Random thoughts of a fiber enthusiast - mostly fiber related, sometimes coherent

Category: Dye Page 1 of 14

Natural Dye Workshop

We had a Natural Dye Workshop with Anni Redding in September. It’s taken me this long to blog about it because I was really disappointed with the results. It didn’t quite turn out the way I had hoped.

Anni was great, but there were other issues that came up that resulted in less my vision of what I would end up with. Darned expectations!

Anni showed us some of the colors she was able to create using natural dyes.

naturaldyecolorwheelstick

Gorgeous color wheel and color sticks. It was really inspiring to see the range of colors that she was able to get.

Our guild worked extensively with our indigo dye pot and were happy with the range of blues we were able to get out of it. It is a vigorous and very forgiving pot that has been going on for years and years. Phyllis also had a madder patch that we harvest annually and play with.

We wanted to focus on a strong yellow and a blue red to round out our color pallette. After talking with Anni, we settled on Osage Orange and Cochineal. We will have 3 dye baths of each color in light, medium, and dark.

We spent August preparing our fiber by simmering them in a 10% solution of alum. (10% by weight of fiber – WOF) We tagged the fiber by the dye bath we wanted them in.

osageorange

My first disappointment came with the Osage Orange bath. One person in the class went off the reservation and wanted to play with other mordants — specifically tin on some cotton handkerchiefs. When that went into the pot, it immediately dulled the dye bath. Instead of a bright yellow, it greyed out the bath when the tin leached out of the cotton into the dye bath.

Lesson learned. If you use different mordants, use different dye baths for each mordant. This may not be an issue if you are a solo dyer since you will likely only do one mordant at a time. In a class environment, keep it controlled and follow the instructor’s plans exactly. If you want to play, play with the after bath.

cochineal

After we finished with the cochineal, Anni showed us Saxon Blue — a different way of using indigo than the way we had been using it. Saxon Blue can be dyed like regular chemical dyes. The indigo is already in a pre-reduced form. You can just add the concentrate into a pot of hot water and it is immediately ready to use.

And here comes my second disappointment. I had squares that I had planned to overdye with our indigo bath at a future date. They were grouped with the primary color groups that I had planned for Osage Orange and Cochineal.

If I had proceeded as I originally planned, I would have washed the samples and retagged them for the indigo pot. Since I didn’t have tags and string during the workshop, I just dipped a square from each bundle into the Saxon Blue baths. I wasn’t careful enough and accidentally splashed color onto other squares.

Nevertheless, I continued. It would just add character to the finished squares.

Now, for the last disappointment. It was the Saxon Blue again. The blue took forever to rinse. I mean forever!

Someone rinsed at the workshop…and rinsed…and rinsed…

So I decided to let the squares cure for several weeks before washing them. Even 2-3 weeks later, the blue still bled. I washed the squares in about 4-5 lukewarm baths with synthropol. It was still bleeding when I finally gave up. And because the were still bundled together, the blue attached themselves to my gorgeous reds and yellows that were in the same bath.

Again, my fault. I should have taken the time to separate the bundles into specific dye groups to prevent just this type of problem. But I was lazy.

natdyesquares

In the post workshop euphoria, I purchased the nasty chemicals and safety equipment to make my on Saxon Blue stock. However, I am now so discouraged, I don’t know when/if I will make up the stock.

More on Indigo

If you go back and look at the color chart I posted yesterday, my favorite green is the indigo overdyed with osage orange. The result is a very clear green (left stripe, second square from the bottom in each strip) compared to the osage orange overdyed with indigo (top left square in each strip).

Now, this next bit is hearsay … I’ve heard it in some natural dye classes but have not been able to confirm this from internet nor book research (from my personal natural dye library of 4-5 books). Please take this with a grain of salt and drop me a note with references if you have more information one way or the other.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to apply the indigo first, osage orange second at this weekend’s workshop. Indigo doesn’t bond to the fiber the same way that typical natural dye does. The indigo pigment actually nestles into the fiber rather than chemically bonds to the fiber. This is why your jeans, if truly indigo dyed, will fade in creases. That is where the pigment rubs off.

Anyway, what this means is that indigo can be released again in another dye pot, thus alter the dye pot for everyone else in the class. We were advised not to try this unless it is at the very end of the workshop. However, that means the dye may be exhausted and I wouldn’t be able to get accurate medium on medium dye strength.

I might try this myself at home to see what the color variations might be with indigo last vs. indigo first.

Glazing

glazing

Next weekend, I will be taking a workshop on natural dyes with Anni Redding. She will show us dyes using cochineal and osage orange in 3 different depths of shade: light, medium and dark. I plan to dye the squares I’ve woven with the Zoom Loom a while back.

Since I plan to overdye some of the samples, if time allows, I wanted to get an idea of what the colors might look like.

Since overdying is similar to glazing technique with watercolors, I pulled out 3 colors that are close to the cochineal (quinacridone magenta), osage orange (nickel azo yellow), and indigo (phthalo blue – green shade). I painted 3 strips in varying depths of shade and glazed over them with additional colors.

Bottom up:

  • 1st row/square: colors as is
  • 2nd set of 3 rows/squares: glazed with yellow first, then red over 2, then blue over last
  • 3rd set of 3 rows/squares: glazed over with red first, then red over 2, then blue over last

I pooped out over the darkest shade so they are not correct, but you get the idea. The order in which the glaze is applied does make a difference to the colors.

Anyway, fun coloring exercise. Let’s see how they turn out with dyes.

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