Category: Plant Dyeing

Solar preparations

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Summer being what it is this year (sweater weather – ooops, I said it again) and my plastic greenhouse falling apart from exposure (let’s just say I don’t need to air it out when it’s sunny OR water my plants, that all happens naturally), I’m going to see if our kitchen window gets hot enough for some solar dyeing experiments. A south window would be better, but the cats use those and they’re not very particular about what they shove out of the way. So east it is. Here’s a couple of pix of my preparations:

  • Anthemis tinctoria getting ready for some mulberry silk top. Just poured some boiling water in and left it for a few days.
  • A couple of small cotton placemat thingies? that I scoured and wadded up with oak leaves in one jar, sumac leaves in the other, some of the famous Dorset on top. Mainly for the tannin, I expect to be overdyeing with something after. Possibly solar dyeing with the last coreopsis in the freezer.
  • Hypericum in vodka – just for laughs. I can’t find enough to make a serious dyebath from these, I’ll have to get seeds next year.
  • Some Suffolk fleece stuffed into leftover acid dye mixes. Let’s see if it will exhaust without steaming!

Last year I scraped off a teeny amount of lichen from some dead trees. Thinking it might be the parmawossname saxatilis? that yields blue which then sometimes turns to pink when exposed to sunlight. Soaked it in ammonia and it looked pretty brown for a long time until I forgot about it. It’s been sitting in the greenhouse all winter, until I found the bucket again yesterday. Inside was a clear blue liquid (much like that blue toilet water you see someplaces) and the plant matter just some black fluff at the bottom. In went some fleece and the day after it looked like this:

I have no idea if this is lichen dyed or ammonia dyed… It doesn’t turn pink in the sun anyway or change when soaked in vinegar.

I have further plans for cold dyeing:

  • Privet berries and elderberries
  • Alder cones (or are they actually catkins?)
  • Perhaps madder?
  • Anything interesting that I come upon that can be stuffed into a jar basically. Avocado pits or skins are candidates.
  • Onion peels

I’ve been pondering whether the jars would get hotter and the colours preserved better in coloured jars. Which colour would work best I wonder, green, red, black? One could cover the glass jars in coloured cellophane, that would make it easy to check on the progress.

This is an excellent blog on the subject that someone posted on Ravelry.

Dre has had a lot of scientific thoughts on the subject

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Solfarvning 1

Min plan omkring solfarvning – dvs. koldt vand som sÃ¥ blot opvarmes via solen i xx dage eller uger istedet for at koge planter og uld – holder ikke helt stik pga vores meget kolde sommer OG fordi mit Lidl plastdrivhus er ved at falde fra hinanden, betrækket kan simpelthen ikke holde til vind og vejr, sÃ¥ alle de smÃ¥ “ruder” er ved at falde ud. Dvs. jeg ikke kan fÃ¥ temperaturen i mine farveglas op, pÃ¥ den anden side behøver jeg hverken luft ud derinde eller vande planter, det klarer naturen selv….

Men nu prøver jeg alligevel et par bøtter i køkkenvinduet, noget silke, noget Dorset, et par bomuldsblondepynteting proppet i vand med egeblade som en slags bejdsning, perikumn i vodka, fordi jeg ikke har fundet blomster nok til at farve en ordentlig mængde uld med, men noget skulle der ske. Og så et par bøtter med syrefarverester. Enten er varmen nok på sigt til at klare vandet = farven sidder på ulden, eller også damper jeg det til sidst hvis det ikke virker. På den måde regner jeg med efterhånden at få regnbuefarvet en del af den Suffolkham som jeg fik gratis hos min høleverandør.

De der 40 + grader man kan få i et drivhus kommer jeg nok ikke op på selvom sylteglassene måske nok i sig selv gør lidt. Det gule glas med gåseurt var i hvert fald håndlunt da jeg mærkede efter, men ikke så varmt at mit termometer kunne vise noget.

Woad seed dyeing

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Woad generates about a ton of seeds per plant, I harvested a whole sack, forgot about it, they moulded and I went out and got another batch to boil directly for trying to dye with as instructed in “Wild Color” by Jenny Dean.

The dyebath was dark, dark and looked suspiciously like an actual woad dye bath, so I couldn’t resist trying a small portion out treating it as such. Alkaline, whisking, spectralite etc. Result:

To the rest, dark brown soup, I added some unmordanted fleece (yeees, more of that Dorset), which after a good heating up looks like this: Continue reading “Woad seed dyeing” →

Eco friendly dyeing

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At the moment when I plant dye I use the old recipes, the usual metal based mordants etc. to get some experience under my wings. But just because it’s done with plants, all these chemicals doesn’t also make it natural. “Wear a mask as you measure up the powder, gloves too”. In fact chrome, used in many recipes, is illegal here now for regular use, you can’t buy it. It can in fact alter your DNA!

