The cone of light blue-green and the royal skein on the left came from the stash; the others hopped out of recent dyepots.
I find that it's tricky to dye these small skeins. Weighing only 18 grams each, and requiring something in the range of .01 to .03 percent WOF for a pale or light shade, these skeins really are a stretch for my digital scale when weighing out dye powder, because it only registers tenths of grams. Let's see: .01% of 18g is .18g. If I use .1g dye powder, it's too pale; on the other hand, .2g might be too dark.
So sometimes I make stock solutions, and draw from those using small-scale measuring devices. Still, it's hard to measure .2 ml (or even 2 ml) accurately. So, a crap shoot is what I end up with. It's a good thing I'm happy with what the goddess of the dyepot renders, and don't fuss over it when what She gives isn't exactly what I had in mind.
2 comments:
dye goddesses seem to be pretty laid back unless you house a dyeing taliban at your place :)
The really accurate way to do it is through dilution.
Make a 1% stock solution, with 10g per 1000ml of water. Each ml contains .01g of dye, and you can measure 10g and 1000ml fairly accurately. But it's hard to measure 1 ml with ordinary equipment.
Take 10ml of that and dilute it to 100ml. The 10 ml had .1g of dye, now diluted 10 times, so each ml now has .01g. You can measure out 10ml and get .01g, and it's easy to measure 10ml. Dilute more to get even smaller quantities.
Of course, this is overkill for most purposes.
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