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.

Science of Craft: 001 What is Cotton?

I'm a hippy-dippy Whole Foods shopper. I buy healthy, organic, free-range, fair-trade, sustainable, recycled, recyclable, eco-friendly and ethical. I might be fooling myself that the higher prices I'm paying at Whole Foods or my local co-op are really giving me any benefit, but I'm hoping. It's hard to keep hoping though because I often find myself in some pretty bizarre company at these stores. I'll overhear folks parroting specious Food Babe claims about staying away from chemicals and ingredients with complicated names and it just makes me shake my head. Everything is made of "chemicals" dummy. Even that locally-sourced organic strawberry. Yummy, wholesome chemical goodness!

Cotton is made of chemicals too. Sugar, in fact. And no, I'm not getting confused by cotton candy, though the confection and the material your shirt is made of do have some things in common chemically. The chemical composition of cotton is important to understand if you're going to be working with the fiber. It determines the structure of the fiber and that influences how you manipulate it into thread or yarn, and finally into a textile. The chemistry of cotton determines the properties of cotton that in turn determine the application for which we use this fiber. Understanding the chemistry of cotton also helps us know how to dye this fiber and with what. I'm not a scientist, so I'm sure if I can understand why cotton has so many useful and frustrating properties, so can you.

Cotton's Chemical Composition

Do you remember learning about photosynthesis in high school biology? Someday I'll get more into it, but for now, all you need to know is that one of the products of photosynthesis is glucose, and plants string together a bunch of glucose molecules to make cellulose. When cereals advertise that they are high in fiber, cellulose is just one of the many kinds of plant fiber that you'll be sending through your poop-chute. All plants produce cellulose, hence why many plants, like bamboo and flax to name a few, can be processed into spinnable fiber. What makes cotton so special though, is that its bolls are made of over 90% cellulose in nice, long fibers, making it almost immediately ready to spin. But what actually is cellulose, and what makes it so suitable for spinning? Let's explore the chemical structure. Don't get scared, I'm going to try to make this easy. If you are a better chem-nerd than me however, I would kindly solicit any further details you can provide in the comments below, thanks in advance.

Sugars

Earlier I said that cotton is made of sugar, and if I remember correctly, you interrupted to tell me I must be confusing cotton with cotton candy. I understand your confusion. If you put cotton candy in your mouth, it dissolves. If your dentist shoves cotton balls in your mouth, it just stays there getting soggy and bloody. So what's the deal? Well, cotton candy and cotton balls are made out of different kinds of sugar in different arrangements, that's all.

All of the different kinds of sugar are really just carbohydrates that often like to form rings. Carbo is for the carbon atoms that are in sugar. Hydrate for H₂O that's in there too. That's it. Three elements, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. You put those together in different ways and it gives you different properties. Let us take a look at two of the many, many ways of putting those ingredients together.

The cellulose molecule: What cotton balls are made of

The sucrose molecule: What cotton candy is made of

Learning Break

Take out a scrap of paper and make a column for cellulose and a column for sucrose. We're going to be looking for similarities and differences. It's good for learning if you actually do this instead of just reading what I've already noticed. So, the following are the things you are going to be hunting for, using the two pictures above as reference:

• The number of oxygens (O), hydrogens (H), and carbons (C) in each molecule
• The number of oxygens bonded directly to hydrogens. They look like this: OH or HO
•  The shape of the molecules
• Any other differences or commonalities that jump out at you

When you are ready, highlight the list below to compare your's with mine:

• Depending on how you count, both molecules have 11 oxygens, unless you left out the one oxygen outside the bracket in cellulose. Oxygen is pretty electronegative, which means it's often reactive. You may be familiar with this property for oxygen's well known part in combustion (burning) and it's role in rusting metal.
• Cellulose has 20 hydrogens and sucrose has 22, but cellulose would totally have 22 hydrogens guys, if it wasn't on endless repeat. Those naked oxygens on the end, if they weren't bonded with another cellulose unit, would be hooked up with a hydrogen.
• Both molecules have the same number of carbons. In carbohydrates, carbon acts as the backbone to which all of the other elements or groups of elements attach to. What other elements and groups attach to the carbon determines the special properties of the entire molecule. But hang on a second, as we have inventoried, there really isn't that much of a difference of ingredients between cellulose and sucrose. What gives?
• Look at how those ingredients are arranged. Just like when you are baking, the same ingredients don't always produce the same results. In our case, cellulose has 6 OH groups and sucrose has 8. In cellulose, these spots are where the magic happens when it comes to dyeing. More on that in a future post.
• Furthermore, the shape of the molecules are different. Give or take a couple of details, the left half of both molecules are the same. But look at the right half. Cellulose repeats and then flips the left unit. There is a name for this unit, it's called glucose. The right half of sucrose has a pentagonal shape instead of an octagon. This unit is called fructose. To summarize, cellulose is made of repeated glucose units and sucrose is made of just a glucose and a fructose bonded together.
• You might have noticed some other things like how cellulose repeats its units. This means we call it a polysaccharide, or more generally, a polymer. Sucrose is made of just a couple of units so we call it a disaccharide.
• Maybe you also noticed that the oxygen that bridges the gap is up in cellulose, and down in sucrose. This link between units is called a glycosidic bond. Good eye. I have to confess though, of all of the ways of representing these molecules, the way I chose to draw them is not very accurate geometrically. None the less, the orientation of the oxygen in the glycosidic bond is very important, and I will go on and on about it in a later post when I discuss the physical structure of cotton.

