Holiday Market Prep
Temporal pressures force me to adapt new, more efficient processes.
Preparing for Christmas markets has been on the forefront of my mind lately. I planned product about a month ago and am in the last stretches of production before the London Mystic Market this weekend, November 18th at the Marconi Club. There have been a few things that I improved about my studio practice.
I have a very small studio.
This requires that I manage my time and assets carefully. It is so small that I dry my goods outside on a drying rack, rather than have the rack take up space in the studio. One of my troubles has been the drying time required by my wool fibre and yarns. The top takes much longer to dry, because the loose fibres have lots of space for water tension to hold onto the fibres. They mostly dry by evaporation, which takes a while if outside is wet or humid. This means that I am planning when to dye my goods based on extended drying times, and have less flexiblity when making my production schedule.
Drying my dyed materials takes too much time.
I do have some potential solutions.
A Giant Salad Spinner
I am not joking. A giant, hand powered device to spin out the fibre would be ideal. My school had an upright washing machine for this purpose. I used it so often that I just forgot that it was there. Getting an entire washing machine would be a pain, and I have no room for it. Acquiring just the basket and a way to crank it up to speed and evict the water inside would be fantastic. The trouble is that it is big, so even if I had it outside it would be occupying space. The other worry is that it will rust if it is outside. That would provide some significant complications for my natural dyes, because iron bonds with the dye pigment and modifies colours.
I know that there is an industrial version that some laundry mats have, and will keep my eyes open for those.
Wringing out the yarns
This seems obvious (yes of course you should be squeezing out the water between rinses and before hanging to dry). The trick is how to do it. Traditional Japanese dyers have a pole anchored to a wall of basin. They slide one end of the skein around the pole, and use a secondary pole to twist the skein into a tight bundle. This allows for a lot more leverage, tighter twist, and thus extraction of water! Then the skein is hung with much less water in the fibres, and thus a lower drying time. Voila!
Just like how this artisan uses two poles above the basin. I take mine outside, pin one stick under a foot and turn the other one in my hand. Which is more akin to the video below. They work over an indigo basin to preserve the precious bacteria laden fluids inside the indigo vat. I do it in my backyard because the water has to go somewhere, and the slightly acidic water won’t hurt my plants. I suppose the bathtub or shower would work, too.
Letting the fibre drain overnight
It’s cold outside. I don’t like going out in the late hours to hang my yarn. It sits overnight in a pot after it is rinsed, and the water drains to the bottom of the pot. It sits in its own soup. Last summer I picked up a bowl shaped pasta strainer to use as a steaming rack (another brilliant move if I do say so myself). I connected the dots between draining water from pasta and draining water from yarn. It’s brilliant! Brilliant!! Brilliant!!!
Now I rinse my yarn and leave it in the strainer over another pot overnight. I can also use one of my ban marie to apply pressure to the yarn and push water out into the pot below. Now my yarns are drying overnight, working passively if slowly to accelerate my timetable and improve my efficiency.
I just timed how long it took a skein of Treewool yarn to dry, and it is about 26 hours.
That is a very reasonable drying time.
Water Management
I hurt myself recently and am not allowed to carry my large dye pots from the sink anymore. This means that I need to fill the pot without putting it in the sink. I tried using smaller pots to ferry the water over. It was a pain because I constantly had to watch the smaller pots, and take multiple trips. This isn’t exactly helping me heal, so what am I to do? Recall that in my video about Speed the Bump I used a siphon? It’s still around, and long enough to reach from the sink to my burners! It’s not as fast as the sink, but there is no toting water, and it’s pretty easy to set up. There is also a drain that I can siphon the used dye water out to. This does make it no longer food safe, and I am hesitant to do that to my poor tube unless I must. Thankfully the burners are not far from the drain, so I can make it work.
This also encourages me to use successive dye baths in the same volume of water. Everything is a shade of green right now, so going from pale grey-blue to deep greens is not a problem.
Dye Troubles
I recently wrote about how black dye is not great at best, and we do have the ability to grow black wool. I stand by that.
Turquoise dye is also a pain in the tuckus, one that I am recalling now that two of the three green dyes I am using are turquoise blends. I have experienced a bit of tricky encounters with turquoise while trying to create a nice holiday green shade. In my past I have increased the heat and added more acid, which usually works at the risk of felting. The trouble is that if I just give up on bonding the turquoise dye to the fibre, then it goes down the drain. I don’t want to do that.
I recently switched back from vinegar to citric acid. When dying with acid dyes one teaspoon (1 tsp) of Citric acid is used to dye one pound (1 lb) of fibre. While considering my problem I realized that I don’t know what one teaspoon of citric acid weighed. I know that a pound (1 lb) is 454 grams. It turns out that a teaspoon of citric acid is about 5.33 grams. It’s also a lot more volume than I expected. I always use my spreadsheet to calculate how much vinegar I needed, and now am able to calculate how much citric acid each dye bath needed.
It turns out that I may have been stingy over the amount of citric acid that I had been using.
Spreadsheets
My gods do I love spreadsheets. I used to spend hours at school running the maths for dye pots and recording my process. This is good during my education because it hard-wires the formulas and process into your head. Afterwards I had started using spreadsheets to run my calculations and document my process. There is something to be said for hand written notes, primarily that my mind retains them better. A nice spreadsheet document can document my work and easily allow me to compare old and new dye combinations.
I recently added a citric acid calculation alongside my vinegar calculation, although I only use one.
What have you been doing in your practice to improve your efficiency and lower the strain on your body? Do any of these strategies work for you?