This was just a small experiment since my rowan trees on the property are rather measly. And the ones along the main road are too tall for me to reach…. So I just did my usual simmer-soak-simmer-soak 2-day routine to get it out of my hair, like. I threw in a couple of berries because, well, they fell into my sack. Alum/CoT mordant on wool yarn.
Birch left, Rowan right, in my usual Sumak drying tree
I forgot to weigh the leaves…..
One of my books suggests it’s a good base under madder and indigo, another that it gives a brownish yellow. (brown in my head not being great under blue? I could of course be wrong)
The colour did turn out to be a different yellow than birch leaves (more on those in the near future), so quite ok as experiments go. Whether the berries had an influence? Well, it’s always fun to have more mysteries waiting out there.
Det skulle lige prøves, ingen forventninger andet end “gul”. Men det kan jo bruges til overfarvning. xx g blade (og et par klaser bær fordi de sad der) til 30 g garn, alun/vinsten bejset.
Den gule farve er i øvrigt, mod min forventning, anderledes end den gule fra birkeblade, så det var alligevel ikke et helt tosset eksperiment. Om det er de få bær som har give en lidt varmere tone er svært at vide, det må jeg teste en anden dag. Men det er da en udmærket måde at få variation.
Vidste du, at man kan kommentere min blog uden at være wordpress medlem? Bare udfyld navn er nok. Det er så hyggeligt med dialog fremfor monolog!
Came across a patch of flowers in the forest the other day that turns out to be a garden plant by the name of Telekia speciosa, heartleaf oxeye.
Normally I don’t blog on Saturdays, figuring I’ll give you people a rest from my blabbing, but I wanted to get this one out of the queue, so here you go. Continue reading “Telekia – tusindstrÃ¥le”→
Came 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.
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.
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?! .
I can see this post is still getting some traffic. A friend reminded me that I never wrote more about vegetable dyeing and therefore never clearly mentioned the most important info about it: These dyes are not light or washfast. They are fun to play with, but you should not expect to knit items that are meant to stay true to colour.
When I first became interested in natural dyeing it was winter and by March I was getting impatient from all the reading, NO PLANTS in sight. So I decided to try my hand at using what the larder had to offer.
Frozen strawberries and black currants, fresh beetroot, tea leaves, turmeric, onion peels, and horseshoes in rain water for modifier. My mordants were all ready thanks to the www; alum, cream of tartar, tin salt.
And, I have to say, I had a blast. The colours were amazing and everything just went well. I used the most commonly described method, premordant yarn, simmer my berries, cool overnight, strain, then yarn into dyebath to simmer, cool overnight and hang up to dry. I didn’t rinse before drying except in the case of a modifier bath (iron, copper, alkaline or vinegar bath after the dye pot), then a soap flake wash after a week or so which the colours stand up to very well. Sunlight or laundry detergent: not so well….
Beetroot / Rødbeder
When you boil beetroots, the water turns orange. Yes indeed. Then you add vinegar to the pot and BOOM, instant, deep, fantastic purple. I did one skein at a time, exhausting the dye intensity each time. One skein got an alkaline modifier and turned first purple, then beige when dry (the colour literally ran off). I never did get around to trying a skein in the orange pre-vinegar dyebath, maybe some other time. I did do a cold dye version though, soaking a skein in the juice for about a week in the cupboard, and it worked every bit as well as the hot dye bath.
Strawberries / Jordbær
No, you don’t get pink yarn from cooked strawberries, you get salmon orangy. Nothing much I did to it seemed to change that fact. Not really my thing, so I didn’t pursue it further…
Left skein had an alkaline modifier, right skein had an acid modifier, both premordanted with Alum.
Black currant / Solbær
From the garden, saved in the freezer. I just don’t eat that much jam anymore, the bushes grow new berries each year, what the hey, in the pot they go.
Left to right are: Pot ash modifier (alkaline), copper modifier, tin mordant, just dyebath, vinegar rinse.
Red cabbage / Rødkål
Yum, the smell of boiled cabbage…. or not. Surprisingly though, the red cabbage gives up its colour very well and gives a variety of shades and colours with the different modifiers, similar to the range I got from the black currants only more muted. Maybe the chemical properties of the colour in there is the same?
Left to right: Just dyebath, vinegar rinse, tin mordant, iron modifier, potash modifier.
Onion skins / Løgskaller
I’m almost tempted to put this in with the other dye plants, because this dye is supposed to be as colourfast as them. But it is a vegetable, so we’ll mention them here.
First I tried regular yellow onion skins. Alum + CoT mordant. I added one skein at a time, then another as the first was removed and so on until the bath had exhausted. I used only about 25 g of skins for 4x 33 g skeins. Left to right are first and second skein in, the third green one had an iron modifier after dyebath, and the fourth is just a pale, but nice yellow. The last three on the right are done with red onions skins, 1 simple dyebath, 2 iron and the third had pretty much exhausted so I added some orange peels and simmered some more getting a brighter orange. All skeins had about 1 hour simmer each in the dyepot.
Onion skins / løgskaller
Turmeric / Gurkemeje
Basically what you do is add a good couple of spoonfulls of turmeric powder to your boiling water, enter yarn. Take out after 5, 10, 20 and 30 minutes to get deeper shades. A short alkaline bath afterwards can really bring out that yummy, warm orange of a buddhist monk’s robe. Leave it in sunlight and it fades in a matter of days and turns beige if you wash with laundry detergent. Works far better on wool than cotton. There’s quite a bit of powder left if the yarn no matter how much you rinse it, not visible but it sheds out when you wind the skeins for instance.
Tea / The
Tea is not really a dye they say, it’s a stain. Well, you can’t really get it out, can you? So, for brown/beige it works quite alright. AND you can use it on cotton. I dyed a couple of baskets I’d made from heavy cotton string. Then took the lid of one and dipped it into a bowl of water where I’d added some of my own iron modifier from horse shoes. The water turned ink black, I couldn’t even see my item. When I took it out, it had turned a really nice chocolate brown and it stays that way without fading.
This was just a small experiment since my rowan trees on the property are rather measly. And the ones along the main road are too tall for me to reach…. So I just did my usual simmer-soak-simmer-soak 2-day routine to get it out of my hair, like. I threw in a couple of berries because, well, they fell into my sack. Alum/CoT mordant on wool yarn.
