Category Archives: Natural dyeing

May 4, 2014 · 7:28 pm

Indigofera Australis crop of 2014

Last year, I tried a cold vinegar process on some indigofera australis. The result was very pale blue, but just the same, blue, especially on silk and linen.  I thought this time I’d stick to silk.  I also found a direct dyeing method described online and decided to try it out on my indigofera australis.

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My friend and I stripped the leaves from the stems and into the blender they went.

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Pretty soon we had finely mushed leaves.

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I tried both the  vinegar method and the direct dye method with no success to speak of, even after repeated dippings.

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Remember that the wool on the right of each sample card has been mordanted with rhubarb leaf, so wasn’t white to begin with.

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Well, I thought I had nothing to lose by leaving the leaves and the liquid to sit for a few days and trying again, so I reunited the pulverised leaves and the two dye baths.

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I thought I’d try hydrosulphite, the last resort in case of indigo failure, in my case.  I warmed the liquid and strained out the leaves.

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I have recently received a Ph meter as a gift, so I aimed for 10.5 and added washing soda in solution until I reached it.  The result was a striking yellow.

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However… absolutely no blue whatsoever, not even an improvement on samples I thought I might overdye for improved colour.

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Time of harvest?    User error in the process?  The Ph meter isn’t properly calibrated?  The thermometer is out of whack (it certainly didn’t agree with the one on the Ph meter, so I knew one of them must be wrong–and I now know it was the thermometer)?  I have no idea, honestly.  I’ve decided to leave my one Japanese indigo plant to keep for seed…

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May 1, 2014 · 6:15 pm

Opening some jars and filling others…

Once upon a time, I used to make ginger beer, recycling glass beer bottles for the purpose.  We had some with us one time years ago when I was travelling by (even-then-antique) Kombi.  We stopped at a wonderful national park, near Hattah Lakes.  There was a long walk in intense dry heat.  We walked much further than we planned, perhaps having failed to fully understand the map on the sign before setting out.  The water in the lakes was so low that we eventually realised we were not seeing eels in the lake, we were seeing the spines of large fish as they swam in water so shallow that it was barely as deep as the fish were tall.  We got back to the Kombi, and since we’d been walking for hours, and we were on holiday, opened up the back of the van and lay down on the bed for a nap.  We’d been there a little while when there was an almighty bang.  We sat up pretty quickly, because to our untrained ears, it sounded like a gunshot.  There were no other people in sight and only one car in the distance.  All fell quiet.  No dramatic action.  Eventually realisation dawned on one of us, and the three way (gas–electric–car battery) fridge was opened.  Inside it were the remains of a bottle of ginger beer which had exploded under the pressure of its own contents, sprayed though the vegies and suchlike.  Three cheers for the fridge keeping the glass shards safely contained.  Long story short–all bottles of ginger beer stashed under the bed were emptied right there and then, and I never put ginger beer in glass again, except once the lid was off!

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In case you can’t tell, this is a sideways introduction to my circumspection about the state of my steeping jars of dyestuff.  I’ve had some difficulty getting a good seal with with the Stuff, Steep and Store method.  The first time,  I think I raised the temperature too quickly.  It’s a vice I’ve been known to indulge in (or a problem I’ve suffered from, depending on source of heat) when preserving fruit, too.  I resealed some jars and took additional steps to ensure a good seal.  But several of the lids began to dome up again (or just plain leak). This one (pelargonium petals) leaked, as you can see.

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Luckily I had stored it on top of another jar.  Ahem.  So much dye lost!

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The very reverse of a vacuum seal (which is the intention), all of this suggested to me the contents were fermenting.  Perhaps the lids were damaged.  Perhaps my thermometer was actually faulty… I went off and checked when I had this thought on the weekend.  Yes, the thermometer was faulty–the little glass blob that should have held it in a fixed position had clearly broken away unnoticed, allowing the whole business part to slide down by about ten degrees.  So… back to the drawing board.  I am glad I didn’t use that thermometer for preserving peaches and plums!  The jars of fruit all came out just fine, which leads me to think that Stuff, Steep and Store should work for me, as it undoubtedly does for others.  Clearly I can manage a vacuum seal under favourable circumstances.  The good news on my jars of dye is that it looks like I got colour even though these jars haven’t steeped as long as I planned.  Here they are wet from their baths… and not smelling especially fermented.