So to go all the way, I’d like to switch to natural mordants when possible (meaning that of course I’d still like to get the range of colours I’ve been discovering), so I’ll be doing a bit of research on that. I know India Flint does it, her book Eco Colour is very inspiring. The other day a fellow blogger introduced me to another one written specifically about using Native American plants and methods rather than Continue reading “Eco friendly dyeing” →

Dyer’s chamomile – Anthemis tinctoria – FarvegÃ¥seurt

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first skeinsCame by my overgrown vegetable garden the other day and discovered the Anthemis in full bloom. Anticipating rain I got a bowl and nicked off all the heads.

So this year I’ll be dyeing with the heads and the leaves separately to see how that goes. First batch ended up getting boiled, and this doesn’t seem to ruin the colour like madder or weld, so I’ve just continued doing that as I forget to watch the kettle anyway. I will try a solar dyed batch just for “science”, though. The leaves were boiled as well.

I ended up with a total of 2000 g of flower heads over several harvests, most have been set out to dry for winter projects. Or to be sold in small dye kits if anyone is interested!

There is an inceredible amount of dyestuff in the flowers, after straining I poured the extra water for the dyebath over the sieve with the boiled flowers and strong yellow just kept coming out of them. So there’s a great opportunity for many shades of yellow here depending on how much wool you put in or using the dyebath several times. You might even boil the flowers several times and combine the results in a bigger dyepot.

Click for more pix and to Continue reading “Dyer’s chamomile – Anthemis tinctoria – FarvegÃ¥seurt” →

Colourfastness

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I haven’t been doing anything with my plant dyed yarns from last year, they’ve been sitting snug in a box and I thought it was time to pull them all out and have a look at the colours. How much did they fade? I’d already determined that wool dyed with berries and vegetables were bleached to white or beige in sunlight or when washed with laundry detergent. But what about the “real” dye plants? They’ve been in a white plastic container with clear lid, so indirect daylight, not dark, not sunny..

I’d mainly dyed 30-35 g skeins to stretch my supply while I was still playing around, not dyeing for a specific project. I think they’d make a great beeskeeper’s quilt or something similar to that. Anwyay, here they are, all of them, in a big pile (not so big actually, in my head it seems like I’d done a lot more skeins? Especially I had this idea that I was drowning in yellows).

Conclusion is that most of the skeins look pretty much like they did a year ago. How they’ll look after strong daylight and in use I’ll have to wait to find out until I begin knitting with them or take the time to make a proper test with cardboard strips and the lot.

I use Spectralite when doing woad and indigo, no urine vats for me, sorry. I just don’t find it very charming to wear clothes smelling of wee. I’vealso tried cold dyeing with Japanese indigo, instructions in English and in Danish.

List of plants I tried in 2011:

Birch leaves – birkeblade
Apple leaves – æbleblade
Dandelion flowers – mælkebøtteblomster
Weld – Reseda luteola – farve-vau
Coreopsis tinctoria – skønhedsøje
Horsetail – Equisetum arvense – agerpadderok
Japanese Indigo – japansk indigo
Woad – Isatis tinctoria – farve-vaid
Lilac – syringa -  syren
Onion peels – løgskaller
Celandine – Chelidonium majus – svaleurt
Ragwort – Senecio jacobaea- engbrandbæger
Mugwort – Artemisia vulgaris – bynke
Madder – kraprod
French marigold – tagetes
Sumak soup (leaves, bark, flowers) – Hjortetak

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Billedet forestiller det garn jeg plantefarvede med sidste år. Det ser ud som om farverne holder ret godt, selvom de dog ikke har ligget i direkte sollys, som jo er den ultimative test. Jeg har farvet små 30 g bundter fordi jeg blot ville eksperimentere så meget som muligt og ikke havde nogen deciderede strikkeprojekter planlagt, men jeg tænker at man kunne lave et fint slumretæppe af en art, dem kan man ikke få nok af i et land som vores!

En del af plantefarvningens kunst er jo at vide, hvor holdbare farverne er, selvom det også er sjovt at blive overrasket af nye resultater. Naturens farver jo næsten altid flotte lige meget hvad man gør!

Det garn jeg farvede med bær og grønsager er falmet betydeligt under samme forhold, men det vidste jeg jo godt, det var stadig sjovt at prøve. Det bruger jeg nok til grydelapper eller lign. som jo alligevel bliver ødelagt ret hurtigt. Eller også farver jeg ovenpå, måske der sidder rester af noget i garnet der virker som en art bejse og får indflydelse på næste farvelag?!
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