Category Archives: Natural dyeing

November 5, 2012 · 7:09 pm

Ironbark experiments: E Corynodes

On the weekend, I went to a fete at Black Forest Primary School.  They had a sensational community garden, complete with a sale of silkworms, 5 for a dollar!  Who could resist?  Clearly not me (you guessed), so there are 5 silkworms in the lounge munching through mulberry leaves.  More on that later.

While my posse of friends and my house guests from Denmark were hitching up their bikes, I took a sample of the tree right at the dead end of Kertaweeta Ave Black Forest where we entered the school grounds, with the help of a taller friend.  Excuse the extra good photo….

This tree had smooth, pale bark in some of the finer upper branches.

I don’t know why, but I do not entirely trust the result that Euclid and I produced: E Corynodes.  Poor Euclid, depending on me.  There were no mature fruits, buds or flowers to consider, and that makes the result less dependable and the chance of detecting an error smaller. Euclid suggests E Corynodes can be confused with several other species, but look at this account of how to tell them apart!

E. fibrosa subsp. fibrosa, E. fibrosa subsp. nubila, E. melanophloia and E. rhombica … differ in having buds with stamens all fertile and irregularly flexed.  E. sideroxylon differs by having buds that hold the outer operculum into maturity and both the inner and outer operculum shed together at anthesis (no operculum scar).

So that would be obvious, then!  Based on this I wonder how I can be sure this is not E Sideroxylon, which would give orange too…  Because whatever its true name, this is the result I got.

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November 5, 2012 · 12:14 pm

Eucalyptus Torquata: Leaf Prints and Modifiers

Remember my modifier experiment?  I have two jars of wonder, based on Jenny Dean’s instructions.  One contains offcuts of copper pipe from my Dad, vinegar and water.  It’s been steeping for months.  My first effort at iron water didn’t work out as I’d hoped, more like a science experiment!  This one is based on my friend’s collecton of bent nails.  He has been turning pallets into furniture, so he has removed a lot of nails.  They got left out in the rain and, bless him!  He thought of me.  Here they are, left to right:

Mystery Science Experiment, Rusty Nail Water, Copper Pipe Water.

Here are my E Torquata samples on hand spun wool and commercial wool/hemp blend:
Unmodified at the top, Iron modifier next, Copper modifier at the bottom.  I have to admit, this isn’t a deeply exciting result.

And here are my E Torquata leaf prints on recycled linen (the darker one was the side against the cast iron pipe):

Here are the prints from my ‘is it E Scoparia?’ experiment.  The answer is a tentative ‘yes!’  Recycled linen on the left, recycled silk on the right.  I included the very young, soft, green foliage you can see printed toward the bottom partly because I have been asked whether it is true you need to use young foliage to get good leaf prints.  My experience is that you don’t (though of course, you can).

Finally… a gratuitous photo of an E Torquata flowering very pinkly in a car park in my place of work.  One of my co-workers came out of the building to see me with a pile of papers in one hand and my phone in the other, and said: ‘What are you doing, Mary?’  As you would, really.

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November 3, 2012 · 10:19 pm

Ironbark Mystery

This week I found some E Sideroxylon trees in a park with lots of low hanging leaves… too tempting.  So I harvested some.  I brought them home and made leaf prints.  I have obtained strong oranges from these leaves in the past, so imagine my surprise when I unwrapped them and saw this:

This is on the silk-faced side of a hemp and silk blend.  It did confirm for me that the silk-faced side should be the right side.  Here, on hemp-cotton blend:

Disappointed, I considered the possible reasons.  Perhaps those pipes were not cast iron but something else?  I didn’t think so. I re-checked that I still have my cast iron pipes stored separately from my welded steel pipes… yes.  Hmmm.  But then I checked the dye pot using the same leaves, that I was cooking at the same time as the leaf prints.  And the wool was barely tan, almost no colour at all.

So, the metal content of the pipe is not the explanation.  The leaves that had been cooking for 3 hours or more were still green looking.  The dye liquor was barely tan.  I would expect the leaves to be orange and the dye liquor to be strongly coloured.