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From left to right, pelargonium petals (greyer and less blue than the image);  dyers’ chamomile,  brown onion skins, and E Scoparia exhaust dye bath on various silk threads.  Since it’s my patience and my thermometer and not the method that are at fault… I decided to try again.

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From left to right (below): red hibiscus flowers, dried prunus leaves and fallen flowers from an unusual, purple-leaved hibiscus I found almost at the end of its flowering season when I visited the Himeji Japanese gardens on the weekend.  Each with vinegar, sea water, silk/cotton thread and aluminium foil.  Wait and see!

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April 29, 2014 · 6:53 am

The unbearable cuteness of stranded colour knitting

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After all the three-ply colour spinning there has been around here, I started to itch to use those colours in knitting. I settled on these, the Tingvoll slippers by Kristin Spurkland. I began them before I went to Melbourne in March.  I found that knitting them over breakfast in  a cafe in Melbourne triggered a conversation every single day, and usually with another keen knitter.  It made me feel right at home, even though I was far from home and essentially, I was in the cafe because there was nothing for breakfast in the cupboard where I was staying!

Even the soles are cute.

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I knit these in Corriedale.  Yes, Malcolm the Corriedale.  The orange is dyed with eucalyptus, and the yellow with my mother’s coreopsis flowers.  While I was in Melbourne, I found myself frustrated by how slowly it was all going and how hard I was finding it to read the charts.  In the learning zone I was in spending my whole day at a workshop–I started to explore.  By the time I was flying home I had found that I could knit withe one colour in each hand–picking the yellow (‘European style’ as some call it here–yarn in the left hand) and throwing the orange (‘English style’, as some call it here–yarn in the right hand).  Best of both worlds!  I love that phenomenon: learning one new thing opens the doors to learning others.  Delightful.

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They are smaller than I had hoped, which just shows I settled on this wool and this pattern with no real thought for sizing and not much attention to the instructions.  Clearly it would be a good idea for me to quit spinning finer than I like to knit!  I think they are destined for a small child of my acquaintance.  She is a fine appreciator of hand knits.  Her Dad says when he told her I might be knitting her slippers, she was ‘beside herself!’ Apparently she likes the felted clogs I knit him so much she tries them on a lot, even though he has some of the largest feet I’ve ever knit for…

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April 25, 2014 · 5:05 pm

Unidentified Eucalypt sample of the week

My attention was caught by another eucalypt in the parklands.  It was the colour of the flowers that attracted my interest.  I don’t remember seeing it in flower before.  Something about this purplish shade of pink caught my eye.

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The tree itself was rather unprepossessing at a distance.

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It seems to be managing to grow despite having survived multiple insults and lost limbs if not its entire primary trunk at some point in the past.

 

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On the other hand, this had clearly created an opportunity: the hollow at the base of the trunk had been chosen as home by bees, who were flying in and out the whole time I was watching (they would be the small blurs in the photo).

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I took a small sample and really…  this tree is safe from me.  The alum mordanted sample gave a good brown and the no mordant sample, a pinkish shade of tan.

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April 21, 2014 · 1:48 pm

Dyeing red with dandelion… or not!

It was a day for harvesting…

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…and a friend from the Guild had given me a booklet from the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens which described a method for achieving magenta with dandelion (taraxacum 0fficinale).  As I’ve said before, rumours on this subject are many but claims of a result are few, and better dyers than myself have been defeated (at least temporarily) by the challenge of obtaining any shade of red from dandelion.  The booklet came from the stash of an older woman who was giving things away, and dates to the 1960s.  I have to say the method sounded improbable to me, but I love to use my weeds, and magenta is promising!  I am happy feeding weeds to my hens or my friends or even my compost, and dyeing is another good use.  I gathered up all I could find with roots attached, since the recipe called for cooking the whole plant for two hours.

