Natural dyeing with fennel | gather and grow.
Last year I was inspired to sow bronze fennel, even though I thought I was through with food dyeing. Rita Buchanan also mentions it in her book. This year my plants are really growing, so I decided to give it a go. One wool skein, two silk, all alum mordanted.
I’m having severe painting withdrawal symptoms (ie temper tantrums, surliness, self pity and alround discomfort), but I’m also too knackered to do anything really involved today. Napping a lot sounds fascinating! I’m only halfway through my house&garden chores, so it will perhaps be at least a week before I pick up my brushes again, depending on when I wake up from this fatigue, finish the chores, wake up from the next fatigue, yadda yadda more chores having arrived. 😉 I have taken some time this weekend to play a bit with my old macro lens and flowers, that helps in soothing my nerves and itchy fingers.
Today’s program got cut down to one physical assignment, needing perfect weather which will end tomorrow, and then I thought I could do little short sessions on my wardrobe situation. Not all necessarily, just a suggestion, mind.
All done in little increments, such as:
Anyway, on to my latest modification. Remember my orange sweater? While I love the pattern, I never really loved the sweater. I’d been too enthusiastic with my sleeve decreases AND it turned out the yarn is crazy itchy on the body. It’s cotton/alpaca and you’d never guess just touching it, on the contrary. And then there’s the colour. It just feels like an orange version of beige on me, not flattering. So all in all, I didn’t use it much.
So first I decided to frog the sleeves. Yes, I could have knit them again, wider, but I’m not in the mood, and it really looks best with nothing under = crazy itchy.
And now it’s a vest, and it’s had a large pot of tea. I’m always cold, but too many layers of sleeves really get in the way when you’re working with either water or paint. What do you think? The onion peels were a stupid idea since the vest isn’t mordanted, in fact the tea didn’t take either except to activate the iron afterbath. I guess I can always add blue acid dye at some point, or woad. Or green, since it’s already khaki. Pocket cam has horrible colour balance fwiw.
It may be an ongoing theme however, this remodelling of old clothes! Btw I didn’t have to worry about the dress I wanted to change for a smaller size coming out too small, it appears the whole return package (5 items) has gone missing and never reached the company. So much for buying cheap stuff when you can’t get your money back. That’ll teach me. Or not, possibly. Now that I think about it, we haven’t had any mail this week either. Odd. I’m waiting for a very special package.
It’s 4 pm and I’ve at least done the napping and the PC part of my list! No dog walk I think. Picked the rhubarbs earlier, now I’ll consider cutting them up and throw them in a pot with a pod. And I’m going to see if I can cut, zigzag and clear the table before bedtime. At least when I’m this poorly there is a greater chance of painting because I have to back off completely on the harder work for a while. My hands need a bit of mending too! More on the wardrobe mods at a later date if anyone is interested. I’ll try to get a photo of the blue holey on me, so you can help me decide on lengths?
Birdie mentioned whether I’d sell the plant dyed yarns I’m not using (especially if they were fabrics). Raquel always wants to make scarves from it. 😉 My reply was, that until now I’ve used cheap, scruffy wool in very small skeins, so not very interesting for knitting at least, and I’m not really sure anyone would want it if they saw felt it in person.
Since I’m changing directions slightly both with my dyeing and yarn crafting, I thought it would be fun to do a survey, not because I expect any who reply to buy anything, but to help me choose materials. For myself mainly, but yes, if I could hand over an unwanted skein now and again in return for the ability to buy a couple of new ones to modify, that would be awesome. Sometimes I have an idea but abandon it halfway not because I hate the result, I just moved on quicker than my production pace.
I’d like to do more silks – mostly yarn, since fabric is expensive, so probably small quantities for needlework. Which yarn weights and skein lengths do you stitchery folks prefer? Do you use wool, and then which type? Chances are, you can teach me which threads I’d like to use myself…
I’m also probably going to experiment with dyeing wool fabric. Either handwoven or what I find. There will be fabric ends leftover from my weaving of all sorts. Do people look for small amounts of handwoven for quilting or textile “paintings” like some use handspun and handdyed mini-skeins? Would be über cool to swap or see a bit of my stuff used in someone elses stuff!
In which case, what types of fabric do you look for, when you look?
Cellulose fibers such as cotton and linen are out of my league now. They are difficult to dye. I do not have the energy to go into it this year, or ever. It doesn’t feel important when I know I can make protein fibers shine.
