Getting ready for Woolfest & More! Fibres! Solar Pots !

After two weeks of work experience Tara and I had amongst other things dyed 2 kilos of merino, handpainted 1 kilo and 20 silk caps.
New Solar pots are: Madder and Logwood, and Mullein with a copper mordant -made using copper piping and acetic acid. It is this which is dyeing the fibres turquoise at the moment!

Work experience and the Woolfest

For the next two weeks I have Tara here for Work Experience. The idea is (I think) that Tara gets an introduction to working life as a school girl and I get the use of an extra pair of hands. Tara came to me because her mother (clever woman) brought two of my pictures and emailed asking if I might be interested in having Tara . I asked members of the Online Guild of Weavers Spinners and Dyers what they thought and they on on the whole thought it was a good idea provided I met Tara and liked her (which I did). Most butnot all of them had had a good experience of having someone for work experience.
So
Here is what we did.
I am getting ready for two days of workshop next weekend, the dye garden open to visits ( two next week) and in three weeks time I shall be having a stand at the Woolfest. There are three areas I really need to work on. Inks-I was getting down to just a few bottles. A good range of colours on the 23icron Merino. And my hand spun "Beyond the Twist Yarns". I had 24 different hanks at Wonderwool now I have ten which barely fill my yarn stand. All the knot yarns, , all the multicoloured single yarns, and all the very textured slub yarns have gone and all the Lesley Prior's Devon kid mohair and silk. This leaves me with some teeswater and silk and one of the welsh kid mohair . I am trying to spin for the Woolfest and none of the things I will get Tara to do is to drum card batts for me.
Yesterday Tara wound off 2kilos of Merino into 20hanks. and labelled them, and did the same for about a half a kilo of cashmere and silk and then we made up 5 different dye baths of complex dye mixtures to give red purples,blue purples, violet, terracotta, and reds. After lunch I started a stock check on my stock but did not get beyond the inks which were low. I sold quite a lot at the Natural Dye Day on Saturday and found I had only one green, and no purple . So I made inks and Tara stuck the labels on.
Today we will start to mordant and to get the dye baths ready. This will take up all my electric rings. In the afternoon Enys will be coming round and provided we can get into the garden we will be planting out the Japanese Indigo and the Chinese Woad But as I write this it is raining so I am hoping we will manage it.

More On Solar Dyeing

From Left to Right the pots are birch leaves with added alum , rusty nails and copper piping

I have added more pots to my array. This is partly because my dye garden is open to visitors this month and it is something else for them to look at, partly because I am demonstrating and exhibiting at The Natural Dye at Trefriw Woollen Mill Conwy on Saturday June 5th. This is a day of dyeing with indigo and coreposis by me , demonstrating of spinning and felting, talks on dye plants , and solar dyeing demonstration. This leads me onto my pots. When my friend Anne was here (who is demonstrating the spinning) I told her about birch leaves and what a good dye it was. Off we went withthe dogs, and picked birch leaves. We half filled her 4 litre pot with birch leaves topped up with hot water, and then decided to try and add rusty nails as a mordant. DH joyfully pulled rusty nails out of planks from our newly demolished shed, we added them to the birch leaf pot and the water in the pot went black almost immediately, indicating that the leaves were high in tannin and the the iron had reacted with tannin to give grey to black. To the next pot we added a piece of copper piping and a tablespoon of the copper mordant I had made by putting copper piping into acidulated water (made by adding vinegar to water). This used up all the birch leaves we had collected but by this time we felt the pots would clearly illustrate colour modification by the different mordants so when DH next took the dogs off to the woods he picked some more and this time I added alum only to the pot. All of the solar pots had some unmordanted fine prefelt added which I had wetted out and some unmordanted mohair. As sod's law ( what ever can go wrong will go wrong) would have it we had no sun for a few days so yesterday was the first day the alum pot really got going and this morning is quite yellow.
This pot was started on May 5th. On the bottom layer is annatto seeds which I had soaked in vodka for 5 days to extract the dye. I added about 200ml or so of water and onto this I pushed down about a metre of pre-mordanted cotton muslin ( mordanted in 5% alum acetate) and added a tablespoon of a logwood dye bath as well as some logwood chips. This experiment was inspired by the new yahoo group I belong to, sustainabledyepractice, where we are investigating dyes month by month. The first one in May was Annatto and the second starting in June is Brazilwood. So yesterday I stuffed down some more premordanted muslin and added some brazilwood chips to the top and little water. It will be fun to see what has happened by the end of the summer!

A few people have asked me how to make solar pots. The most usual way I do it is to start with a glass jar, put in a generous handful of dye stuff if dried and about half the jar if fresh, add premordanted fibres, top up with warm water and leave in a sunny place. You can add unmordanted fibres and put in some mordant solution which is mostly what my friend Anne does. I leave my pots all summer befor emptying them out and seeing what has happened.

Solar Dyeing

Chopped dried goldenrod from summer 2009
Eucalyptus leaves and madder with a view of annatto seeds on the right hand side.
My sunny place

Annatto seeds and logwood and cotton
An article on solar dyeing that I have written has just been published in the Weavers Spinners and Dyers Journal so this spurred me on to do some solar pots this year especially as we have been , until today , having quite a lot of hot sun.