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Well, my friends, the mystery of how red was ever obtained from dandelion was not ended by this experiment.  It wasn’t much of a try-out for my rhubarb-leaf mordanted yarns, either!  I don’t see any change from the pre-dyeing colour of any yarn on my sample card.  Has a crucial step (like a mordant) been left out of the process?  Is this yet another case of user error on my part?  I simply don’t know.  But if any reader does know–I am all ears!

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April 20, 2014 · 10:04 am

Rhubarb leaf and alum mordants, hot and cold processes

Way back in December I was thinking about hot and cold mordanting processes.  I decided on an experiment inspired by a post by Leena at Riihivilla which led in turn to a blog called From Silk Road.  There, Jarek shows experiments with solar mordanting over 28 days, and one of the mordants he is using is Himalayan Rhubarb. Mine is the good old fashioned European eating kind… but perhaps the same principles could be applied?  Jenny Dean certainly describes cold mordanting with alum and I have tried that previously with success.    I was also curious about the findings of Pia at Colour Cottage.  She has undertaken some experiments with rhubarb leaf mordant here and here and found it made no difference to dye uptake or lightfastness.  So disappointing!

I started with 1100g rhubarb leaves (and stewed the rhubarb with orange juice to go with waffles… mmmm).  Way more rhubarb leaf than necessary for the job, I think.    I have no way to know if I am even using the same rhubarb as Pia… but I decided to err on the side of plenty of rhubarb leaf and not committing a huge quantity of yarn. I created two, 25g skeins of Bendigo Woolllen Mills alpaca rich ‘magnolia’, left over from some past workshop I ran.  One was subjected to the classic heat treatment in rhubarb leaf solution (45 minutes on a bare simmer), left overnight to cool down and rinsed out.

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The other went into a glass jar for a solar treatment, which was quite hot at times.  It went into the jar on 16 December and our first 40C day of the year was scheduled for the 18th. I created two more skeins and mordanted them in alum, one using the hot process and the other packed into a bucket with a lid in the sun.  Here is the solar mordant rhubarb jar (and some iron soaking in vinegar water on the left), in December.  They’re sitting on a concrete surface with a concrete wall behind them.  I’m trying for thermal mass in a sunny spot.

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Things being what they are (by which I mean I have been too busy to think much about this experiment), I took the yarn out on 13 April 2014. Here it is before removal.  There was a little layer of mould stuck to the lid, for those who are wondering.  In retrospect, this would have been a great application for Stuff Steep and Store.

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Here is the yarn after removal from the rhubarb leaf solution.  I’d call that a dye and not only a mordant!

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Here is my solar process alum-mordanted yarn after similar neglect for the same period of time.

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Finally: my full selection dry and ready for use: no mordant, alum applied with heat, alum applied through solar process, rhubarb leaf applied with heat, rhubarb leaf applied through a solar process.

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April 14, 2014 · 12:15 pm

Unloved fibres of yesteryear and some eucalyptus dyeing

Some time ago I received a lot of fibres that even the felt group at my Guild didn’t want anymore.  I think this was because I taught a class on ‘novelty yarns’, known to online spinners as ‘art yarns’ or ‘textured spinning’.  It is true, people like Pluckyfluff have been known to spin semi-felted wool and all manner of inexplicable (yet ultimately gorgeous) things–and I’ve done some fairly inexplicable, or at least hard-to-explain, spinning,  myself.  But there are limits!  It seems some people equate artyarn with awful yarns made from awful fibres.  I wasn’t about to inflict most of this fibre on beginners.  What I felt was readily useable, I carded into batts for people to experiment on some time ago,.  Some I turned into trash batts.  Some I re-washed and turned into yarn.  But just recently I found there was still some in my stash.  Some was simply suffering from poor washing.  Sticky and unpleasant to touch.  I washed it.

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The amount of mohair the felting group handed over makes me think mohair isn’t favoured as a felting fibre.  So some was just mohair.  I carded it up and found it was neppy mohair, but still.

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Some was extremely short and rather matted. I would rate this trash batt standard, so carded it up with some longer wool to hold it together.

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Some was low quality alpaca in small quantities.  I carded that with some longer fine wool too.

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I would rate almost all the resulting yarns basically suitable for yarnbombing… or perhaps I should offer them back to the felters!

