Dyes from Winter garden 2 : an array of yellows.

The dye plants I had in the garden were Genista tinctoria, Weld ( leaves) Dyers Chamomile and Tansy. I picked what  I had,

 

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I cut the plant materials up, soaked overnight added premordanted fibres and heated all of them  slowly  in  a large pan

From left to right Dyers Chamomile Gensita tinctoria, Tansy and Weld

The sunny result-very nice to have in the winter.  

As there is only so much yellow a girl can have I put rusty nails into the Genista tinctoria and tansy but in fact these only became a bronze/gold.(Top row), the acid yellow of the weld leaves stands out in the middle and in the fluff of alpaca to the right.  There was so much colour in the dyers chamomile that I repeated it and got almost  as good a colour the second time ( Alpaca on left hand side)

The alpaca I stuffed into a fermentation indigo vat- so now a truly eco green!

Dyes from the Winter Garden

We have had, so far, a very mild winter and as I wandered around the dye garden on a very mild sunny day I was astonished at how many dye plants were either still  in flower or doing well.

So:

Chinese Woad Isatis indigotica

I decided to dye with them all:
starting with Chinese Woad ( Isatis indigotica) .This was last picked in November so all this growth has been since then so I was not sure how much blue there would be in the leaves .

ripped leaves covered with boiling water

I picked all the leaves, weighing 220 g and ripped them all roughly , poured over 2 kettlesful of boiling water and left to steep.  You can see the colour after about 20 minutes, this is  the precursor to Indigotin. 
Then I added 1 tablespoon of washing soda ( sodium carbonate)You can see that the water is now a murky green

Ready to beat

starting to beat

after beating for a few minutes

Then I started to beat to areate the liquid . This converts the precursor to indigotin to indigotin which being insoluble will precipitate  out. You usually but not aways will see the froth turning blue . It doe slook bluey here but not marketedly so.

After beating.  Now there is blue skim of indigotin on the surface. Hopeful!

 Then I added 1 dessert spoon of thiourea dioxide which removed the oxygen so that the insoluble blue indigotin would convert to its soluble form indigo white.   At the sme time I heated the little vat till it was 50 degrees C -the optimum temperature for dyeing wool . The pH was 9.
In the picture below you can see the fully reduced vat with some pale  blue undissolved indigo on the surface showing that there is some blue but perhaps not a lot.

redcuced vat

warmed vat with fibres added

 I enterd about 50 g of dry 18,5 micron merino and silk.  Here you can see it soaking in the vat.

fires goingblue in the air

 Here the fibres are hung to drip and oxidise from yellow to blue.

weld dyed merino and silk

I tried dipping the  fibre again to get a deeper blue but there was little change in the colour so then I put in some  weld dyed fibres - dyed with the weld I found growing in Conwy in November

Here is the result. About 80g of dyed fibres. Not as much as you would  probably get if the leaves had growing durign sunny months  but still nice  to have especially in the bleak winter landscapes with grey skies and drizzling rain.
The rest of the dyes are cooking as I write.

Dyeing the Greens

The photo of my samples above also has dyed fibres from half a dozen leaves of Chinese Woad (Isatis Indigotica). The orange fibres were for Dyers Chamomile with a touch of ammonia. The colour was so fabulous none of us wanted to over dye !




Posted by Helen

These last two summers I have run workshops in my studio using dye plants from the garden. This year I could only manage two workshops as I am teaching for a week at the Lincoln summer school for weavers spinners and dyers. The first one which I ran last weekend was Dyeing the Greens (The other is Dyeing the Blues on August 29th) As all natural dyer know greens are rare and even where you can get them they are mostly olive greens and dark greens. So I had great fun devising different ways to get there. We achieved green by modification of yellows from Elderflower leaves ( Sambucus Nigra), Dyers Chamomile (Anthemis Tinctoria), Mullien (Verbascum Thapsus) Yarrow (Achillea Millefolium) Tansy (Tanacetum Vulgare)-this was at the last minute as someone said they had got some green from Tansy leaves -with either ferrous sulphate or copper sulphate made up by dissolving 2 g in 100ml of water (Jenny Dean's recipe). We overdyed Weld (Reseda Luteola) in Indigo, and used Indigo Sulphonate mixed with Fustic extract. Indigo Sulphonate is Indigo dissolved in concentrated Sulphuric acid and was discovered inthe 1700's and is probably one of the first chemical dyes. It is often called saxon blue and while it is not as lightfast as indigo itself it gives a fabulously strong blue with a slight green tinge. I use Jim Liles recipe in the Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing , but Trudy Von Stralen also has one in her book Indigo Madder and Marigold. Finally we ended up by painting some merino tops and silk cap with extracts using green, osage orange and fustic with a little logwood grey to make the green turquoise.
Welcome to all the new followers - I hope you enjoy the blog- do drop by and say hello

