Towards an indigo revival?

 Blog

Jenny Balfour Paul

Recently my guild was privileged to host Jenny Balfour Paul, a world expert on the history of indigo and its use by different peoples. That history is a global story of chemistry and dyes that goes back at least 6,500 years.

“It’s unbelievably ancient this dye. All the other dyes change. Indigo is always blue,” she said.

Balfour Paul’s lifelong study of indigo started mainly by chance as a project to document vanishing traditions so that when the time came they might be revived. Her work has taken her to Yemen, India, China, the Marquesas Islands and beyond.

“My life has been guided by a molecule. It’s a perfect molecule. Without indigo there would be no natural blue dye,” she said.

“Even indigo stories are based on chemistry. Indigo is invisible in the plant. It’s dyed cool not hot. It’s green in the leaves you have to extract the color with oxygen. No other dye does that. Everything about it is different. Indigo doesn’t absorb into fibers. It sits on top of it, in layers.”

But indigo’s story also has a dark side linked to slavery and exploitation, which in some areas is holding back its revival as an environmentally friendly alternative to chemical dyes. Balfour Paul does not shy away from this part of the indigo story, which she sees as the second part of the indigo tale.

The indigo miracle

Indigo vat

The first chapter in the indigo story is—broadly— the incredible story of how indigo pigment, invisible in its host plants, was detected, extracted and used by humans in the first place. Indigo shows up in different plants around the world. It’s the same molecule, but in Europe it’s found in Woad, in Japan it’s polygonum and in Mali it’s Lonchocarpus cyanescens.

How did humans happen upon this miracle molecule? No one really knows. What we do know is indigo dyeing traditions developed worldwide and many of them have since vanished. Or in the case of indigo dyeing in Yemen, it’s literally being bombed out of existence.

Slavery and exploitation
The middle of the indigo story is enmeshed with slavery and exploitation in the US, the Caribbean and India.

In the US, indigo was introduced into colonial South Carolina in 1740 where it was grown on plantations by slaves. It became the colony’s second-most important cash crop after rice.

Jamaica’s first colonial crop was indigo, again grown on plantations by slaves.

In India, farmers were forced to grow indigo and workers’ conditions were appalling. Indigo was big business and in 19th century half the exports from Kolkata were indigo.

That all came to an end in the early 20th century as synthetic indigo had almost completely replaced the natural pigment by about 1914.

Revival?

Shibori dyed with Indigo

Indigo has struggled to overcome its cultural baggage particularly in India, says Balfour Paul. She is optimistic however that the page has turned for indigo.

“Now it’s a story about revival and environmentally friendly dyeing,”she says.

In El Salvador indigo is now vacuum packed or canned as a paste. The revival of indigo in El Salvador being used by Gap, Levi’s and Benetton for baby clothes, because they know synthetic indigo is toxic, said Balfour Paul.

In 2013 Levi’s 511 collection featured organic, indigo-dyed jeans. People really need one pair of organic jeans, not 10 from discount retailers, says Balfour Paul.

Jamaicans are revisiting indigo and in Kolkata and throughout Bengal there are efforts afoot to reintroduce natural dyeing.

Sustainability and slow fashion are the way forward, said Balfour Paul: “I’m going with it.”

What’s next for Jenny?

Jenny Balfour Paul continues to follow the indigo molecule. She is now working now with Dominique Cardon—another natural dyeing superstar— on the Crutchley Archive at the Southwark Archive in London.

According to the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Textile Conservation and Technical Art History:

“Thanks to descendants of the Crutchley family who owned and ran a dye company on the south bank of the River Thames 300 years ago, rare records from this era have survived. The collection includes sumptuous pattern books with samples of wool ‘topped’ with red from madder and cochineal dyes, dyeing recipes and instructions, and customer names and amounts of credit.”

“In 1740 they could colour match as well as any modern dyer. The archive is full of dye recipes,”Balfour Paul said.

I personally can’t wait to see the fruits of their work. It’s bound to be fascinating for any student of natural dyeing.

Jenny Balfour Paul bibliography

Indigo in the Arab World (1996)
Indigo: Egyptian mummies to blue jeans (1998)
Deeper than indigo (2015)

Jenny on the Maiwa podcast

Andrea Mowry and Color Confidence

 Sally Williams

 Blog

Last October I took a class from Andrea Mowry, of the popular “Fade” patterns on Ravelry, called “Color Confidence”. The class was paid for by a scholarship from my Guild, one of the great benefits of being a member. Her color change patterns are similar to an ombre, but instead of going from light to dark, they go from one color to another. My hope was to learn through her color combination techniques, ways to use various 4oz braids that we all seem to purchase without necessarily having any plan for. Her patterns primarily use the speckled, hand-painted yarns that are so popular right now, but there is a lot of handspun that also ends up being colorfully variegated, so my thought was that handspun would be a reasonable substitution.