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Only the mohair really became a yarn of any quality… not too surprising given what went in to the others!

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I also had some small amounts of fibre from an exchange.  One was some kind of ruggy (coarse) wool with lots of contrasting nepps in it, and the other a quantity of a lustre longwool, something like English Leicester.  I checked my perceptions with two spinners of much experience at the Guild and we all agreed on these conclusions, which was a happy thing, suggesting I am learning about identifying wools.  I decided on eucalypt dyes.  In each case I divided the fibre in half, and dyed one half in the first dyebath and the other half in an exhaust dyebath of the same leaves, to get two different tones.  Then I spun the fibres up to retain the colours as distinct stripes.

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And now, back to spinning a large quantity of alpaca…

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April 9, 2014 · 9:07 am

Sampling oak leaves

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While I was in the Western suburbs recently, I went for a wander and saw what I thought at first glance were olive trees.  Shame on me for not looking more closely: these were oak trees, as evidenced by the acorns.

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On the other hand, looking at those leaves, this is not a variety of oak I’m accustomed to.  The most common oak in my neighbourhood is the English oak (Quercus Robur), which has quite a distinctive leaf shape: nothing like this one.  The next most common is the cork oak (Quercus Suber): there are a couple in a nearby park which are a constant source of wonder to me. Perhaps I am just not paying attention.  I found this site listing quite a few oaks on a site from my own city–so many different oaks must be grown here.  While I was in Melbourne there was a leaf I could only have said was not native on the table during the Second Skin workshop.  India Flint pronounced it an oak, and that evening I saw loads of them planted down the side of a street.  With acorns–which are evidently the only mental clue I have for identifying unfamiliar oaks.  So I recently understood there must be members in the oak family I hadn’t met.  To look at this tutorial on identifying oak leaves in North America, the leaf I saw in Melbourne was a red oak and the ones I know better are white oaks.

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Just to add to the mystery, where the trees had re-sprouted after being cut back, there were juvenile leaves that were positively prickly along the leaf margins.  Well–I decided to gather a few leaves and acorns and try them out.  The result was not really exciting… but then I have never seen so many acorns in one place and there are dyeing applications for acorns I’ve never tried. So perhaps the future still holds possibilities!

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April 4, 2014 · 6:23 pm

Sampling eucalypts

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As we drove home from exercise group last Saturday morning, it became clear that a big part of a tree had been cut down beside a warehouse-style business near home.  A big chunk of tree canopy was lying on the footpath.  I didn’t think I had sampled the tree in question, but there are several in that area that look like E Scoparia, but have been pruned to branch very high–out of reach.  There isn’t much hope of my identifying this one–it has no fruit, flowers or buds on it right now, though it does have red twigs and white-barked branches and leaves the right shape for E Scoparia.   I have had some success with leaves from the gutters on that street, but not right where these branches were lying.  I went back and applied my secateurs.

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To my sadness when I actually stopped I could see that a tree had been felled and that its trunk had been taken away.  The very base of it was all that was left, and it was clear that a large section of the root mass had rotted away or become diseased.  Just the same… the continuing loss of trees around our way feels relentless. This week someone else aggrieved by the felling of three massive trees on one block which I posted about recently took a spray can to the fence of the block in question.  One fence had something I can’t fully reprint here: ‘What the f*** have you done?’, and the other fence said the neighbourhood was in mourning for the loss of the trees and that planning laws should be changed.  I thought I would take a photo but this morning there was a chap with a paintbrush taking it out less than 48 hours after it went up.

But this is no reason to allow all the leaves of this felled tree to go to commercial composting if I could dye with them and then compost them.  Needless to say, after this flame orange result, I went back and cut all I could get into a chaff bag (that’s a very big sack, in my terms). As a bonus to my visit, the tree had been felled beside an E Cinerea, so I picked up every last leaf that had fallen from the E Cinerea too.  I’ll be running a workshop at my Guild in June and I’ll need to bring a goodly amount of dye material.

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This next eucalypt was standing in the parklands in North Adelaide.  I went there early one morning for an appointment so had a walk before my appointment.  I decided to sample it because India Flint suggests silver grey leaved eucalypts are promising dye plants.  The buds were so pretty!