second year woad blues

Posted by Helen
I am often asked if second year woad gives blue and although I have done it in the past I thought it would be nice to have evidence!
A few days ago I cut about four second year plants of Isatis Tinctoria down to stop them flowering as I don't want them to cross pollinate with Chinese woad Isatis Indigotica which is in full flower.
As always I followed Jill Goodwin recipe from the Dyers Manual( Published by Batsford) so I ripped the leaves up and poured boiling water over them sufficient to cover the leaves , left them for about half and hour and then squeezed the leaves out and removed them leaving a brown liquid darker than the normal sherry colour I have got from first year leaves. I added about a 100ml of washing soda solution, {sodium carbonate) made by mixing 4 tablespoons of washing soda to 1 litre of water, which turned the liquid a sort of browny/green colour, beat thoroughly to oxygenate the water and precipitate the indigotin. Normally the froth turns blue but it did not show much sign of the blue froth this time suggesting that indogitin levels might be low. I added 1 teaspoon of thiourea dioxide and left for a further 20 minutes. The little vat was difficult to read as it was bright green and when I dyed fibres they went green, this was a yellow colour in the dye bath which washed off easily revealing the blue underneath. I added in the fibres shown and got as you can see pale blue on silk, on a textured yarn and quite a reasonable blue on the teeswater. I put the squeezed out leaves into a slow cooker and left overnight on the keep warm facility before adding teeswater curls and getting the resulting golden tan with a pinkish tinge.
So there you are you can get blue from second year woad leaves before they flower but the amount of blue you can get may be low.
Welcome to the new followers Manya , Danielle and Joybilee farm

Seeds

Posted by Helen
Last week I went round to Enys's house to have a look at the emerging dye plants mostly for the Woolfest in Cumbria in June but some will be big enough for Wonderwool Wales which is April 25th & 26th at the Royal Welsh ground at Builth Wells. The Japanese polygonum (Persicaria Tinctoria) has germinated well-over 60plants Enys said-plants like dyers chamomile (Anthemis Tinctoria ),coreopsis (Coreopis Tinctoria) and cosmos (Cosmos sulphureus) are as usual romping away, and the woads are better this year than last. One of the plants that is doing much better than ever before is safflower, carthemis tinctorius. Enys was furious at the madder -the seed tray on the top left of the picture of seed trays as none of the madder had germinated after two weeks. Over the years she has tried various ways to get it to grow, she tells me, but it is always difficult. I lent forward to inspect the reluctant seeds and saw one just starting to push it's way through. Time for champagne? I suggested hopefully. We went back to celebrate with coffee.
Incidentally the nearly flowering woad is Chinese woad (Isatis Indigotica) and as mine is flowering too we should have plenty of seeds for next year. The Chinese woad we have planted this year is still from the original seed sent to me by Annee Silk in Canada who sent them twice when the first lot did not germinate. Chinese woad (Isatis Indigotica) produces more indigotin (about twice as much)as does the European woad (Isatis Tinctoria). The comparison data is here

While I was there Enys proudly showed me lots of robust Baptisia Australis-"what dye colour do we get from it"? She asked. My mind went blank. However researching through my archives I found I wrote a post about the Baptisia and you can find what I did here!

Welcome to my all new followers.

Friends, Dye Garden, Mordants , Health and textured yarn

Posted by Helen
Where would we be without friends? My friends have always been very important to me but over the last few weeks I have come to value them all very much. This is what one good fairy friend turned up with the other day. Something to crochet with from her own stash, some are handspun yarns and others are interesting yarns she has picked up. yum! yum! . So I made a hat for her. The turquoise is from the merino 18.5 micron dyed with Saxon blue (indigo sulphonate)I dyed a couple of months ago,and spun last week, but I added in some of the sparkly yarn and then some terracotta and purple. Here is the result although I plan to add a large flower.