Speckled commercial yarns; hand-dyed handspun yanrs

The first part of the class was learning how to do two-color brioche knitting, which is one of her favorite techniques. Although it involves brioche-specific stitch names, once you get the hang of it it’s fairly easy to see how it works, especially if you are using dissimilar colors. It also helped that Andrea was a good, patient teacher! If you think you might be interested in learning the brioche stitch, I would recommend actually taking a class. You will end up with a lightweight, two-sided fabric, with the background color having the effect of “muting” the foreground color.

Brioche stitch side A

Brioche stitch side B

The rest of the class focused on Andrea’s techniques for combining color, or in her words, “painting with yarn”. The first technique she discussed was the marled effect you can get by simply holding two strands of different yarn together and knitting. This look seems to go in and out of fashion, but it’s been very popular in Vogue Knitting for the past several years, and it is an interesting way to do optical blending. This is also easy to replicate with a two-ply barber pole handspun.

Vogue Knitting Late Winter 2017

She then discussed color pooling, and how she breaks up the occasional patches of color that can show up in odd places in your knitting. She is a big fan of using textured stitches, like garter stitch and lace patterns, to visually visually break up the pooling. We knit some samples of two yarns held together in garter stitch, and I chose a solid red and a red-with-lots-of-other-bits-of-color handspun, and I was surprised how much the garter stitch toned down all the other colors. Visually the swatch looked mostly red. After thinking about it, I shouldn’t have been so surprised: a yarn that’s 100% red combined with a yarn that’s 50% red will end up looking 75% red. Combining that with garter stitch, where you are basically seeing only every other row, and of course it will tone down the variegation dramatically.

We then talked about color value, or where a particular color falls on a greyscale. For colorwork such as Fair Isle or mosaic knitting, Andrea recommended having high contrast in value, otherwise the finished motif will look “muddy”. For her Fade technique she recommends using a low contrast in value. When considering whether the colors you like actually work together as far as value, she showed us that by taking a black-and-white picture of your fiber on your cell phone, you can easily see if you’ve got a high or low contrast, because the photo will take away the hue and leave only the value. When Andrea picks yarns for her Fade patterns, she is looking for a greyscale gradient.

Natural-dyed and ice-dyed yarns

The same yarns in greyscale

Finally, she discussed how she transitions from one color to the next. She recommends using yarn from the same dyer when you first start trying her patterns, because you will be able to find families of color combinations to help your Fade blend smoothly. If you are the dyer, so much the better! One of her techniques is to use the Fibonacci sequence to gradually decrease one color and increase the next color, rather than just dropping one color and starting the next.

An example of the Fibonacci sequence, Vogue Knitting Early Fall 2017

Reverse stockinette stitch will hide lines between color changes more easily than regular stockinette. Adding mohair or another fiber with halo will help blur or “fuzz out” color changes. And finally, you can always Fade into a neutral!

For me, the biggest tip was her advice, when choosing colors, to pick something that will look good with your skin tone at the part that’s going to be up by your face. That way your finished project will look good on you, and you will still have the freedom to experiment with colors that you wouldn’t normally think you can wear.

Taking this class really made me consider the role that stitch texture and the physical structure of the yarn being used plays in the perception of color, which I will definitely keep in mind for future projects. Added to that, Andrea was charming and generous with her knowledge: if you are a class-taking sort of person, I would certainly recommend her.

But how much mordant do you really need?

 Sally Williams

 Blog

This is THE question, isn’t it? I think a lot of people, myself included, just start with a formula they find somewhere but don’t take the time to test it against other options. The good news is, I’ve done a test for you. I’ve done a mordant strength test with aluminum acetate previously; this is a mordant strength test with potassium aluminum sulfate, aka, alum mordant for protein fibers.

My underlying question in doing this experiment is how best to handle wool, alpaca and silk blend roving— how much heat, agitation, time and mordant gives the best result? And do I need to use cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate)? My preferred outcome will be good color uptake while still having a nice hand and easy spinability.

The first recipe I came across was from John and Margaret Cannon in Dye Plants and dyeing, which uses 18% WOF alum and 6% WOF cream of tartar. I started using it and had good results, but in my natural dye class we use 10-15% alum with no cream of tartar. I usually bring my mordant bath up to temperature (about 160-170F), turn off the heat, and let my fiber sit overnight. In class (where we generally use fabric samples, not yarn or roving) the fiber is at constant temperature for an hour (170F or so— not boiling, but steam coming off the water) and then removed and rinsed. The least amount of alum mordant I’ve seen used is from Jenny Dean, just 8%, but with 6% cream of tartar.

This experiment is my fairly best comparison of apples to apples to apples, starting at the low end of 8% alum, ending at the high end of 18%, and splitting the difference at 13%. All mordant strengths are tested with and without cream of tartar, and processed at heat (170F) for one hour, or brought up to heat and then turned off and let sit overnight, for a total of 12 different samples. Both wool, silk, wool/silk blends and a silk/plant fiber blend were sampled, in the form of fabric and also commercially prepared organic undyed yarn. All samples of the same mordant bath were processed together, and all samples were wetted out for at least an hour. In the end, ALL of the samples went into the SAME dyepot of 20% WOF cochineal, a good strong dyepot, with the hopes of disambiguation.