What could explain this?  I went back to my sample cards to check I really had ever had success with E Sideroxylon and there were my samples, bright orange.  There are a lot of variables in natural dyeing, and season or rainfall or soil could make a difference, but surely not this much of a difference.  The most plausible reason is that this tree was not E Sideroxylon, and that when I have had perplexing results in the past, they have also been caused by using a different species.  So, I consulted my most detailed and sophisticated Eucalypt resource, Euclid.  This is a database of Eucalypts created by the CSIRO, an Australian government-funded scientific research organisation.  Euclid is an amazing tool, but when using it to identify a Eucalypt, an accurate result depends on accurate observations of the tree in question–so user error is still possible.

When I began learning about Eucalypts, I couldn’t tell an ironbark from a stringybark (for those still in this position, please accept my assurance that the difference is quite profound once you grasp it).  I finally worked this out when I tryed dyeing with E Melanophloia and got nothing.  Almost no change in colour.  I thought it was E Cinerea, which has a great reputation as a dye plant.  Well, Melanophoia is a pale trunked ironbark and Cinerea is a stringybark.  They do both have rough, deeply furrowed bark and silver grey heart or round shaped leaves and white-cream flowers, and there the similarity ends!

So… perhaps I am about to move my understanding of Ironbarks up a few notches.  Euclid and my observations reduced the number of possibilities down to 7 (from a possible pool of over 900 Eucalypts).  The plausible candidates are: E Rhombica; E Fibrosa subsp Nubila (Blue Leaved Ironbark); E Decorticans; E Fibrosa subsp Fibrosa (Broad leaved Red Ironbark) and, of course, E Sideroxylon.  I think E Fibrosa subsp Fibrosa is my front-running candidate… it looks very much like E Sideroxylon to me on Euclid even now my suspicions are raised.

Next thrilling update whenever I reach some new insight!  Unfortunately none of these new possibilities are in my ready reference (a book), so I may be observed under trees in the neighbourhood with my laptop in hand.  Well, it won’t be the first time.

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November 1, 2012 · 9:48 pm

Eucalyptus Torquata

This is E Torquata, the Coolgardie Gum.  In my area it is a popular street tree.  It is a relatively small gum tree with a showy lovely flower and distinctive bud caps.  Being native to Western Australia, it tolerates the dry conditions that a street tree in Adelaide can expect to have to manage.

I find Coolgardie Gum easy to identify. When I was a child we lived in the goldfields in WA where this tree is from.  We lived in Kalgoorlie for a while, and this tree grew there as well as over to Coolgardie, which we used to visit.  The other town Wikipedia mentions as within its range is Widgiemooltha.  When I was a kid you could hardly call Widgiemooltha a town, but there was a dam there that someone had set goldfish free in.  We went there once and came home with 15 goldfish, all different!  It was a fantastic day out, picnic plus new pets–what more could a young person want?  We used to break the beak off the bud caps from this tree and string them to make necklaces.  They are distinctive.

This particular tree has relatively yellow flowers, but most nearby have flowers that are closer to orange.  There is a big infrastructure project happening in my suburb soon, and some of the local trees are going to go, including this one.  So I decided to harvest a little.  I have tried it as a dye plant before and I wasn’t impressed (I don’t invest time in natural dyeing with the intention of gettng tan), but I know someone who has achieved green from this tree using modifiers.  These leaves are destined for my sample pot.  I’m aiming to try them with modifiers myself.  I have some rusty-nail-iron-water and some copper-pipe-water, and I’m finally going to try them out.

I have also wrapped up some leaves sandwiched between some recylced silk and some recycled linen to see what happens.  I also put some samples in from some trees I found near a friend’s house in another part of the city just in case they are E Scoparia… the leaf shape and bark are right, the number of valve sin the fruit is right, the flower colour is right, and the bark is colouring up the way the ones in my neighbourhood are, but I trust the dye pot more than I trust my capacity to identify Eucalypts.  I’ve cooked my leaf bundles for 3 hours and I’ll unwrap in a day or two.

While I’m on the topic of Eucalypts that don’t have long to live… RIP this beautiful Corymbia Citriodora (Lemon Scented Gum).  At the community information day on the weekend I was told it would be cut down this week or next.  Right now it is in full bloom.  There are thousands of bud caps showering down and the road is covered in a dusting of yellow stamens.  Lorikeets are screeching and flying in and out of that tree all day long.  They start before I’m out of bed in the morning.

