The wool tree

1. May 2013 PiaFarm Life

You’ve probably seen my pix of yarn drying in the sumac tree in the front garden, it’s so easy to use, good branches. Today it’s really been put to work! It’s my montly headache day, but I felt perky enough to do some “dumb work” as we call it here.

On Sunday I put out the rest of my Gotland fleeces to soak in a tub before scouring, today they are promising a quiet sunny day so I filled my carrot bags and hung them up to drip dry the dirty water before getting the soapy baths ready.

I’ve also started mordanting my tapestry yarn, I’m going to keep a “regular” batch as well as some of the other forms of mordanting I’ve been contemplating.

Some cotton yarn that has been scoured, waiting for the next step.

And some small test skeins for a test tapestry. I had a bunch of purples and blues already from a colour blending test session, I wanted some black as well and as an afterthought did some greens and yellows on some strands that had already been cut for more testing which never happened. Only plan is to use a lot of white (remember my dream?) and then wing it row by row. Will probably end up needing more black. 😉

wensley01 — Next batch of fleece soaking: Wensleydale

garden01 — A tiny bit of colour is finally happening outside

Uldtræ

Månedens hovedpinedag i dag, men ikke værre end at jeg får lavet lidt “dum i arbejde”. Vinde garn op, binde snore på, bejse uldgarn og vaske bomuld i soda, så det hele er klart til plantefarvning. Puh, det er kedeligt, men det skal jo gøres hvis man vil have lov til at lege.

Uldtørretræet blev også lige læsset med gulerodssække med gotlandsham, som har ligget i blød siden i søndags, det kan lige få lov at dryppe det snavsede vand af inden det skal i et varmt sæbebad.

Og så smed jeg for sjov et par garnstumper i syrefarve, til evt. brug i mit nye eksperiment gobelinvævning. Har nogen andre stumper fra testfarvning jeg også kan bruge bare til at øve mig med.

Get your pots and jars ready

21. April 2013 PiaPå dansk

Corn Marigold / Glebionis segetum / gul okseøje

Soon the plant dyeing season will be upon us, so it’s time to find yarns and get them mordanted (I always do this ahead of time and then just keep the labelled skeins on hand). This year I’ll be working with more natural mordants such as sea water, tannins, soy and rhubarb leaves.

I’m looking for cheap silk yarns and/or fabrics that I can cut into swatches to add to my sample library. As well as cotton.

I’m also going to help myself to some structure by creating a section for it here on the blog with an easy access plant list of which I’ve done and how, update my tags and some other stuff I’ve been thinking about, hoping that it might prove useful for other people as well. I have a few science experiments in mind that might interest you…

I take requests for topics! Who knows, maybe my library contains items I haven’t even thought about mentioning yet. But please be patient, I won’t be finishing this off in a day or two. In fact I’m feeling a bout of blog fatigue coming on, so we’ll see how it goes!

Det er ved at være tid til plantefarvning lige om snart – mon der kommer nye vaidplanter? Så det er nu man skal i gang med at samle garn, få det bejset osv. så det er klar hvis man lige skulle få lyst til at smide noget i gryden! I år har jeg tænkt mig at lege med naturlige bejser som havvand, rabarberblade, garvesyre og soyamælk i stedet for eller sammen med metalbejserne.

Så jeg er på jagt efter bomuld og silke, som garn eller stofrester jeg kan bruge til at lave prøver med. Gerne billigt…

For at hjælpe mig selv til at holde struktur på tingene, og måske være en hjælp til andre, går jeg i gang med at udvide plantefarvningssektionen her på bloggen med lister, opskrifter, links, tips og andet. Jeg tager også imod forslag til emner, måske ved jeg noget, som jeg bare ikke har tænkt på at skrive om endnu?

Og jeg vil gøre mit bedste for at også opdatere det hele på dansk. Det kommer nok lidt i bidder hen ad vejen, så kig forbi i ny og næ.

Hollyhock 3

23. January 2013 PiaPå dansk

This post will be a collection of my last experiments this time round. Nothing special, just to wrap it up as, well as being the only kind of documentation I seem motivated to do for my dyeing…

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I took the very acid jar, strained the flowers, crammed the jar with fleece undtil it was all soaked up, then I filled the jar until it was full and topped it up with the “no longer alkaline” liquid from the blue skein. Since that was already done from exhausts, there was not much juice left, but I wanted to see if I could create a “rainbow” jar or if it would all eventually intermingle to one shade. And this did indeed happen. On the last night the jar was still variegated in looks, red, purple, brown, but in the morning when I wanted to empty it, all purple. The biggest surprise came when I put half of it into ammonia. It didn’t change AT ALL!? No green. WTF? So despite having measured the water to pH 10, I held my breath and added another glug of ammonia. And got grey…. Leaves me wondering if the tin mordant makes the purple more stable?

Then I put the very sour flowers from above into a new jar and topped with rain water to see how much juice they had left. Start pH 3 just from the acid in the soaked flowers. Put it on stove shelf, they did indeed contain more dyestuff. pH 3 while hot. Added too much fleece so topped with rainwater, pH 4, very pale pink. Back on the shelf because I had trouble with the set below and wanted to heat test the fleece in dye, even a weak one, before adding the rest of the fleece to a new bath in the canner.

As I mentioned in connection with the pink skein, the heat in itself seems to alter the dye to purple despite the pH. When it was done, it ended up silver grey and it’s the first time I’ve seen a plant dyebath exhause completely. Absolutely clear water left when I took the fleece out! The flowers themselves were also done for, 1st image below is flowers after the last extraction.