So, did I miss anything? Did you notice a similarity or difference between cotton and candy that I didn't find? Kindly share in the comments below. I'll be talking about the chemistry of cotton dyeing soon, which is pretty good timing because I currently have picked all of the seeds out of my cotton bolls and am ready to start the process. If you're 

Why I'm Spinning Cotton: 002 Wooldn't You Like to Know

So I don't know about you, but I'm looking for an activity to keep me out of trouble, and as I discussed previously, I've landed on spinning, for many reasons, but mostly because my mother gave me her wheel. I was happily flapping the treadles up and down, and the flyer was making such a lovely breeze, until someone interrupted me and asked what I was going to spin. I was perfectly happy spinning the air, but as it turns out, there's quite a variety of fibers that you can tangle together into thread and yarn. Upon a little bit of research, it seems that nobody just picks one fiber to spin. There's all kinds of animal fibers, including a wide array of sheep breeds, alpaca, qiviut, memorial cat hairballs, and insect excretions. There are plant fibers as well, such as bamboo, flax, hemp, and my choice, cotton. There's also a bunch of synthetic bullshit too. It seems that people like to blend a lot of this stuff together, possibly because these fibers have a variety of properties that one would like their final fabric to have. Or maybe it's more fun to just mix a bunch of fuzzy stuff together and see what happens. This is way more than I can handle. Have you been to Ravelry? Of course you have, it's an amazing site and community. One of the things that strikes me though is the huge amount of supplies and equipment some of these folks end up stockpiling. Just check out anyone's attempt to destash, which is a polite term for making your clutter someone else's problem. Often a destash is composed of a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Some dyed silk sampler because, oooh! It's prettyful! and a couple of ounces Corridale leftover from a colorway where all the good hues got used up, and some soy from that vegan phase you were going through. Yeah, I can't deal with this much random stuff, so I'll just make it really simple. I'll just do one fiber, and that will be cotton. Why?

© New Zealand Films

Because screw wool, that's why. Whoa! Now I've gone too far you say. That's a pretty bold statement for one of the greatest fibers in the history of the world. So let me congratulate wool for it's amazing properties before I get back to hatin' on it:

• Wool is flame retardant without any additional treatment. If you take it away from a flame, it's just got no passion for combustion, and will self-extinguish.
• It's incredibly absorptive. It's hygroscopy allows it to absorb your perspiration, which will apparently keep you cool in the heat, a feature I have never in my life experienced.
• Wool felts easily, unlike my hair, try as I might during that whole Boho trend.
• It doesn't wrinkle.
• It's really stretchy.

© New Zealand Films

For only three of the above reasons I own exactly one wool jacket that I use solely for funerals and job interviews, and thankfully it's lined because wool is scratchy as hell. I've heard people come to the defense of wool, saying that it just wasn't prepared or spun properly, or it was the wrong breed, or came from an unhealthy animal. Maybe I'm just oversensitive then, because I have yet to meet a wool fabric that didn't make me want to crawl out of my skin, and every time I rub sheep sebum (lanolin) on my lips, they crack and bleed. Maybe it's allergies, maybe it's psychological scarring. I accidentally took and animal science class in college once. During the first lab, a sheep dragged me through poop and then the rest of the flock nearly trampled me. I can still hear the thundering of their hooves, darting around my huddled form. Although, in the next lab we got to put our hands in a fistulated cow and that was kinda interesting, and then we got to make our own ice cream. No regrets.

Anyway, cotton. 

• It's lightweight and breathable.
• It's soft.
• Common varieties are naturally white, so less need for bleaching.
• It's a plant. So, instead of growing plants to feed animals for their fiber, you can just skip the middle-man. Also consider that animals require husbandry and produce waste. What I'm proposing here is that cotton is more sustainable than harvesting animal fiber.
• Cotton is stronger when wet, not to be confused with Bon Jovi album, Slippery When Wet.