There were some interesting results!

Even before I mordanted anything, the visual difference between the alum with/alum without cream of tartar bath was obvious. With cream of tarar, the bath was clear. Without, it had a cloudy, milky look. This persisted after the fiber was removed from the mordant bath. The ph of each bath remained the same, about 3-4.

After I’d mordanted my samples, but before I’d dyed anything, I tested the hand, or feel, of all my samples— the common complaint about increased alum strength is that is can make the fibers feel “sticky”. With all of my wool samples, regardless of alum%, those without the cream of tartar felt coarser. The yarn especially felt sticky without cream of tartar. On the silk noil samples, the samples WITH cream of tartar at 8% mordant strength had a more noticeable yellow cast . The hand of the silk noil and habotai were not discernibly different, but the silk-faced plant blend and the wool/silk were definitely smoother/nicer with the 6% cream of tartar.

So what about the color? Take a look! These samples are all laid out in a 4×3 grid as follows:

8% 1hr, 8%/6% cream of tartar 1hr, 8% overnight, 8%/6% overnight

13% 1hr, 13%/6% 1hr, 13% overnight, 13%/6% overnight

18% 1hr, 18%/6% 1hr, 18% overnight, 18%/6% overnight

Silk/hemp blend— my “control”. In real life I’d use aluminum acetate to mordant this.

Silk habotai. The cream of tartar definitely helps the dye uptake, especially noticeable at the lowest strength mordant.

Silk noil. The unevenness of color I attribute to not enough wetting out time. In the future anything with silk will soak overnight.

This is a thin 60%silk/40% wool twill. I was surprised that I liked the 18%/6% 1hr mordant the best.

Medium weight wool challis. Not as great a difference between the 13% and 18% mordant strengths as on the silks.

Commercially prepared undyed organic merino yarn. I didn’t scour it, and I should have! I think the color uptake at all mordant strengths would have been much better. The 18% overnight skein is missing— I ran out of yarn.

Takeaways:

Its pretty clear that more mordant equals more dye uptake. This was a strong dyebath, with plenty of color left over (I dyed several more yards of fabric afterwards with the leftover bath). Between 13% and 18% the difference isn’t as stark as at 8%, so I might do an additional test at 15%WOF and see if I can see a big enough difference to merit the additional mordant.

It’s not so clear in the photos, but the samples mordanted on heat for one hour had a nicer, more even color than the ones brought up to temperature and then left to cool overnight. This surprised me. In the future I will probably keep on heat for one hour, then let cool naturally before removing the fiber. This has also dissuaded me from trying a recipe I found on the internet for mordanting in cold water!

I will definitely be wettting out silks overnight, and scour any fiber I haven’t already prepped myself. I will use cream of tartar, for both mordant uptake and nicer hand. The final test, of course, is a light-fast test. My hypothesis is that the higher mordant strength will be more fast.

Light-fast test in progress.

At this point I’m of the opinion that the prep work, from scouring through mordanting, is the key to nicely dyed fiber. The dye bath is basically proving how good a job I’ve done. A stronger dye bath won’t produce any more color than the amount of mordant bonded to the fiber. This test was done with cochineal, which won’t dye without some sort of mordant; if I was dyeing with something substantive like onion skin, the extra mordant strength may be unnecessary.

I hope this helps answer the question of how much mordant *you* really need: by all means, do your own experiments!

Surface Design with Natural Dyes

 Sally Williams

 Blog

Rachel: “I found these cute block-printed throw pillows I want to make. How can I do that with natural dyes?”

I’m mostly a spinner and knitter, but in the natural dye classes that I attend at OCAC, there are a lot of people who focus on textiles. We’ve used a simple technique to get a lot of different results, and it’s really a lot of fun.

You will need the items you wish to print with: print blocks, stencils, potato stamps, paintbrushes, silkscreens, or anything else, and a few pieces of equipment: a blender, a steamer, an old bedsheet, and gum tragacanth. Gum tragacanth is a natural product that is most often used making fondant for cakes. Here it’s used as a “sticking” medium. What’s good about gum trag vs. other similar products is that it doesn’t interfere with or change the color of your dyestuff.

The technique: mix up some gum trag and water in a blender. Say, 1/4 C gum trag and twice a much water. You will hear and feel the mixture get thicker after about thirty seconds. If it’s too thick, add more water. If it still seems a little runny, let it sit for a bit, it thickens over time. Don’t mix more than you’ll need for your project at hand, because it only lasts about a day in the refrigerator. (Obviously it will be easier to judge once you’ve done it, but a little medium goes a long way.) You will want it thick enough to adhere to your stamps, but not so thick that you lose definition. If you’re silkscreening, you’ll want the thickness of silkscreen ink. Make some practice stamps before you commit to your fabric!

Mordant Printing

You can mix a mordant into your gum trag mixture. We used very small amounts of copper and iron, and a slightly less small amount of alum during our classes.

