a lot of cellulose. In order to "spin trees" you have to remove all of the lignins and other compounds to get at the cellulose, and by that time you just have a bunch of unspinnable pulp left over, so then you'll have to chemically polymerize the pulp, which will never be as long or strong as cotton polymers. What I just described there is how rayon is made. Through some physical effort, bamboo, and bast fibers like linen and hemp, can be processed into spinnable fibers. Cotton, though, is a clear winner for me.

If you want to know more, here are a couple of more technical pages on the structure of cotton. Have at it!

Cotton Inc.

Barnhardt Cotton

Bullshit Crafting Product: 002 Toilet Paper Tubes

I was inspired to see if my cotton seeds were still viable, so I put one in a sawed-off water bottle filled with soil to see what would happen. After watering, it sprouted in a matter of days. Truly a miracle since these seeds may very well be 5 years old or older. I can't remember the last time I went picking cotton bolls in my father's garden. When the sprout grew large enough to transplant, removing it from the bottle was very difficult. I had to slice the bottle down both sides to get it out and I'm pretty sure I damaged some of the delicate roots. By this time I had tried sprouting a few more seeds in the same way, and they did not survive the transplant when it came their turn, though I suspect one fell prey the the moth grub problem my patio has.

I would not have even bothered using the plastic bottles, but I have a shitton of them already prepared left over from a student experiment with plants. At the end of the experiments, I eventually had to get to work cleaning out the plastic bottles so I could recycle them. During the grueling work I had ample opportunity to reflect on whether or not repurposed bottles were the way to go. Would my students have used as many water and soda bottles in the first place if I hadn't told them they needed to bring some for an assignment? Was there really any environmental benefit to using the bottle as a pot before recycling it? We already had to rinse them once to use as pots, and then rinse them again so we could toss them in the recycle bin. What a waste of water! There has to be a better way, and I think I found one on Pinterest. What a great idea, using toilet paper tubes as seed starters. You can transplant your seedlings without un-potting them and the paper tube will decompose easily in time. Furthermore, I've always been a little dubious when I toss tp tubes in the recycle bin. These things aren't made out of the greatest paper pulp quality, and I can't imagine they recycle into anything very well anyway.

I did a little bit of research to see how other people were starting seeds. Thanks to the nosy nature of Google (second only to my grandmother) I started getting eBay ads for rolls of toilet paper. It's a thing friends, and I'm not even the only one who has noticed. Now why in the world would someone be willing to pay for and ship bulk toilet paper tubes? In my heart I hoped it's because everyone is really getting into gardening and need tubes for a massive amount of seed starting. Pinterest, well aware that I was showing interest in toilet paper tubes, showed me far more impractical applications that really pushed the boundaries of taste.

Adults are seriously making home decor out of toilet paper tubes. Mostly, the end products really, most definitely, look like they were made out of toilet paper tubes. Like, if someone invited me to their house, showed me their toilet paper tube wall art, and asked me to guess what it was made out of, I would instantly say toilet paper tubes. One of the problems in disguising this art form is that the most common design element is the simple squashed-tube shape which makes
a leaf-like design. It really, really just looks like a squashed toilet paper tube.

One way to disguise the material is to paint it. The problem with toilet paper tubes is that the crummy pulp the tube is made of is pretty absorptive and it's fuzzy, paper-pulpy nature often shows through. Even if it's painted with many layers or given a good dose of spray paint, it still looks like a painted toilet paper tube. Glitter seems to help, but I'm not an advocate of glitter-based solutions.

Some toilet paper tube art uses paper quilling techniques to add diversity to the shapes and patterns your art can take. However, the cardboard that is used to make toilet paper tubes isn't very forgiving. It's really crappy quality, and should be. It's a toilet paper tube. If you try to fold, bend, or roll this material, it tears, crumples, and frays easily. I'm not just imagining this either. I got roped into making party favors once with these things, and it's not easy. Considering what a frustrating craft material toilet paper tubes are, and their terrible quality, I don't know why anyone would put so much effort into something that is going to fall apart.

People with far more patience and skill than I have done some truly impressive things with toilet paper tubes, but you probably aren't one of those people, let's face it. I can see a theater set designer pulling off some impressive faux wrought iron using toilet paper tubes, and to me, the stage seems to be where this skill belongs. Up close, it's obviously toilet paper tubes.

Most likely will not be
used for actual canning

There are enough bottle caps in landfills,
Why do we need pre-decorated ones?

At the very least, craft stores haven't found out about this trend yet and started selling better quality vintage paper rolls like they do with those Ball jars and bottle caps of all things. So, while I have a lot to complain about, these toilet paper tube creations are actually repurposing trash.

Bullshit Scorecard

It still looks like toilet paper tubes	-5
Environmental friendliness...I guess	+5
Durability	-5
Grand Total	-5