Antron Fleece Help

Hi all,

Help out a nice little puppet building shop with a big problem! We have been building some puppets using 14 oz antron fleece (as opposed to the lighter 12 oz fleece) and we are finding for the first time that it is pilling horribly as soon as it is dyed - this is not a problem that we encountered previously. We are considering tracking down a fuzz buster to help control the problem when the puppets we are building are on set, but I'd love to know any tricks anyone else has out there for dealing with this.

Thanks!

Pilly fleece is usually the result of one of three things: dyebath water that is too hot, material that is over-worked in the dyebath, or machine drying. You should only use water that is just hot enough to dye fleece. Most people can use their hottest tap water. Over-working it will pill it up, too -- that is, allowing it to rub against itself a lot in the dyebath. Many people try to dye too large a piece in too small a pot and the constant agitation necessary to keep it from dyeing unevenly makes it rub against itself and pill up. Drying it in a dryer will instantly make it all pilly, partly from overheating, and partly from being overworked. And unless you're dyeing huge pieces, don't use a washing machine -- that will pill it up, too. The best after-the-fact solution for de-pilling something is NOT one of those commercially available fuzz-buster things. They're pretty lame. The best thing to use is a high-end dog trimmer from a pet supply place, or you can also use an electric hair trimmer -- but expect to have to clean it often, and keep the blades properly oiled or you'll choke it with fiber and dull the blades almost instantly.

Hope something of that helps.

Thanks for the tips rickly, we're still not sure why we had the problem, since we dye fleece all the time with no problem but we're chaulking it up to either a fluke or the idiosycrocies of 14 oz fleece (we like to use 12 oz).

Normally we would have just dyed some more fleece, but in this case we were waiting on an order of more and we needed the two puppets we were working on done asap!

We considered the electric trimmers (we had ironically just bought some from a beauty supply place were we had a very large credit note) but tried hand-trimming the pills and it's worked beautifully.

The puppets are for a new TV series we are working on that is in pre-production, I'll post links to some photos of these puppets for everyone to see sometime in the next week once they are done.

HI, CAN YOU TELL ME WHERE I CAN BUY ANTRON FLEECE? YOU CAN EMAIL ME AT HYNECIA@sbcglobal.net