The second thing she bought (apart from the cherries which I really enjoyed :)) was " A BOOK" ! This lovely book is full of different ways to create interesting textured yarn. Now it may surprise some people to know that I can spin a smooth even yarn if I have too and if I put my mind to it but I get so bored! I can never resist adding something in, so this book is just up my street. The book is Intertwined,The Art of Handspun Yarn,Modern Patterns and Creative Spinning Lexi Boeger ISBN-13:978-1-59253-374-9 published by www.quarrybooks.com.It is full of interesting textured and innovative yarns with clear instructions on how to spin them (although you do have to know how to spin -it is not a beginners book). There are projects too but I rarely want to follow some one else's projects preferring to invent my own.

The Dye Garden -or rather bits of it in January.The first snowdrops are out.When Enys came three days ago there was no sign of them but today here they are. Here too is some very healthy looking weld and my Chinese Woad.



My health is continuing to improve with some minor setbacks. An investigation has shown no further complications,which is very good news. As the Consultant said I have "just" had pneumonia but she did say this is a serious illness and I can expect it to take three months before I feel like my old self :(
While in recovery from my recent investigation I read more on mordanting and also Brazilwood as Debbie Bamford is running a red dyeing workshop on the Online Guild in March. She wants us to put some into soak now as it improves with age. I haven't done it that yet but I will tomorrow.
Mordanting:I have written 7 pages so far on the history of mordanting, the use of mordants worldwide and on alum .What do I do? Extract some of it for the blog or publish the whole lot.What do you think? How much do you want to read about mordanting?

Indigofera Tinctoria

posted by Helen

Yesterday I went over to Enys's house and she carefully pruned her nurtured and much cared for indigofera plant. Enys loves this plant; she says it is partly because it folds it's leaves up every night, but it is also because getting it to germinate proved challenging and growing it even with a greenhouse has been difficult. Now, however, she has got the hang of it and there are two other seedlings coming along nicely on her kitchen windowsill. It germinates in the greenhouse but seems happier in the kitchen and as she has an Aga the temperature probably stays fairly even. This is a plant that has been really looked after just as if it was baby which explains why she won't let me near it with her pruning shears and her DH ,an expert gardener, was drawn into a discussion on how much to cut off without endangering the plant.

The leaves weighed 100g, 76g after I had stripped them off the stalks. I ripped them up and put them in an 1 litre pot with a lid and placed them in a larger pan. I covered them with water and placing in a double boiler and heated till 60 degrees C

There was very little colour in the little vat so I left it overnight as a member from Natural Dyes Online had suggested. This morning ( Sunday) I had a look at it and it was still barely more than pale yellow so I chopped the leaves more finely and reheated in the double boiler and repeated to about 80 degrees C. The water was now murky yellow green , but I put 1 teaspoon of washing soda and had a pH of 9.8: too high I wonder whether the washing soda which is a new batch is unusually strong, and whisked till it was very frothy. The froth was quite white . By this time I was becoming convinced that there was no indigotin at all, but I added 1/2 teaspoon of thiourea dioxide to the vat and left it for ten minutes and put in a few strands of throwsters waste, which looked white as it went in rather than yellow. Now I was convinced that there was nothing there and was wondering how to tell Enys that her precious plant had produced nothing. when I pulled out the silk. To my astonishment the edge of the silk turned a turquoise blue. I tried re dipping and finally I got a pale blue silk and a pale turquoise blue 10 g piece of wool. I am a bit surprised how turquoise they look and felt the result has been more like the colour obtained by dyeing with persicaria (polygonum) tinctoria.

So there was not much indigotin there but some and I feel very pleased to have tried as I have now successfully used all the four plants that we grow and that will give blue. I wonder whether the lack of sun has been a factor but it is more probably that it is a tropical plant growing in conditions which are far from ideal for it. Well I will try again next year provided of course Enys lets me.

Dyeing the Blues

Posted by Helen

Here is Maureen delighted with the colour of her hand spun yarn at the Dyeing the Blues Workshop

Yesterday I held the last of a series of natural dyeing workshops held in the studio here over the summer. This one was Dyeing the Blues and covered dyeing with a variety of sources of indigotin. I decided to roughly follow the path that dyeing the blues would have taken in history. so we started by picking woad ( Isatis Tinctoria) and the Chinese Woad (Isatis indigotica) which turned out to be covered in lots of green caterpillars happily munching away. We tore the leaves up,having removed the caterpillars, and covered with boiling water. After twenty minutes we squeezed out the leaves and added washing soda to the liquid. I put in a bit too much and the pH was 10. My students energetically beat the liquid and the froth turned an astonishing deep deep blue. I had never had this before. Was it the time of the year? The hard beating? Or the unusually high pH , I usually have a pH of 9). Unfortunately I took few photos. I find it difficult to take photos at workshops as I am always racing around keeping everything running smoothly so there were none of this stage. I added thiourea dioxide to reduce the vat

The next vat was an introduction to a fermentation vat. I had a large one with about 9 litres in which was a madder/bran vat started four day ago. This too produced very dark blue fibres nearly a midnight blue. The indigotin in this vat came from Indigofera Tinctoria.