Farewell beautiful trees.

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October 4, 2012 · 10:21 pm

Eucalyptus Sideroxylon dye pot

I went into the city to hear a presentation the other week, and on the way back there were so many opportunities to harvest that I couldn’t help but pull my bike over and pick some E Sideroxylon (Red Ironbark) leaves.  Yes, I did get a few looks… but I am reasonably impervious!

I picked a little on the main road out of the city beside the parklands, and a little more as I turned off onto my bike path.  As I exited the bike path, there was a big branch lying underneath a nice specimen near the tram line.  I have dyed from that specific tree before and the leaves were already dry.  I went back for more later.  So here is what I could get home on my bike rack, with my drum carder beside it for scale:

And here are some of the flowers.  There is one of these trees in full bloom next door to my house and there are lorikeets and honeyeaters feasting on these flowers in next door’s back yard calling to each other all day long at the moment.  I love it.

I decided to continue with the dye bath from earlier that week (the one in the post from September 18) rather than using fresh water.  The wool I dyed in the previous incarnation of the dye bath was not a really impressive colour, so it has returned to the pot and I’ve added a little more.  When I strained out the leaves and bark from the last pot, the water was a deep wine red.  This is unusual and I wonder if it is a result of leaving iron pipe in that bath–but if it is, I can’t figure out why the wool in that dye bath was still orange and tan.  The mystery continues…

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September 18, 2012 · 1:37 pm

The end of the Royal Show… and some show and tell

Well, my attempts to keep our saltbush plants from being trampled had partial success.  The bunting was apparently attractive enough that it was stolen several times (but survived gale force winds for a couple of days).  I had initially planned to make very time consuming and beautiful bunting, and there are great tutorials for making it online.  Then, as I contemplated the enormity of the task, a friend told me she would just take her overlocker to each triangle and then overlock the triangles into a strip and that she had success doing this in the past.  I decided that I’d take this lower fi approach, and it was a great use of some of my huge stash of bias binding (which I used to join the triangles on some strips) and some fabric that I bought as offcuts from bedsheet manufacturing years ago.

It took plenty of time to make metres and metres of it anyway and I was glad not to have made over engineered loveliness for this particular application, especially once so much of it was stolen!  After I had replaced about 4 metres of bunting once I was dismayed to find that it had gone within a day.  And, the antique overlocker my grandma gave me when her eyesight reached the point where she hadnt been able to use it for years had a hissy fit and needed to go off to be repaired.  This is unusual.  That overlocker is a workhorse and has responded to irregular maintenance for many years.  My grandma died years ago but I often think of her while using her very dependable machine.

So, in short, the last replacement piece of bunting is extremely low fi… triangles zig zag stitched onto a piece of recycled cotton thread I rescued from a sad old jumper.  However, with one day of the show left to go, it was still there when I went to pick some leaves from the tree, and I found two geckos living under bark at the base of the tree when I checked under it for white ants (sadly, evidence of white ants as well as geckos).  I’ve never seen lizards on this tree before, so this was very exciting!

Here, finally, are my three braids from the twice-run  Eucalyptus dyepot.  I am not sure that the extra-long heating time has made any difference at all, but the low heating temperature has retained the softness of the roving very well.

 

Meanwhile, I have sieved out all the leaves and bark, added more dried leaves and my smallest piece of iron pipe, applied heat, and we’ll see how that goes… Finally, here is another tea cosy.  It’s made from merino dyed with Eucalyptus–for the orange– and Silky Oak (Grevillea Robusta)–for the yellow– with felted shapes spun into the yarn.  Once again, this is based on the Fun and Fast tea cozy by Funhouse Fibers.

