Indigo!

comes out of the dye pot green

We got into the indigo - a totally different way of dyeing. Forget what you learned the day before, this is vat dyeing. Put the stuff in a pot,, add stuff to take out something, add something else to take out the oxygen, and make sure the ph is between 9.5 and 10.5 -- picky little process! I'll definately have to go over my notes to get this all straight in my head, but it was fun!

turns blue reacting to the air

When you take your yarn out of the dye pot it's green and as it reacts with th air it becomes blue - totally magical!

Dipping our yarns dyed from the previous day did somewhat as suspected -- turned yellows into greens and reds into purples, but what a color range we created without much effort.

our beautiful range of colors

Mad Scientist

weighing fiber

It's "mad scientist" time at Convergence! The class in natural dyes is about to start, I hope it is very "hands on" and we get to take home samples. I've only done natural dyeing with plants I have gathered in the neighborhood. That beginning into the world of plant dyes has been very interesting and entertaining for the neighbors to watch, but I mostly get yellows, greens and browns. The class today will play with the materials to get reds and blues -- finally a whole range of colors from natural sources!

cooking dyestuffs

We got right to work, going over the basics and getting the amounts for mordant worked out for the different fibers. Moved onto straining the dyestuffs (that the instructor had soaked overnight.) and putting the samples into the dye. After alternating from info bits and figuring out percentages for more dyestuffs and taking out the samples and washing them -- a lot of juggling of tasks by the instructor to keep things moving forward -- we ended up with seven plant samples in wool and cotton.

chopping madder

Our dyestuffs are: Osage Orange (yellow), Sage (yellow), Madder (reds), Brazilwood (reds), Cochineal (reds), Logwood (purple), and Cutch (tan). Many of these plants are altered by hard or soft water, ph levels and temperature - I can understand how modern science could figure this out, but how did our ancient peoples figure all this out? Smarts and time -- passing down information for generations. Amazement and respect for those that came before us!

cooking the yarn

Tomorrow we'll put indigo and iron into the mix and end up with 42 samples plus whatever we do with the indigo.

samples drying

 

Barberry

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I cut off the branches from my barberry bush, trying to take parts that seemed to have a lot of color and the tiny berries. I chopped them all up into small pieces and simmered for an hour and let it sit overnight. After straining, the juice seemed to be fairly red, so again I hoped for red. The first samples with alum produced an light tan-orange color. Adding the tin turned the samples to olive green, then tan-green with copper and a very nice warm gray-browns with the iron and pre alum + iron.

Oregon Grape

OK I'll admit it, I want reds, blues, and purples. I had huge expectations when I gathered and started cooking up my oregon grape berries. They stained my hands when I picked them, they were dark blue, the juice was really red...

The top photo is the Oregon Grape plant, middle photo = berry samples, bottom = leaves

In went the yarn samples, a very dark red stained the yarn, it was really dark, almost brown, but it was a red. Then I tried the tin, and again a really dark blue - midnight. Disappointed, I really wanted a lively purple, but not to be. The copper and the iron produced really rich browns. Like before, not what I was hoping for, but pretty, especially within the group, it's really a wonderful way to get a lovely range of color by using the one plant, but altering it with different chemicals, they always go together enhancing one another.

The grape leaves did not produce anything unusual, I got the the tans and greens. With copper and iron the greens were very nice, soft and dusty, they would go wonderfully with the oregon grape berry colors.

Red Onion

Again there was the collection of dry onion skins, boiled on the stove for about an hour and left to sit until the next morning.

The colors were in the same family as the yellow onion skins, but all a bit darker. Again, a fairly distinct color was garnered from the different minerals added. Tin brightened, whereas copper added the more red tones an iron the green.

So far the onion skins, both red and yellow, were the most successful plant dyes, based on the range of colors gathered from one plant -- if only I loved the fall colors as much as reds and purples.

Geraniums

I had prepared a bunch of yarn for samples, made butterflies, loosely tied in several places to keep them from getting too tangled with the others. I took some of them and use the pre-mordant method, reading that alum enhanced many colors, I simmered the samples on the stove with about a 1/2 teaspoon of alum the night before. These can be dried and used at a later time, but I kept them in the water to use the next day. I also got the rest of the samples soaking in water with a spot of dish soap, so they would be ready to accept the dye evenly.

The night before I also simmered for almost and hour geranium flowers and geranium leaves in separate pots and let them sit over night, hoping to draw out as much color as possible. I had great hopes of getting red dye from the flowers, since the bath was so red and whenever it landed on paper, there was a red stain.

The next morning it was the geranium leaves that were tested first. I didn't expect much except maybe some green color and there wasn't much to get excited about except the sample with the alum and time did produce a very nice soft yellow.

Then it was on to the geranium flowers, would I get red? Well, no; at first I was really disappointed trying all the mordants and only getting light orangy tans, a very faded orange, a medium tan and a nice warm gray. But when you look at them all together the colors were nice together, soft and natural. I think that if I would have been using a plant fiber like cotton or raffia instead of an animal fiber like wool I may have seen the red I was hoping for.