Tag: summer

Get your pots and jars ready

PiaPÃ¥ 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!

Corn Marigold / Glebionis segetum / gul okseøje
Tussah silk dyed with the flower above (and a few of its friends)

.

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

SÃ¥ jeg er pÃ¥ 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.

Solar silk

PiaPÃ¥ dansk

My first venture into solar dyeing, this grey, cold, miserable summer, was a couple of jars with silk and dye from Dyer’s Chamomile.

We did get one week of warm and sunny, but I didn’t actually think of moving my jars into the greenhouse until afternoon on the last day… Pretty typical of me.

After about a month I pulled it out, since nothing much seemed to be happening. (forgot to register, sorry)

I didn’t get any orange from the Tinctoria this time, but not necessarily due to temperature, but rather the fact that I was using 1/1 dyestuff to fiber this time as opposed to 3/1 last time. Bit of a shame since I wanted the orange shade as part of the silk project. So I fixed it by adding a handful of frosen coreopsis to some of the silk and a pot of hot water.

There wasn’t much difference in colour in the copper mordanted silk compared to the alum mordanted, so since I needed olive for my spinning project I dunked it in my horse shoe bucket. Voila presto!

Unfortunately I ran into another problem with the silk. I’d used two different batches, and the bit that I’d been gifted in a swap was really, really odd even as I soaked it before dyeing. Didn’t get wet properly, didn’t “float” and smelled odd. Did I pay attention? Nooooo… So what happend to that portion was, after it’s all dry and ready, the silk was completely brittle and rough to the touch. I can tear the fibres into short, short bits and it just feels unpleasant even after a wash. Not going to spin it. At first I thought it was the iron, but when half the coreopsis dyed silk ended up the same and the other half didn’t I guess it has to be the silk itself.

So I had to take some more of the yellow, that was supposed to stay yellow, and dunk that in iron to get the greenish tint, and then I gave up and acid dyed a new piece for orange. Easy to spot in the crowd I think, but probably won’t be noticed once they’re blended.

≈ Leave a Comment

Koldfarvet silke

Ikke helt SOLfarvet, eftersom vi ikke har haft så meget af den, i hvert fald ikke sommertemperatur, men dog farvet uden opvarmning af fibrene. De stod i glas ca. en måned, men der skete ikke rigtig den store udvikling de sidste par uger. Farvebadet er gåseurt, det ene glas med kobberbejset silke.

Jeg fik ikke orange denne gang, formentlig pga mindre plantemasse pr. fiber, ca. 1/1. Kobberglasset var en ret mørk gul, men ikke den grønlige farve jeg skulle bruge, sÃ¥ den kom lige et dyp i min hesteskospand og sÃ¥ blev det ellers oliven pÃ¥ nul komma fem. Orange fik jeg ved at lige opvarme en hÃ¥ndfuld nedfrosset skønhedsøje – coreopsis tinctoria og putte noget af det gule silke i.

Desværre viste den ene portion silke sig at være mere end underlig, så både den grønne og det meste af den orange er fuldstændig sprø og ru. Jeg kan trække fibrene over i korte, korte stykker helt uden at anstrenge mig. Silken var også anderledes allerede da jeg havde det i blød før farvningen, men jeg havde ikke regnet med det ville gå så galt.

Så jeg var nødt til at tage lidt af det gule og dyppe i jern igen, og for at have nok til mit projekt syrefarvede jeg så lige en portion orange. Jeg håber den ikke skiller sig ligeså meget ud når de bliver blandet.

Solar preparations

PiaPÃ¥ dansk

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

≈ Leave a Comment

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.