Gum trag with mordants

Here is a thread spool print with copper mordant:

Here I’ve printed on a silk scarf previously dipped in indigo with alum, using a feather for my print:

Here I’ve used an iron mordant on silk noil, again with feathers. I used an old paintbrush to apply the mordant mixture:

Discharge Printing

You can mix and acid or a base into your medium to discharge color on an already dyed piece.

Gum trag with soda ash

Here I tried using soda ash to shift the color on a pisolithus mushroom-dyed piece of silk:

Here I’ve used tartaric acid to discharge the logwood dye on silk organza:

You can do combinations of these techniques:

Discharging with a print block

And printing with an iron mordant

How to set your prints:

Lay out your dried fabric on an old cloth in a single layer, fold extra cloth over, and roll up, jelly roll style so that it will fit in your steamer basket. You want STEAM ONLY! Take care that the water is not getting into the bottom of the basket, and place a towel or piece of felt on top underneath the lid to keep condensed water from dripping back down. Make sure you’ve got steam going before placing your jelly roll in the steamer basket. Steam ten minutes, and remove carefully. Let cool until it’s comfortable to handle, then unroll.

Jelly roll in steamer basket

Wash your steamed fabric in warm, soapy water to get the gum trag residue out. It still contains mordant, discharge or dye, and if the excess isn’t washed out it will go into your dye pot and change the result.

Here are some results after dyeing our prints. The yellow is from onion skins, the pink from Brazilwood, and the orange a combo of both.

Here are my feathers. You can see that the gum trag wasn’t washed out completely by the extra dark muddiness around the onion skin feathers.

I decided to after-mordant the whole piece in alum, and not only did that get rid of the excess print fuzz, it changed the color of everything. It’s a bit 1970’s decor now, but I think it will still make a nice pillow:

For the discharge printing, you don’t necessarily have to steam the piece before washing. Here’s a sample of logwood on silk that I discharged by painting the back of a leaf with gum trag and citric acid, and then simply washing when I liked the result. It made a nice multi-colored effect:

I steamed my Ph-shifted fabric, and once I washed it out it ended up being merely discharged. I think I would have had better results if I’d washed it out as with the leaf print:

And here is a piece of silk crepe de chine that I silkscreened with alum and then dyed in Osage orange:

So, to answer your question Rachel, you have a lot of options. You can make a mordant print on unmordanted fabric. You can make a (different) mordant print on mordanted fabric. I didn’t include any photos, but you can mix natural dye extracts with your gum trag and print directly that way, with color. You can discharge already-dyed fabric. And you can do combinations of these techniques. You’ll no doubt have noticed that all these examples are on silk, but many of my classmates used this same technique on cellulose fibers.

There is also the option of surface design using natural pigments, which I’ll cover in my next post.

Handmade gift ideas for men

 Rachel Wolcott

 Blog

The leaves are just starting to change colour and fall, but the Christmas puddings are on the shelves at the shops and it’s just a matter of time before the first pre-Christmas sales begin.

Over the past few years my sister, mother and I have been giving each other handmade gifts at Christmas. Mom makes wonderful hooked rugs and cushions and my sister has made us beautiful felted stockings, knitted scarves and sweaters. I’ve woven wraps for my mom and made yarn and soap for my sister.

This year I want to make a gift for everyone in my family–luckily we are a small group! The problem has been coming up with something different and useful for my dad and husband.

I did a search for DIY/handmade gifts for men and the options some of the ideas were hilarious–a bouquet of bacon , flavoured toothpicks and “restore an heirloom axe“. Also apparently beard oil is The Thing, but we are a beardless bunch.

Not all the ideas I saw were totally crazy and here are some that aren’t beard oil, bacon, scarves or hats.

Utility tote by Don Morin

Man bag: I was telling Sal about this tote bag my dad uses as a sort of briefcase. It is a freebie from a pharmaceutical company he was given for judging a science fair. It is ripe for replacement.

I found this utility tote pattern by Don Morin. It’s perfect, and as Sal says all I have to do is stencil some drug logos on it.

There are loads of free patterns for messenger bags out there both knitted, felted and sewn. How about upcycling some jeans or natural dyeing or printing on some organic hemp fabric then sewing it up into a bag? There are so many ways to use your fiber arts and sewing skills for a messenger bag.

Finlayson “sweater” (Thread Theory)

Sweatshirt: I love this Finlayson Sweater from Thread Theory. I’m going to make this up for my husband. I’ve got some jersey fabric in my stash. There are some nice organic jerseys available now that could be naturally dyed. Or maybe you have some handwoven you could use. Here’s a link to our guide to using handwoven for sewing projects.

For further inspiration: Independent designers have some beautiful sewing patterns for men now. Check out Walden, Thread Theory, Hot Patterns and Merchant and Mills.

Man scrub: Men like a good scrub just as much as women. Last year I wove washclothes using Syne Mitchell’s Loop-pile washcloth pattern from her book Inventive Weaving on a Little Loom. I used cotton, but she has a hemp/aloo version which would be a great alternative to those plastic shower poufs. Once this one has outlived its usefulness you can throw it on the compost pile and make another one.

