Oak leaves

7. October 2013 PiaPå dansk

Green leaves picked September 11th. Dried some, frozen some, to dye on silk, cotton and a sample strip wool only. The rest dyed immediately. Test also early summer leaves 2014 as well as brown self-dried.

4:1 fresh, 2:1 dry – oak galls 2% if colour not strong.

Those are my notes in short form. 😉 What that means is, I’ve dyed some wool 4:1 ratio, with and without premordant, and same with an iron afterbath. Then I did it again with oak galls in there too. You don’t quite see it in the photo below, but the dark skeins are actually a deep, chocolate brown, and the ones with iron minus oak galls are greenish.

The oak galls don’t appear to do much to the oak colour itself, it works with the iron. Don’t leave your yarn in there too long unless you are aiming for black!!! Half an hour the old books say. First dye for an hour, add iron, simmer another half.

Technically people use oak to get grey, a wonderful smoky/silver shade. I got all sorts of brown and grey shades, but not that one!

So I’ve saved a few leaves in the freezer as well as dried some to test later. Perhaps the grey is more easily obtained on cotton?

Then I had a stroke of genious if I may say so. Especially since I had not bothered to actually check what other people do, I just followed the book. What if I did NOT dye the yarn first, but plunked it into the iron/oakgall/leaf bath when it was squeaky clean?!

But I’m kinda glad I did follow instructions first, or I would never have gotten all those other shades. Of course now I’m wondering what happens if you just use iron and oak galls…..

Oh – and if you rinse and rinse and the water still comes out black as night – make sure you don’t have a piece of oak gall trapped in your fiber. 😉

Egeblade

De gamle bøger siger: egeblade vægt 4:1 friske, 2:1 tørrede. 2% galæble for at få mørkere farve.

Så det prøvede jeg. Man skal passe på ikke at lade det ligge i gryden for længe efter tilsat jern, med mindre man går efter sort, en halv time er vist passende.

Galæblerne gjorde ikke rigtig noget ved selve farven, de virker først sammen med jern, her var der en tydelig forskel på de “grå” nuancer jeg fik. Måske de flotte sølvgrå jeg har set, har været på bomuld? Indtil det faldt mig ind at IKKE gøre som i bogen, nemlig farve i blade først, og så putte jern i til sidst. Og det virkede. Men jeg er da ret glad for, at jeg ikke checkede hvordan andre gør, for så havde jeg jo aldrig fået alle de fine brune!

Jeg farvede både ubejdset (det er det, de fleste bruger) samt alun- og kobberbejdset, her var også klar forskel, så man kan let skabe sig en gradueret skala til brug ved flerfarvearbejde.

Motley crew

10. September 2013 PiaPå dansk

I’ve been modifying and dyeing a few skeins here and there which I can’t be bothered posting separately.

Lady’s mantle with iron. Since the two hanks I did earlier were so similar, I thought I might as well modify one, I can’t remember why I didn’t do so immediately, but here it is.

Watercolour solution, cold dyed. Tagetes and coreopsis. What I did after I was done testing was pop a hank of yarn into each jar with more iron, and it was so strong that they took up a dark colour instantly! No heat, just left them in there for a bit. Some rinsed out, but they’re still a lot different from my other yarns.

Another batch of reeds, this time only alum mordanted, no CoT, and from the freezer to see if that ruined the plants. Complete succes, so having an abundance of this shade I overdyed some with woad.

Blandet landhandel

Lidt blandede fed, fra toppen er det Løvefod puttet i jernblanding, coreopsis og tagetes akvarelfarve tilsat jern og et forsøg med frosne tagrør og derefter vaid. Helt nederst alle dagens modeller linet op til fotosession.

Sweater SAL 3

4. February 2013 PiaAcid Dyeing

It’s knitweek at the cottage, so I finally managed to assemble my handspun sweater. Just have to weave in all the ends etc on this thing. I’m no grand knitwear designer, but it’s warm. I knit a double collar with silk to protect my dainty neck from scratchies.

