In a message dated 10/3/2011 2:33:52 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, [email protected] writes:
Hello All! Thanks to all who responded with info on cold dyes. Intuitively, I guess I knew they were out there--just hadn't crossed paths. Having had "heat setting" drummed into my skull brings up whether these cold dye products are colorfast/lightfast etc. Even heat set products are sometimes not colorfast. And professionals don't seem to have licked the technology either, i.e. while recently using a variegated red DMC floss, I ended up with red marks on the linen. --------------------------------------------- Comments from Jeri: I wrote on Arachne about the dyes in embroidery floss about a dozen years ago. This is for all those who are new to our lace site. Back in the 1970's, DMC changed their dye formulas for embroidery thread. I think it was due to new clean water laws -- for less toxic impact on water used (and then discarded) in the dyeing process. Their factory (a campus of many buildings) is located in Mulhouse in the French Alps, where there is a plentiful supply of water (needed for production). Unfortunately, they made a decision that meant that some of the colors were not color-fast. This meant that if you used them, when you washed the item the dyes would bleed into the foundation material. There was quite a cry about this, especially from members of Embroiderers' Guilds in various countries. We lost some embroiderers forever -- people who were beginners and had this terrible thing happen to them after many hours of work. The response in the U.S. was to print little cards with the numbers of colors that were not colorfast. These were distributed by the better embroidery supply shops, who gave them to customers. Pity the poor person who bought a kit of fabric and thread including these colors of thread, where the manufacturer of the threads was unknown.. Many of us thought the colors should be recalled and the colors should be made colorfast from that day forward, with the cost spread across the entire line of threads. I do not think that happened. By now, 2011, anyone with old thread could have some of these bad dye lots. The situation has not been improved by huge customers, like craft store chains and W_lmart, which have forced many product lines to provide a cheaper version of traditional products, and have forced service-oriented privately-owned shops out of business. Personally, I can visually see a difference in the quality of embroidery floss (slubs and knots, where they never existed before). I have no idea what the company has done in the past 40 or so years, if anything, to improve the situation of dyes not being colorfast. When I select dark shades of floss from my extensive stash, I choose to put them through a hot water bath in a white basin (to see if dye is present in the water) - just in case. It is annoying to someone itching to get a new idea down on fabric. Perhaps someone fluent in French would like to communicate with DMC to ascertain whether the problem has been corrected, and to request a list of which color numbers were not color-fast. They may have corrected the problem by now, but we need reminders of the problem periodically. Needleworkers keep old threads a long time. We live in an age when the numbers could be listed on many thread supplier's web sites, and I am sure someone like Brenda would be happy to publish the numbers with her other thread information, since lace and embroidery are often used on the same household linens and clothing.. Jeri Ames in Maine USA Lace and Embroidery Resource Center - To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [email protected]. For help, write to [email protected]. Photo site: http://community.webshots.com/user/arachne2003