There are knit and crochet options. Here’s a shower mitt from yarnspirations which could be knitted in hemp or cotton. For crocheters, here’s a loofah.

Do you want to make homemade soap? You should. Look no further than Humblebee & Me. Loads of idea not just for soap, but things like DIY tiger balm, after shave and lip balm. This woman is a genius.

Slippers: Slippers are a classic dad gift. There are so many patterns to choose from including: Martha Stewart’s, Drops’ felted and these gorgeous ones from Arne & Carlos.

There are some upcycling possibilities here. Why not use old sweaters, felt them and sew them into slippers. You could sew a bit of old denim on the bottom to make them sturdier.

Dice bag: Do you have any gamers in your life? How about a dice bag? Here’s a knitted one–twelve – sided no less! You could run up one on the sewing machine maybe with Doctor Who fabric? Or Space Cats!!!

Mug cosy: Another classic. Again there are loads of patterns on Ravelry. But you could easily use woven fabric or even sew them with your favourite novelty fabric. Free patterns galore online.

Other ideas might be making a belt on an inkle loom or knitting a pair of socks.

One last idea which is not sewing/fiber arts related, but I think is a great idea for a Fathers Day present–homemade barbecue rub. My dad would definitely use this! Thanks Martha.

Last year Sal wrote a post on gifts for the fiberista. Lots of good ideas here.

Please let us know your ideas for making for men.

Fresh Leaf Indigo

 Sally Williams

 Blog

The hardest part about dyeing with fresh leaf indigo is growing the indigo. One of the people in my natural dyeing study group did all the hard work, and brought it in to share. This is what fresh Japanese indigo looks like:

Japanese indigo, persicaria tinctoria

The leaves are picked off the stems:

Then blended with ice water:

And strained through a cloth (in this case, silk):

We squeezed out the cloth to extract as much juice as possible, and this was our dye bath. We put our fiber in, a mix of wool, linen and silk:

Fresh indigo dye bath

We massaged the items in the bath occasionally, and let them sit in the bath about an hour. The bath began to oxide:

We then removed the items from the bath and let them air out. The color slowly changed from green to blue on silks, a pale green on linen, and a dark blue-green on wool. The oxidation time was much slower than with a reduced-indigo vat.

This is the silk straining cloth:

Straining cloth after several batches

Straining cloth after half an hour

Bonus round: we also used the leftover pulp from the straining cloth to “paint” on fabric— basically rubbing it into the fiber like a grass stain.

We let the pulp-prints dry and oxidize before rinsing. And although we did not do this step, here are instructions to precipitate out the indigo from a fresh bath, to use in a reduction vat. It’s a great teaching article using fresh woad.

Japanese indigo seeds are available from various places on line, and the plants like a warm, humid environment. Humid places can get several crops per season before the plants die. Places that are dry in the summer (like western Oregon) can get one crop during the growing season with irrigation.

Fun with Cochineal

 Sally Williams

 Blog

After indigo, I bought a cochineal dyeing kit which contained the bugs, several mordants and some vague instructions. (I say the instructions were vague, but really they gave several options as far as time vs. temperature in mordanting. It’s one of those things that once you know what’s going on makes perfect sense.)

Rachel and I did a test run when she was here last April (Sheep Cabana retreat: dye as much stuff as possible in 48 hours), and here is what we came up with:

Cooking and straining some cochineal bugs

We started with 4oz of dried cochineal (which is a lot), cooked them for about an hour and then strained the liquid into the dye pot. I saved the used bugs for later. Then we mordanted our wool. We used some white Shetland and some grey mohair locks, and mordanted with both alum and tin, by simmering our fiber in each mordant bath for about an hour. I would say that our mordanting pots weren’t large enough, because the tin-mordanted wool definitely felted.

The dye pot, onion bag of mohair locks on top

We could have used a bigger pot.

Viola!

Here are the results, from top clockwise: tin mordanted wool, alum mordanted wool, alum mordanted mohair, iron after-mordanted wool, iron after-mordanted mohair.

Rachel left, and after a couple of months I got out the leftover cochineal bugs again and tried some more dyeing. (Those bugs sat on my patio in that plastic container, above, the whole time, ignored. I had no issues with them rotting or anything else unpleasant.) I re-simmered the bugs and left them sit overnight in the pot, and strained the bugs out in the morning. Then I did a series of successive dyeing on 50g each of alum and copper-mordanted wool:

Top, alum mordant
Bottom, copper mordant

I heated the cochineal dye pot, added the mordanted wool and let it sit out on the patio here either all day or overnight. The total hands-on time was probably 1/2 hour.

Here it is spun up:

Successive alum mordant, left to right, with copper mordant wound into a cake far right. The orange is the immediately adjacent cochineal overdyed with weld.

I’ve been taking some natural dyeing classes at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, and one of the neat things we did was dye with cochineal with no metal mordants. Instead we used 25% WOF of cochineal, 10% WOF powdered gallnuts (Gallic acid) and 10%WOF citric acid, all in the dye pot at once. Hot tip: we ground up the cochineal bugs and a little water with a mortar and pestle. No soaking required.

