Monday 5 December 2011

Multicoloured eco dyeing

I love multicoloured fibres and fabrics and although I can get this effect with the extracts of natural dyes  I am rather pleased  to find along the  way of experimenting with eco dyeing that I had found another method of getting a painted  effect. 
I have been solar dyeing for the last three or four years with large kilner jars and have been enjoying stuffing fibres and dyes into large pots and seeing the result and opening a pot is rather like opening a Christmas present.   But of course solar dyeing here is only an option in the summer so now Iam suffering form withdrawal symptoms. I decided instead  to experiment with ecodyeing in kilner jars using one source of heat. 
Here are the three pots I produced for a demonstration at Trefriw Christmas Textile Market .They all fit into one pan and although I stuff different things into each one they  take about 50gs of fibre, a couple of silk caps, handfuls of mohair and pieces of silk for example.  I usually stuff in silk cocoons and carrier rods too. This is an ideal method for a project as the different fibres all go together and in one pot you can get a lot of variation.  My photo of the results of  the madder logwood and persian berries pot  is not brilliant because there are two different silk caps one from the bottomof the pot and one from the top. This is also  a lovely technique for nunofelt as you can dye both the silk and the fibres together but I plan -as I am now into my spinning season  (long dark cold nights and a woodburner) to spin quite  lot of these into yummy art yarns. :)




The colours in the basket are from two lots of dyeing. The left is form madder cochineal and persian berries.  The right from logwood and persian berries.
I haven't opened them all yet - I have just started so will post the results of these pots when the fibres are out and dried.  But in logwood and cochineal  pot I have pulled out some of the silk so you can see the rich colours .
The last pot you can see was the demopot form Trefriw,.  Here I poured in soaked out madder Cochineal and Persan berries over the fibres and a long piece of silk.  I haven't heated this one yet so this gives me something to look forward to. 

2 comments:

  1. Lovely colours. I am looking forward to see the outcome.

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  2. Great combination of colours, natural dyes are so generous, they always seems to match up with each other so well..love those colours and want some of those berries!@

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