I have considered dyeing larger quantities of some nice knitting yarn, because I had various requests. Problem is, people talk but they don’t pay up front and I can’t afford to stock up on many kilos of nice yarn. If I have to spin it myself I’m not going to part with it for “a friendly price”! And I’m not really looking to set up an actual shop for small items that demand too much time compared to their price. At least not at my current energy level.
So anyway, while I’m trying out this tapestry/artistic weaving thing with ideas of some embroidery on top or meshed in specialty yarns, searching for a path among different types of yarns than I’m used to, I basically would like to hear what everybody else out there likes for various purposes. I hope to narrow down my spinning and weaving baseline staple to a few things that I use 80-90% of the time rather than have 300 g of every fiber under the sun.
I also don’t know yet what I’m going to “major” in. Will it be weaving or making/designing yarn? Or is textiles simply my grounding exercise that keeps the more brainy creativities alive, such as photo(shopping), writing – and what about the painting? I feel like I’m trying various things out, like different semesters in an education, and eventually perhaps I’ll fall deeper into one than the others. Which means leftovers from the activities that end up on the back shelf.
Well, that plant dye week, that just hasn’t happened yet. But I’m going to slowly start up the season by actually finishing some of my old halfdone posts from last year and see if that may get me going. At the very least, they’ll be out of my hair!
I’d read about saving the dyebath and use it once a week, first time I dyed with this plant. But couldn’t quite contain myself and did only 3-4 day intervals. This time I waited 3 weeks before dyeing another hank and had another surprise. Much stronger, much warmer in tone. The next one, 10 days later seemed pretty weak, so although the dyebath looked dark, I haven’t done any more.
But I think it’s interesting that it does not exhaust in the same way most plants do, but keep looking much the same after the first. I still have the jar with the leftover dyebath btw! It looks dark brown by now, who knows what’s growing in there! 😀
20th August & 1st September
I wrote last time that I wanted to do one with reeds, but although I had plenty of dye, I simply forgot. Instead one of them went in the Japanese indigo, with the intention of adding #3 to the woad, which I also forgot, having quite a handful of other yellows to try in there. Here they all are in their proper order #1 on the left:
Recently I read in an older book, that another knapweed “Centaurea scabiosa” is a better dye plant. She uses the leaves, not the flowers! Would be interesting to find and test. In fact, I didn’t know there was more than one!
So, googling this one, I’ve come to realise, that these flowers from my garden are also a type of knapweed (Centaurea montana?). Time to investigate!!! And definitely try out the leaves this year…. It has faithfully reproduced itself every year no matter how weedy or crowded that bed is, so I have high hopes for gathering seeds in case it’s good to dye, they should germinate easily in other locations too.
Siden jeg sidst havde gang i gryden, ventede jeg denne gang 3 uger inden jeg farvede igen, og pudsigt nok blev farven meget kraftigere igen og en del varmere i forhold til før. Jeg glemte både at putte et fed ned til tagrørene og til vaiden, det må blive en anden gang. Men det er pudsigt som farvebadet bare bliver ved og ved, hvor andre ret hurtigt bliver trætte.
Så læste jeg pludselig i en farvebog af Esther Nielsen, at STOR knopurt “Centaurea scabiosa” er den hun bruger, og ikke blomsterne men bladene. Da jeg så googlede for billeder, opdagede jeg at ovenstående blomster i min have nok også er en art knopurt (Centaurea montana), så nu skal der researches, og bladene ryger nok også i en gryde i år!!
There have been comments about my use of freezer space 😉 so I thought I’d get at least one experiment done “for the books” after I’d seen these puffs in the December sun.
I’d saved a guesstimate of 500 g of heads, no leaves. Enter 25 g of wool, 3 silk, 30 cotton previously dye fail with iron and weld, thought it would be interesting with the high dye ratio (it wasn’t). Careful not to boil and leave it as long as last time. Steeped overnight:
Things to ponder:
What would the same dye ratio look like with fresh plants? I could have put more into this pot to exhaust the bath, as I’m sure there’s plenty left, but I didn’t have the heart to. I have so many yellow skeins and I just don’t use that colour very much.
Is it my temperature or the species of Goldenrod that gives me the bronze colours rather than bright yellow? (as seen elsewhere)