We simmered wool and silk noil for an hour and got these lovely colors. The cochineal strikes the wool and silk differently!

Shibori cochineal on wool

Left, wool, right, silk noil

These are nice colors on their own, but I also wanted to experiment with this dyeing method as a base color. Here is the same fabric overdyed with indigo. One of the very interesting things about cochineal is that the color will shift from red to blue, depending on Ph. The middle samples are overdyed with indigo (about Ph 12) and rinsed, the far right are the same, but rinsed in a white vinegar solution (about Ph 3).

Cochineal overdyed with indigo

I also tried some after-mordanting, with iron, copper and alum mordants:

Left, iron after-mordant
Middle, copper after-mordant
Right, alum after-mordant

There is really a lot you can do with these little bugs, and a huge range of color, depending on what techniques you use. In other words, fun!

Daffodils, St David’s day & Welsh cakes

 Rachel Wolcott

 Blog

Welsh cakes

It’s St. David’s day, the day commemorating Wales’ patron saint. It’s a day for daffodils and making welsh cakes, which are a sort of scone/pancake hybrid and delicious.

Today I embarked on some St David’s day-inspired craft activities–dyeing with daffodils and heather–and made a batch of Welsh cakes. The cakes are all but eaten and I have some dye results to share.

I was inspired by an article in YarnMaker to use daffodils as dye stuff. The sample in the article was a lot more yellow than what I’ve been able to achieve. However, I’m sure if I used more flowers I would have gotten a stronger colour. Still I like this pale yellow.

Here in England the daffodils have been out for a few weeks and there are many more to come. Anyone who has waited all winter to get out and gather some fresh dye stuff, daffodils are a great place to start I used 6-8 small blossoms for the dye stock and mordanted my Norfolk Horn yarn with alum and cream of tartar. The dye stock was a vivid yellow but it took quite some time for the colour to strike. I’m going to try this again with a greater quantity of flowers.

Daffodils, alum/cream of tartar mordant

Winter-flowering heather is a hearty if tiny blossom that gives orange/brown to grey and brown/grey colours. It’s another option for those looking for fresh dye stuff in the winter months. Heather is associated more with Scotland than Wales, but I’ve used some handspun Llanwenog to keep the Welsh theme going.

Heather and a few mahonia berries

I used a few handfuls of white heather blossoms in my dye pot and after awhile a orange/brown colour appeared.

The first sample (bottom) here is with the alum/cream of tartar mordant which to my eye has made a light rusty brown. (It’s not easy to see in the photo).

Top: heather, iron mod
Mid: heather, copper mod
Bot: heather, alum/cream of tartar mordant

The second sample (middle) was from the same dyepot to which I added copper sulphate as a modifier. To me this sample is somewhere between a yellow, a pale green and a brown, depending on the light and what colours it sits next to. It doesn’t look like much, but I love it’s subtlety.

The final sample (top) is again from the same dyepot with iron added as a modifier. I see a pale blue/grey. I love how these three sample look together. I can envision using this palette in a weaving project or perhaps a sweater or wrap.

Spring time is still a few weeks away, but more dyestuff is popping out of the hedgerows and flower beds everyday. It’s been warm here and I’ve seen gorse for a few weeks now and the first broom flowers have started to appear. Gorse gives a yellow and its smell is unbelievable–think pineapples and coconut. Broom should also give yellow with alum and a green with copper.

Warm weather means that sunny spots other flowers are growing. Keep your eyes open for calendula. There’s also leftovers to gather. I pocketed a few handfuls of Mahonia berries the other day. Allegedly they give some colour. There are also ivy berries and acorns.

Autumn Leaves and Contact Dyeing

 Sally Williams

 Uncategorized

Instructor’s sample of leaf contact dyeing

I had my first Natural Dyeing class at the Oregon College of Art and Craft last week. We started by walking the campus and collecting various autumn flora: fallen oak and maple leaves, pink-backed cherry leaves, fresh comfrey, spotted dying blackberry leaves, walnut hulls, tupelo, madrone and walnut leaves, Indian blood grass, and anything else that caught our eye. The ostensible purpose of this was to collect material to make our own contact dyed projects, but really it was to get us excited about natural dyeing. This time of year in the Pacific Northwest the ground is littered with dyestuffs, and the quick and easy method we learned yielded pattern as well as color.

Once we collected our leaves, we laid them out onto fabric or paper, and either rolled up our fabric tightly around a stick (or for added color, around a rusty iron nail) or accordion folded and clamped for a shibori effect. These packets are then simmered in a water bath for an hour, and then removed and unwrapped.

What I found most interesting about this technique is that there is really very little dye in individual leaves (for the most part tannic acids) but because of the wrapping or clamping, the color can’t migrate anywhere other than onto the fabric or paper. In other words, the opposite of leveling. In a lot of cases, the color transfer is more akin to printing— the fabric or paper is not really dyed per se, but stained or imprinted with the actual leaf color, giving pinks or greens which don’t exist as an actual dye. Our instructor cautioned us as much, saying that these colors will fade with washing or over time. That said, there definitely was dyeing of fabric around the periphery from the tannic acids, and also where the rusty nails provided an iron mordant.