Wonderwool 2010

My stall: I am better pleased with this year than last but you still have to contend with the feeling you are setting up inside a shoebox. Sales were okay-just- but odd. Saturday was dreadful and I took most of my money on Sunday afternoon.

I am on the right and Carys is on the left. Carys is one of two who make the most fabulous unusual and interesting clothes from recycled garments , although they say they are upcycled. Below is me and Hayley the other one of the two girls -snapped by Enys when I wasn't looking.

You can find Cary's and Hayley's work here and here Every year Enys and I ransack their stall. Enys bought two summer dresses but I brought the cream top with a bustle to go with the dress I bought last year. It is great fun and of the things I most enjoy about Wonderwool
I am sure why this photo is at an angle. Enys this one is down to you! It shows off my bustle cardigan. I just love the quirkiness of these clothes:)
Here is Enys but wearing her gorgeous coat over her dress so you can't see it!


and my fibres.
What did I sell? Well bits of everything but what thrilled me to my heart is lots of my new Beyond the Twist yarns . One customer said there was nothing like them elsewhere in the 150 stalls.Very heart warming and my favourite customer moment. I sold lots of inks too which as they are are very much my babies I feel really thrilled about. However sales were overall poor. I was not alone with this . Will I go back next year? Not sure.

Cochineal from Lanzarote

Earlier on this year Isabella Whitworth , sent me 100g of cochineal from Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands, where efforts are being made by the Milana Association. to revive the cochineal industry which originally started in 1835. Lanzarote was one of the first places that successfully grew the cochineal bug outside South America. and certainly you see the cactus that is host for the bug everywhere in Lanzarote and I spent one very frustrating day about ten years ago trying to track down cochineal without success.

The producers want to know how good the cochineal is so I volunteered to try it out. Recently I have been experimenting with different ways to dye cochineal. I have tried extracting the colour from the whole bugs by boiling in distilled water but in the end I reverted back to the way I have been doing it for a while which I found originally in Trudy Von Stralen's book "Indigo Madder and Marigold". ( Still one of the best introductions to natural dyeing around I think) . For me with soft water this seems to give me the best colour, but if you have hard water you might want to use distilled to extract the dye as cochineal does not like hard water.
So I ground 50g of cochineal bugs in a coffee grinder kept for that purpose. Trudy Von Stralen says to grind it till it is like flour and I do grind it several times. The photo looks quite gritty and grainy but in fact the fine powder has clumped a bit.
I put the ground cochineal into soak with a teaspoon of cream of tartar and left it to soak for 24 hours. Then I heated it- I used an electric casserole on the low heat so it takes about four hours to come to the boil and then boiled for about an hour and left to cool overnight.
At the same time I soaked my fibres overnight before mordanting them in 12% alum and 5% cream of tartar. (For more information on mordanting look here.)
I added a 170g of 23 micron South African Merino tops , the fibre I use in my felting and for many of my workshops. This I heated on low till it simmered and let it simmer for about an hour. Both of the South American Dyes, cochineal and log wood, are the exception to my rule of low temperature dyeing as they fix better if simmered. The fibres were then cooled rinsed and dried. I used up the exhaust dyeing more merino, a 100g of tussah silk and teeswater. Altogether the 50g of cochineal dyed 970g of fibre paler and paler colours The first colour as you can see from the comparison photo was as good as my usual cochineal.It will be really good to have cochineal from a nearby and known source and with a lower carbon foot print too for us in Europe. I know that cochineal production gives an income to poor Peruvian farmers but I do like to know where my dyes come from and whether workers have been paid well for their labour too.

I still have 50 g left so now I plan to play around with the mordants such as iron and oxalic acid. Cochineal is polychromatic and responds to different mordants givng purples grey and pinks. The best book for this is Fred Gerber's self published classic booklet Cochineal. A mine of information but very hard to get hold of.

I have just been given this link to the Association Milana

Spring in the Dye Garden Frog spawn

The frog spawn is developing fast. Now you can see heads and tails.
Enys and I pottered around the dye garden looking to see what is coming up, what needs to be done and what I want. Basically loads of blue, so woad (I.Tinctoria), chinese woad (I. I ndigotica) and Persicaria Tinctoria. Then I want lots of Dyers Chamomile ( Anthemis Tinctoria) and Coreopis Tinctoria as these go into my dye kits and the latter also makes my orange ink. Genista Tinctoria only seems to last two or three years, so this year we will have to plant some more. This year I only have one self seeded weld so I hope I find lots of wild weld! DG is going to dig over a weedy spot today so may I will sprinkle weld seeds there in the hope I will get plenty next year. I love cosmos too and holly hocks even though I rarely use then for dyeing-too pretty! This drives Enys mad as she would like to see me doing more experimental dyeing-so would I but production dyeing for the workshops and craft fairs (and for my pictures) has to come first. We will plant the black violas in the pots too so pretty even if the colour is fugitive. All the other plants seem to be doing quite well although with having had so cold winter and spring they are slow.No sign of golden rod yet, the iris pseudocorus is just beginning to sprout, buds are swelling on the rhus typhinus and a few madder spouts in one or two places. Lythrum salicaria looks totally dormant at the moment but indestructible yarrow is looking healthy. No sign of ladies bedstraw ( galium varum) however dyers chamomile and dyers coreopsis are both starting to sprout form the base. Goodee!