Now for the second Shetland project, for which I need to dye more wool first, then spin.

Spindeforenings SAL del 3

Fiks og færdig pånær et par løse ender – ikke så køn, men varm, med silke i halsen for at beskytte mit sarte skind.

Black hollyhock 1

7. January 2013 PiaPå dansk

Time to dye! Well, that’s how I felt on more than one level when I woke up on the morning of new year’s eve, massive headache and eating seemed like a waste of time. So I decided I needed a bit of a treat while husband kindly mucked my horse boxes in the rain and wind.

So I whipped out a bag of hollyhock flowers, took a look at the rain water horse trough and decided it looked clean and fresh enough for boiling some plant in.

Normally flowers don’t really give their colours up to wool, but hollyhock is one of the exceptions, in fact I simmered them twice in fresh water because they seemed to give A LOT of dye when I tried them on my cloths and paperprints. And the soup sure looks promising!

I didn’t have any mordanted yarns beside the usual alum+CoT, so I decided to try the pH test for variation and leave other experiments for later. I have two more bags of 100 g each. I left the soup to steep over night since I had “unfortunately” agreed to invite company for dinner. 😉 The pH test can be conducted two ways, in the dye pot or as an afterdip. According to the books, hollyhock generally reacts well to modifiers and mordants, so I’ll need to do iron and tin as well at some point.

For this lot I started with 4 skeins. One had a vinegar bath after, one had an alkaline bath and the last two were left to soak in the bath for 3 days, one mordanted, one not. Then one dipped in iron rainwater and one in tap water. I rather think I’ll have to set up a full experiment someday with every single combination that I can think of!

I used a 1:1 dry flowers to yarn. And after I’d begun to simmer the flowers I realised that with the Dyer’s chamomile 100g of flowers is actually 400 g of fresh flowers, so using a whole bag for my intended 100 g would probably be a bit over the top. So I thought I’d be doing batches of ~100 g until I got bored or ran out of yarn, but in the end the soup was too smelly and the results too bland, so I just chucked it.

First impressions: Blah. In fact all 4 skeins looked the same beigey purple. Now, was that due to soaking them in tap water before putting them in the dye (I’d forgotten to soak and just went for a quick dip, drops of dye in the tap water turned grey) or have the flowers been simmered at too high temps?

hhock02 — top to bottom: vinegar, iron, hard water

Weather forecast says grey, grey, grey, so better pix will have to wait if necessary.

Dye pH: 6. Vinegar afterdip did, well, a teeny bit towards a heather tint. Iron dip a slightly browner beige and the hard water rinse a slightly greyer beige…

Then lo and behold what happens when you dip in water with a teeny glug of ammonia. I LURVE that green! (well, even better when wet and fresh) In fact if the Hollyhocks don’t prove good for anything else, I’ll surely use this strategy again.

Next up will be an unsimmered test. It’s going to live here, mimicking a solar dye because we don’t get up at night to keep the fire going (this is the only heating source we use in the house). So it will be warm/cold alternately just like outside in summer.

hhock04 — 5 minutes into the process, icy cold rain water.

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Sorte stokroser

Første forsøg med stokroser gik ikke så godt (ok, andet forsøg, første gang var jo på noget stof og papir, hvilket gav meget kraftige farver!). Det blev sådan beigegråt med kun meget lille forskel på efterbade med eddike, jern og hårdt vand. Til gengæld blev det med en lille glug salmiak en vældig fin grøn, så det skal jeg arbejde lidt med på et tidspunkt!

Jeg ved ikke om de blev kogt for meget, eller hvad der skete, for jeg brugte rigeligt med plantemateriale, jeg glemte lige i forbifarten at blomsterne jo var tørret og det giver ved jeg ved gåseurt et forhold på 1:4 i vægt i forhold til friske…

Jeg tester lige en koldfarvning, som jeg sætter et stykke tid på brændeovnen, den er varm om dagen og kold om natten, ligesom en god dansk sommer. Måske blomsterne bedre kan lide den behandling.