Here is a leaf print where I had an iron plate clamped to the outside of my fabric packet:

Leaf print on silk noil with iron plate

And likewise wrapped around a large rusty nail:

Silk charmeuse leaf print wrapped around iron nail

Here is the difference of the dyestuffs on cellulose. For one, I didn’t get my packet wrapped tightly enough and the colors ran. For another, the yellows and greens remained printed while the tans of the tannic acids didn’t penetrate as much. I expect this to be a function of the density of the cellulose in paper form, and I would expect better tans on cotton yarn:

Wrapped leaf print on paper

This technique also led me to revisit my forays into dyeing with candy. I’d encountered poor results with a lot of candies that contained very little dye. So I tried some candy contact dyeing:

The candy melted pretty quickly, so it was hard to keep the fabric tight, but the dye migrated onto the fabric rather than into the dye pot. I can see some candy-related shibori in my future!

I’d also encountered some inexpensive pomegranates at the grocery store last week, and per Rachel’s last post I bought them for some seasonal dyeing. Pomegranates contain ellegic acid, which are yellow tannins, so I thought this would be a quick way to see what sort of coloring I could get from them:

This is one slice of pomegranate:

Folded and clamped pomegranate slice on silk charmeuse

And here is multiple slices and layers, with the rest of the pomegranate in the dye pot:

Folded and clamped pomegranate on silk noil, over some walnut hull spots

Tight wrapping and clamping is the key to good transfer, but whether you are preserving autumn leaves, testing dyestuff potential, or finding another use for seasonal candy, it’s such a quick and easy technique that it’s definitely worth trying.

Last of the summer dyes

 Rachel Wolcott

 Blog

Marigolds

Autumn has been a mellow affair. Trees are only starting to turn colour and drop leaves. Flowers continue to bloom and there is plenty of natural dye stuff still to be gathered. It’s time to get a basket and take a walk to find some dye stuff to try out now or over the winter.

Coreopsis

I’m drying dahlias, marigolds, calendula and coreopsis from my garden. Acorns and walnuts are both good for dyeing as are sumac leaves, rhubarb roots, carrot tops, willow leaves and bark, chrysanthemums and pine cones. Not all plants will give you color and some that do–especially berries–are not colourfast. Don’t waste your time dyeing with blackberries or beets, for example, because the colour will fade quickly.

Dahlias

Lichen is also an option, but not all lichens give a dye. Sally is planning an in depth post on lichen dyeing so I will just give a few pointers on lichen gathering and preparation. Do your homework before you go out to identify lichens that give a dye. If you’re not sure there is the bleach test. If the lichen turns red when treated with a drop of bleach it should give colour for dyeing. Here is a helpful link on lichen dyeing.

Personally I’ve had no luck with lichen. Any pointers are appreciated!

As Autumn becomes winter there won’t be as much dye stuff around. However ivy berries and leaves might be worth a try along with mahonia berries. And there is always the humble onion skin. It gives a beautiful golden color and is simple to find and use. Other household items that give color include pomegranates and avocados.

For those of you who need help identifying plants I suggest a book that has pictures and descriptions of plants local to you. As Sally found out it’s properly identifying plants and trees is pretty important.

I use River Cottage’s Hedgerow book for identification. Books like the Ashford Book of Dyeing and Jill Goodwin’s A Dyers’ Manual give a lot of information on what colors certain plants give and whether they are color fast.

One other project for the budding natural dyer is to grow your own dye plants. I’ve started madder this year, which I need to re-pot into a larger container. Other flowers like dahlias, marigolds and coreopsis have all given loads of lovely yellows and gold colors this year. They’re all easy to grow and inexpensive. If you have space you might also try woad, indigo, St John’s Wort and safflower. It’s easy to find seeds online or from another natural dyer.

On Mordanting

 Sally Williams

 Blog

Indigo is apparently the gateway drug of the natural dye world. It led me to try dyeing with cochineal, which should have led me to a better understanding of mordanting, except it didn’t. There are a lot of recipes, but not a fat lot of information out there on the science of natural dyeing. There is a lot of information on synthetic dyes. As it turns out, there is a good reason for this.

The history of synthetic dyes is also the history of organic chemistry, so the process of learning how to make synthetic dyes provided the chemical knowledge. The advent of synthetic dyes squeezed out the natural dyers’ guilds, so the new chemical knowledge wasn’t applied backward. There is a lot of good information out there on the invention of mauveine, the first analine dye. If you love history, how synthetic dyes changed the socio-economic world is fascinating, and it in part explains why there is precious little textile manufacturing still done in the US. Some of the more interesting monographs I’ve come across about the chemistry of natural dyeing are from India, Pakistan and Egypt, where there still are textile industries, and where scientists are taking another look at natural dyestuffs in order to have a more sustainable and less toxic impact on their environment. I’ve ended up learning about synthetic dyes, color chemistry, the quantum physics of color, synthetic fibers, and finally, mordanting and natural dyes.