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Clearly when it flowers there are many flowers… but not yet…

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The tree was an interesting shape…

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There was the intriguing feature of two different coloured trunks coming from one lignotuber.

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And I just can’t explain why there were so many land snails, but I love land snails.

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The result in the dyebath was a pale apricot.

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Then there was this tree, growing on the far outskirts of my workplace just outside a car park.  It seems like a box (one branch of the eucalypt family) to me.

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It was gloriously in flower, full of bees and birds.

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When I went back in the evening, I realised there were a few of these trees and there were also fallen branches.  Well worth sampling, in my view!

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I loved the colour from this plant, and I used a dyeing strategy India Flint described in Melbourne.  Far less energy use and potential for fibre damage… and clearly this may become my new normal way to dye with eucalypts!

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March 31, 2014 · 3:48 pm

Things learned 3

Have I made it sound as though there was no real making at Second Skin, and it was all about the thinking?  Well, I was surprised by how pleasurable hand stitching and the odd spot of thinking were, but of course, there was making.

It began with string. This was part of an extremely cunning method of having all your measurements to hand without any numbers attached to them.  Hand twined string is further evidence of human genius, from my point of view.  I first learned how to make it from a basket weaver and was delighted and intrigued from that point forward.  Usually I make it from daylily leaves.  But this application of it struck me as further genius.  I know I always hate the part of pattern using where I have to compare my measurements to those contemplated by the pattern drafter.  Let me tell you, “The Vogue Body” and the one I am getting around in have little in common!  So many women’s feelings about clothing are really just feelings about our own bodies in the context of an environment where very few of us have the idealised shape and there is a lot of unwanted critique of female bodies.  What genius to sidestep a large part of that drama and along with it, simplify the process of design.  My string is made from tired old cotton that didn’t improve in some dye bath or other, but there were glorious examples of silk string, beautifully crafted by my fellow workshop participants.

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Then there was the infinity scarf.  I made two, because when I modelled a plain cream version for my daughter she liked it so much I stitched all evening to hem hers and bundled it next day along with the frocks… and promptly forgot to take a picture.  Mine, of course, still needs one hem!  But it has been touched by indigo as well as leafy goodness of other kinds:

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I like it very much!  I’d better finish the hem…

We had the good luck to be at Beautiful Silks in the aftermath of workshops on Indigo.  The bag below has also been dipped…  India said that this style of bag revels in the name tsunobukuro (I hope I have that right), which evidently translates as ‘horn bag’, because, of course, it has horns, which you tie together to create a handle.  Japanese design is so often beautifully economical–I did not fully grasp the geometry of this bag, but made it anyway and finished it a few nights ago.

I am not sure I can explain the feeling I have about ‘hornbag’ as an Australian…  and perhaps people who haven’t encountered Kath and Kim won’t be able to understand even if I try to explain this Australian phenomenon.  Those want to try could start with Wikiquote’s take on it.  I won’t trouble you with a critique of Kath and Kim right now, after all, we’re talking about things learned and things made!  Anyone in Melbourne could still take advantage of the fermentation indigo vats at afternoon sessions using them at Beautiful Silks.  The vats were set up when master indigo dyer Aboubakar Fofana was there recently.  Our getting to use them was an unexpected bonus.

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And finally, there was a dress.  It features E Crenulata leaves, happily found in a park near where I was staying.  India said: ‘everything will be beautiful in the end.  And if it isn’t beautiful, it isn’t the end.’  I think this is a beautiful piece of fabric, and I learned a lot from turning it into a dress.  Partly because of my feelings on the subject of myself in a dress, and partly because of the inevitable features of a first attempt (in my case), I think this isn’t finished.  Or perhaps it is finished, but I haven’t found its true owner yet.  But I am still glad to have made it and learned from it.  That’s enough for me.

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My eyes popped out when I saw the number of hits on this blog for today, (it’s usually a friendly but low traffic part of the glorious online universe) and then I realised there was a link in from India’s blog.  Thanks for stopping by if that is what brought you here.  If it wasn’t, and this workshop sounds like it’s for you, India Flint is running this workshop in Victoria later in the year, and there may still be places if that sounds like the holiday for you!

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