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September 17, 2012 · 1:51 pm

Dyeing with Eucalypts… the next instalment

Dyeing with Eucalypts sometimes reminds me of baking sourdough bread.  You can step away for long periods and pick up where you left off, with the process having continued while you were gone.
To reprise the last post, having cooked my bark for  a couple of hours on its own, I had added 25 g wool.  The dye pot then went through 3 cycles of heat for 10 minutes and sitting for 60 minutes before I went out to see some live music with a friend.  Kristina Olsen happened to be in our town!  I added an additional 25 g wool after 2 cycles to see what would happen.  Then yesterday I was busy and the wool sat in a cold dye pot all day.  Today, here are my two bedraggled little braids.  I’ve squeezed them out but they are still wet.

The one on the left is the colour I would expect to get (and has spent longest in the dye bath)… the one on the right is a bit pale for my taste. The dye liquor has changed colour from the initial clear deep red colour to a murky orange.  This is also dependable, even if I don’t grasp why it happens exactly!  Maybe I am just cooking that bark to sludge.

So since I’m home today I decided to run the dye pot again.  I added more rainwater and as many leaves as I could cram in.  This is a dried leaf mix. I have a big paper bag I’ve been using to stash windfalls and leftovers and such, so here are leaves from E Sideroxylon, E Cinerea, E Websteriana (not that it is a specially great dye plant but it has cute heart-shaped leaves and minnirichi bark–what’s not to like?) as well as E As-yet-to-be-accurately-identified.  I moved the pot indoors, since I’m home alone and no one else will be bothered… and I can keep the heat really low without it blowing out in the wind.  I added a further 25g wool, and now we see what happens.  I have the wool in between the residual bark at the bottom and the leaves I added, where I am hoping they’ll have the benefit of both and perhaps some contact printing.

The other reason I think natural dyeing (with Eucs especially)  is like making sourdough bread is because the number of variables is so big, I can get a dependable result up to a certain point, but the most exciting results always contain some element of mystery.  So, I can’t turn out my best loaf every time, and I have achieved burgundy from Eucs more than once, but not often and not predictably.  In my opinion, the only thing to do is to keep experimenting!

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September 15, 2012 · 3:51 pm

Dyeing with Eucalypts

I began the process of dyeing I’m finishing this weekend months ago by collecting the bark of some of my favourite dye trees when they shed their bark.  I don’t muck around when making the most of this resource that the council and other people in my suburb will treat as rubbish if it lands on a footpath.  I take a chook feed sack if there is a lot of bark, as you can see.  Otherwise, I take a shoulder bag with me when I’m out and aboout and just pick up bark bit by bit as it falls to the ground.  There are four trees nearby which have bark which gives a lot of colour.

I discovered this quite by accident when I was experimenting with mordanting cotton one year. I couldn’t figure out where I would get tannin to apply to my fabric.  Then I thought… why buy tannin online and have it transported all the way to my house when Eucalypt bark is rich in tannin and I have it lying on the ground less than a block from my front door?  Imagine my surprise when I heated my pot of bark and saw the water turn deep orange within an hour!  I haven’t stuck with using this method to mordant cotton, but I use it for great colour on wool.

First, I soaked the bark for 48 hours.  I don’t think 48 hours is a magic number, but it is more than enought to wet the bark through.  Then, I brought the pot to the boil and kept it simmering for 2 1/2 hours.  I like to develop the colour in the dye bath without subjecting the wool to heat for so long, especially because my burners are difficult to control and default to a rolling boil rather than any more subtle temperature.

Then, I removed enough bark to allow my wool to move freely and put 25g merino roving into the pot. Sometimes I leave more bark in the pot, because it can produce contact prints on yarn or roving and this can be a lovely effect.  I like to plait the roving because it produces interesting variegation–not just different shades, but different colours–and a semi solid yarn once spun.  Even though this is a huge pot crammed with bark, I’m using a little wool because this gives the best chance of a burgundy… but no guarantee!  I can add more wool for orange or tan later.  Today, I have left the pot steaming but without heat for an hour, then applied heat for 15 minutes, and now another hour without heat.  I’m always happy if I can find a way to save energy… less heat will reduce the chance of felting (or just turning the wool harsh), and I am not convinced that a lot of cooking the wool itself improves the colour.  Well, that’s the theory.

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September 11, 2012 · 4:48 pm

Off to the Royal Show

This week the Royal Show started.  The neighbourhood is full of cheerful people and cars.  One strand of my bunting is gone… it looks for all the world as if someone decided to souvenir the best part!  It has been completely removed.  So I’d better make some more.