That said, Maiwa and Turkey Red Journal are both excellent resources for natural dyeing information, including the chemistry, and they are both on the forefront of bringing the chemical knowledge back to the natural dye world.

So what is mordanting? If you are using metallic mordants, basically you are making your own acid dyes. Instead of using an acidic bath to promote ionic bonding as with synthetic acid dyes, the metal ions of the metal mordants have a similar polar effect. The mordants form covalent bonds with the color bearing compounds in the dyestuffs, which are the very strong bonds between atoms (sharing electrons in the outer shell). Since they are acid (polar) dyes, they therefore bond better with the positively charged amino acid chains (wool, silk) and poorly with cellulose (cotton, linen).

Tannic acid is a non-metal mordant, but “tannic acid” itself isn’t really a discreet chemical, but rather a broad heading under which several acids fall (which also happen to be tannins): Gallic acid, ellagic acid, and catechic acid. Most of the so-called “substantive” natural dyestuffs that require no mordanting have some form of tannic acid in them, for instance, sumac, pomegranate, fustic and cutch. Tannic acids bond well with protein fibers (think tanning hides), and also with cellulose plant materials. It also bonds well with the metal mordants, so plant fibers normally get pre-mordanted with tannic acid, and then again with the metal mordant.

I really wish I could tell you what chemical bonds are formed between tannic acids and these different fibers, but I’ve had no luck in finding scientific documentation thus far. I have to assume it’s not covalent bonding with cellulose just because fiber reactive synthetic dyes are so much more wash fast. I’m starting a natural dyeing class in October and I’m hoping to get to the bottom of this.

Nowadays aluminum acetate is available to mordant plant materials and the tannic acid step is debatable—this post and this post from Turkey Red Journal do comparisons of dyeing cotton cloth with different configurations of tannic acid/alum/aluminum acetate. Some of their considerations are cost and availability for dyers in poorer countries. Rachel does most of the cotton dyeing between the two of us, so I’m leaving it to her to take good notes on her findings.

This monograph is great in detailing the chemical structure of wool. There is a lot going on in a strand of wool, aside from the positively charged dye sites. There are other chemical bonds that give rise to it’s strength and elasticity, and these are both things that can be affected by Ph, heat, and specific properties of different metal mordants like iron or tin.

There is a time vs. temperature factor in mordanting. A lot of recipes call for simmering your wool in your mordant for an hour, but that can easily lead to felting. Heating up your mordant and letting your wool steep overnight can often produce a more thorough saturation of the fiber and therefore more even dye uptake. Mordanting can take place before, during, or after the dyeing, but if it’s done prior to adding the fiber to the dye pot, there is more control over the mordant-to-fiber ratio, and the mordant bath can continue to be reused. This becomes more important when using the more toxic of the metal mordants, tin, copper and chrome.

Older mordanting recipes called for an excess of the metal mordants to ensure good dye uptake, in part because the strength of the mordant material was not guaranteed. Now we can source mordants with guaranteed strength and purity, so we can be a lot more precise and use recipes that leave little to no extra mordant in the bath. I did some trials with cochineal earlier this summer (that’s the next blog post). Using a recipe for a weighed amount of fiber, I tested my mordant bath to see if it was actually discharged (my copper did not seem to be), by adding more fiber to the “discharged” mordant bath and then soaking it in the dye bath and seeing if the dye strikes or not. When I was done I bottled up and saved my remaining mordant bath rather than tossing it out anywhere.

On hold for the next round of mordanting

Once the mordant has bonded to the fiber it’s not going anywhere, so you can use different mordanted materials in the same dye pot, which is fun and interesting because you can see the effect the different mordants have.

Some metal mordants are toxic. Chromate poisoning is particularly unpleasant. Oxalic acid, often used to shift colors as an after-mordant is toxic. Synthetic “true black” acid dye is also toxic, as it contains chromium as it’s coloring component. None of theses things belong in the groundwater, or your septic tank, or near kids, pets or livestock. Entrapment is the state wherein metal particles are trapped in the steam from a water bath, and are then able to be inhaled, so don’t mordant in your kitchen. And for that matter…

Oak galls

A cautionary tale: we have a large tanoak tree growing next to the abandoned well out by our barn, and as a good source of natural tannins, I checked the interwebs for what the tannin concentration should be compared to oak galls, etc, for a possible recipe. What I found was that it wasn’t a tanoak. So I used a tree identification website rather than the book with illustrations I’d used initially, and the final question on the flowchart was “do the leaves smell like almonds when crushed?” Ironically as it turns out, this reminded me of the opening lines of Love in the Time of Cholera. My tree does smells like almonds when the leaves are crushed. It’s a cherry laurel, and when you boil the leaves you get hydrogen cyanide, which Nero used to poison his enemies’ wells. So. Back to collecting gall nuts.