There are also a lot of problems with cotton. It's not as elastic as wool, but whatevs. Make some jersey out of it then. Cotton has a pretty short staple length (meaning the fibers are really short) which presents different challenges for the handspinner. Because of this, there's a lot of negative sentiment out there about the difficulty of spinning cotton, and as such, it makes finding help or a community of cotton spinners not as easy as finding good resources for handling animal fibers. Cotton is also pretty hungry for oils, which makes some folks complain that spinning cotton dries their hands. Despite these nuisances, it's still my fiber of choice. Why?

Cotton fiber, picked from the boll, seeds not yet removed.

My father grew some cotton, and I feel like I have to use it. 

Moving forward, I'm interested in learning more about the fiber itself, such that I can address the challenges of preparing the fiber for spinning and use as a yarn. I'll share with you what I find out.

Why I'm Spinning Cotton: 001 Skills not Thrills

First, I need to deal with why I'm even spinning.

If you're final-product oriented, then there is literally no reason to hand-spin cotton ever. The industrial processes are more efficient, faster, cost-effective, and better at quality control than the world's best handspinner ever will be. I searched around on Alibaba and found some pretty nice cotton fabric, provided I'm willing to order a thousand yards at a time. The factory I'd be ordering from can produce well over 50,000 yards, on demand and to my specifications in one day, and have it at my door in 35. There's no way I'm competing with that as a handspinner. So, why in the world would anyone want to spin their own thread or yarn?

It's topical!

Well, making my own yarn affords me a degree of customization that simply isn't available in the bins of yarn or on the bolts of fabric at Jo-Ann's. But, do I really need customization at the yarn fiber level? I don't like fancy art-yarn, and if I discover that my choices at the store lacking, I'll just buy some white yarn or fabric and dye it myself. Additionally, at my skill level, it's not like I'm going to be able to make anything that would be functional for any of the sewing or crocheting projects I'm currently dreaming up. I highly suspect that my experience with handspinning is going to mirror what I saw at the pottery studio: Novices, refusing to embrace the value of practice, would try and fail to make a functioning mug, and then relabel their mug "art." So, what I'm predicting is that I will make an imperfect yarn, but will become attached to it as you might become attached to a mole that you've been growing since childhood. It's ugly (and probably cancerous (you should have someone look at it)), but you've convinced yourself it gives you personality. This yarn I'm making will certainly still be customized, but only by accident, and surely unfit for anything that I would actually want to make. But I will make something out of it, and probably give it to my mother, because she loves me. She doesn't really have a choice. I'm an only child.

Look at how miserable this woman is. Surely this is the hobby for me!
Image Source

Another reason to spin, or do any hobby really, is because it's an enjoyable break from the tasks demanded by work and home. I don't know why it's enjoyable, because all of my hobbies are a lot of work and kind of stressful. Instead, I should probably just sit around for awhile and rest, maybe even meditate if I felt like I just had to be at least minimally productive. However, I have an unrelenting compulsion to always be creating something. It seems to me, the pace of human evolution has not caught up with technological advancements, and while I don't need to create stuff anymore, I still want to on some deep biological level. Whether if it's during a movie, on a long road trip, as a close friend is breaking some important news to me, while enjoying a day at the beach, or even in the middle of pretty good sex, I'm half distracted thinkin' 'bout craftin'. There might be something wrong with me, but I'm going to indulge this ailment. The pill for which comes in many varieties, so why spinning? 

I could have chosen a million things to spend my scarce time on, but here's why I've chosen spinning in particular. It takes a long time to make very little. I've been doing this craft thing for decades, and feel guilty about all the garbage I've made in that lifetime. I, nor the world, needs one more goddamned tchotchke made out of upcycled wine corks and soda can tabs. I can make 10 soda can tab wine cork animals in one hour, or one hank of yarn in two months. Neither of these things does anyone need, but one of those activities creates less weird stuff that leaves friends and family wondering how long they have to wait to chuck it without seeming impolite.

Probably the most compelling reason for me to take up spinning is that I'm still recovering from my masters degree. I just can't get with this new life of not constantly studying something and writing about it. Spinning is a complex, historically rich and important practice that could easily fill such a gap for me. Being that I'm very interested in science, I'm pretty excited about the chemistry of fiber arts and am planning on writing about that as I learn. Additionally, spinning is a difficult and nuanced skill sure to frustrate and challenge the nervous system. While I'm sure these won't be the most transferable skills ever, I'm hopeful the nuisance of learning something new will buy me some extra time before the dementia sets in.

Also, my mother gave me a spinning wheel.

Anyway, in doing my preliminary research, I have learned yet another reason to spin. When society collapses (thanks Obama), those industrial processes I opened this post with will not be able to make fabric for you. So, if you want to be sure that you and yours survive long enough to be raptured, you better learn to make your own textiles. I read The Road. I'm not sure I'll have the time to make yarn.

So whatever your reason for picking up a hobby, I would encourage you to think of a few things as I have done, such that you have a sustainable purpose for the investment of your time. I've chosen spinning for the time being. What will you do?