* * *

The Teaser jars: I emptied them after 3 days instead of weeks, as it looked like they were as dark as they could get and just beginning to alter their shade. Turns out, the fleece wasn’t really taking the dye. Whether due to my previously unresolved issues with Dorset or the cold method, hard to tell since no yarn was in there with it. I put it back.

Wait 10 days, still in the window, temps 15-20 C. Very dark liquid, fleece rinsing out nearly white. Mould on top of the rainwater jar, the vinegar jar keeping fine. Time for a quickie on the shelf. That helped, so while cold water does extract the dyestuff, I don’t seem able to make the wool take it at low temps. Also, the flowers didn’t exhaust, they were still dark as ever. (more water might be the solution to that)

They were so close in colour at the end, even though one was in pure vinegar, that I poured some ammonia directly onto the rainwater batch as it was sitting in the sink, then immediately hosed it with water. And, well, green again, even though there was tin in there. So I still have no clue what happened with the other batch refusing!

* * *

I used a total of 150 g flowers for all experiments, 280 g yarn and 195 g fleece.

* * *

~~Polled Dorset. Scoured, dyed at pH 7, ammonia pH 9, vinegar pH 2. Iron afters for all. Mordant tin/alum/CoT. Temperature: 60.~~ Well, that was my plan for the remaining fleece. But then I suddenly couldn’t be bothered. So there. I still have some undyed Dorset. And no drumcarder. Spacebags? Fir cones? (yes) Madder? (yes)

– Hollyhock 1
– Hollyhock 2
– Hollyhock 2½

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Stokroser 3

Et par små resteprojekter med stokroserne på tin-bejset dorset uld, noget af det farvet “lunkent” på brændeovnen, noget forsøgt koldt i vindueskarmen, men selvom det sidste trækker farve ud af blomsterne, så sætter det sig ikke på ulden.

Jeg kunne ikke få den grønne farve frem denne gang, ved ikke om det evt. er tinnet der holder på det blå-lilla.

Hollyhock 2

13. January 2013 PiaPå dansk

My experiments with Hollyhock flowers continue. This time a “solar” dye technique, using variations of indoor temperatures to mimick summer.

Rainwater, vinegar, pH 4. 35 g yarn, 10 g dry flowers. Left on top of fireplace 2 days. I shook it up once in a while when taking photos of the progress. Shelf temp. 60-65 C when fired up, 40-45 C on the top of stove (where I let it remain), 15 C in the morning.

30 minutes – 3 hours – 24 hours

hhock09 — compared to first batch which have faded a bit while in the cupboard…

Same procedure, pH 6-7 (my strips are not super accurate) yielded pretty much the same shade, so I took the remains of the dyebath, put in ammonia until it was way up (11+, it takes only drops….), then dunked it for a minute. Thought I might as well compare it to the “boiled green”. There are some strands that had not as much dip as the rest, they turned blue. I left them as such, for science. 😉

Next, both exhausts mixed and upped to pH 8, 2 days on stove. As you change the pH the dyebath pretty much changes to the colour you’ll get on the yarn, how’s that for an indicator? I had fun adding ammonia to get green, then vinegar water to make it rosy again with the last bit of dyebath before I poured it out.

hhock17 — This skein is incredibly hard to photograph to the exact shade – as close as I got today in the snow.

flash photo – always a bit brighter that life…

As you can see however, once I took it out I didn’t quite get the steel blue (left jar below) or the baby blue of the strands on the previous skein, may have left it in there too long and it got too alkaline. A safer bet if you want sky blue may be to do a neutral 6-7 pH lavender then a dip in pH 8. Maybe it takes even less to turn it.

I think I’m going to have to try and get some dark red flowers and see if they give a more rosy warm shade. I thought the acid one would be, given the heather rosy tint I got on the first project with a vinegar afterdip – maybe afterdips are different, maybe if was the temperature? As you can see the dyebath starts out very pink, then to turn purple over time. Could be a completely cold dye procedure would be different yet again. Or maybe I need to push the acid lower than 4 if we have green on the opposite end, then blue, purple in the middle and ?

Join us next week in the quest for pink, 2 more jars in this series still cooking… I’m thinking that perhaps the lavender skein was closer to neutral pH, since it was identical to the neutral one, so I’ll have to conduct another test with the exhaust from the red jar below. Meaning, I need to mordant more yarn to get reliable comparisons, meaning y’all need to wait for a bit.

In the meantime, I’ve also mordanted the rest of my Dorset fleeces in tin/alum/CoT, about 650 g. So look out for “Hollyhock 3”. Or possibly 4.

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Stokroser 2

Nye eksperimenter, denne gang farvet ved stuetemperatur, dvs. jeg forsøgte at kopiere solfarvning ved at stille glassene på brændeovnen, det giver 40-45 grader om dagen og ca. 15 om natten. 2 døgn hver ved pH 3, 6 og 8. Den mellemste lignede grangiveligt den første, så den fik et meget basisk dyp til sidst og blev en flot grøn. Spørgsmålet er, om jeg har fejlmålt pH værdien på det første fed, og det måske var nærmere neutral, dette er jeg i gang med at teste….

Jeg har brugt regnvand, men nu hvor vi har fået frost er jeg nok nødt til at bruge vandhanen, selvom det evt. godt kan give et mere gråligt resultat at dømme fra første test.

Næste test er dels tinbejset, dels helt “koldt” bad uden ovn og, når jeg får dyrket nogen, mørkerøde blomster i stedet for sort-violette. Noget tyder dog på at det er pH værdien som er afgørende, så jeg er i gang med næste test i ren eddike.

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.

COLOUR COTTAGE

c/o Pia Juul

Tag: mordant