I spent some hours on my Guild’s stall, selling things made by members and showing people what spinning looks like.  I took my spindle and some roving dyed with eucalyptus bark, but in the end when I was demonstrating I was on the Guild’s wheel spinning greasy fleece from a bag of locks.  It was interesting to see how many people had some idea what was being done and wanted to show their children.  It is always obvious that people from some parts of the world are much closer to a tradition of spinning in their country of origin than many Anglo-Australians.  I had a great conversation about spinning in India with a couple of people who were surprised I knew what a Charka was… and I am in awe of anyone who can draft with one hand!  Last year, someone took my picture drop spindling because he thought there was no way his mother in Iran would ever believe a white woman in Australia could do this, without a picture.  I heard lots of stories of mothers and grandmothers who were/are spinners, and we joined up a few new members, too.

And, I decided to begin on my tea cosy project.  I have spun a lot of art yarn in the last year and some of it is very bulky.  I think tea cosies would be perfect and I’ve already knit one, which went home with a visitor who thought it was too cute!  That is the kind of home knitting should go to…  I have four teapots I’ve bought second hand.  I decided to start with the smallest one and work up!  This tea cosy bears some relationship to the Fun and Fast tea cozy by Funhouse Fibers, but I’ll have to claim responsibility for its defects as, while I’ve used the central concept… I haven’t exactly followed the pattern… there just wasn’t enough yarn in my smallest skein, and this teapot is a tiddler.  The yarn is corespun, and contains merino I dyed with Earth Palette dyes, tencel and mohair locks.

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September 5, 2012 · 4:17 pm

Neighbourhood dyeplants.. and the odd sock

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I have finally finished a few pairs of socks that I’ve been carrying around for weeks…  these were dyed with black beans (the blue yarn) and purple carrots (the greyer yarn).  I gave them random cables and I like the effect.  Happily, so does the recipient!

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Today I went round to visit my all time favourite neighbourhood dye plant.  I lived in the street this tree grows in for years, and I adopted the tree under a council programme–not that this made me any more fond of it than I already was.  I have had rust through to burgundy colours on wool from the leaves and bark of this tree.  Over the last year or two I have propagated native plants to grown under it (saltbush, mostly), planted them and mulched the tree to keep the weeds down.  My Dad even got in on this, offering me seedlings and cuttings from his garden and collecting saltbush seed for me.  I was surprised to discover that saltbush was so easy to propagate from seed when the weather was warm.  Dad seemed to take it for granted I would be able to do this! I have about 50 more little plants that have stayed tiny all winter but will soon spring into growth ready to be planted around my suburb.

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I’ve been weeding around this tree for years in an effort to stop the council spraying poison into the neighbourhood.  I’ve been collecting rubbish from round the neighbourhood, and especially this tree, too.  I like this tree a lot.  Piping shrikes nested in it several years running.  Kookaburras sometimes sit in it and laugh.  Little birds come through it often, and white ants have unfortunately made homes here too.  Someone has put a bird box in it in the last year, but I haven’t seen an occupant yet.

Anyways, today I weeded, cleared rubbish and then applied bunting.  The Royal Show starts in a day or two and people will park in the streets all round this tree and walk through the patch we have been busy revegetating to get to their cars after dark.  In the past,  I have occasionally been dispirited to have quite a few of my little saltbushes pulled out by the roots or casually squashed as people pass through and plant guards thrown away.  I thought bunting might at least cut down on accidental damage.

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Over the time I’ve been working on growing things under this tree (and collecting bark and leaves!) people passing by have gone from quizzical to interested to pulling over in their cars or stopping with their dogs to thank me.  I think as the plants grow larger it is more obvious what I am doing and how lovely this otherwise weedy patch could be.  My friends have come along on mulch applying and watering missions, too.  It’s a blustery day, so I hope the bunting will make it!  The show runs over two weeks.  Here’s hoping most of the smaller plants make it to the end.  A cyclist came past while I was working, nodded and told me he thought the bunting was a good idea.  At least until the show is over, I’m thinking.

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