My students then made a stock solution also with indigotin from Indigofera Tinctoria ready to make a modern vat and we went off for lunch.

After lunch we dyed with the woad vat. This gave a deep blue the deepest colour I have ever had from fresh woad leaves. I have included a photo of the increasing depth of colour from repeated dippings from a previous workshop as a pointof comparison . The woad dyed the equivalent of no 10 ( reading from left to right starting at the top left).

Time seemed to vanish and we rushed around dyeing with what I described a Modern Vat or Chemical Reduction vat, before galloping back out into the garden at high speed at about 2.45 to gather Persicaria Tinctoria ( the Japanese Polygonum Tinctoria). We gathered two armfuls of these stripped off the leaves then all five of us chopped away with scissors. I covered the leaves with water and acetic acid and then kneaded the leaves. We strained the leaves and then I kneaded the leaves again just as I would have kneaded bread and added the resulting liquid to the rest in the bucket. We stuffed in silk, and wools and even one hank of tencel before leaving it to go back to more dyeing indoors. Finally at nearly 4 o clock we found all our fibres in the Persicaria Tinctoria had turned a beautiful turquoise and everyone was pleased and excited (especialy me as this was only the fourth time I had used the fresh leaves to get turquoise with one failure.) Below is a silk cap on the left, handspun tencel yarn ( spun by Maureen) and Teeswater curls on the right.The photo below shows the bucket after dyeing which today has gone a deep blue with grains of stuff on the bottom which I assume is indigotin settling out.

This photo is of all the colours of day. The bright greens were golderod overdyed with indigotin from the woads

The pan below is the Persicaria Tinctoria vat today.

S

Comparison between Chinese Woad (Isatis Indigotica) and Woad (Isatis Tinctoria)

I wrote this blog as I actually did it. So I apologise it if sounds a bit too detailed. I thought I would try it as an experiment as I usually keep notes on my computer anyway.

10.45. I picked 100g of leaves of I. Indigotica and of woad I. Tinctoria . The leaves of chinese woad, I indigotica, on the left are thicker and slightly more bluey in colour than the leaves of I. Tinctoria
I poured one litre of nearly boiling water over the leaves and left to steep for about half an hour (coffee break time!)

I squeezed out the leaves and the I. Isatis on the left, gave a characteristic sherry coloured liquid but with a pink cast. although this has not come out on the photograph. The I. Indigotica, on the right was darker in colour with almost a purplish cast.

I added 1 tablespoon of washing soda ( sodium carbonate) to each which gave a PH of between 9 and 10 a little higher than I intended. Then I whisked them both for 2 minutes (and did my wrist ache!)
I. Tinctoria went a light green then on beating for 2 minutes a dark green with a slightly blue froth.
I. Indigotica went a bright green followed by very dark green and after 2 minutes of beating the froth had a dark blue cast to it.

The I. Isatis was in a wide bowl and the I indigotica was in a three litre jug so when I squeezed the leaves out this was still very hot ( at about 60 degrees C) while the I. Tinctoria was just tepid.
I added 1/8th teaspoon of Thiourea Dioxide commonly known as spectralite as a deoxygenator to each and left them for half an hour. I did wonder whether the I. Tinctoria might need more being in a wide bowl where the liquid might have absorbed more oxygen. but decided to see what happened.

In the mean time I weighed out 25 g of wet mordanted leicester long wool curls for each vat (mordanted as that is what I had wet and ready for dyeing)

I decided it was a bit difficult to compare the two vats when they were in such different size bowls which effected the temperature so I transferred both vats into one litre jugs and placed in a big bowl with boiling water in to have them both at the same temperature and added a little more Thiourea Dioxide to compensate for adding oxygen as I transferred them, and left them for 10 minutes or so. The I Tinctoria was at 48 degrees the I. Indigotica was at 42 degrees C.


I added the fibres at 12.40 and left for 20 minutes. as I was interrupted by a phone call!
I removed both and allowed to oxidise for about 20 minutes. As you can see the I Indigotica ( the one on the right ) is a darker blue.

I put half of the fibres back for 5 minutes and both went a bit darker.
The dogs got walked at this point so I returned to my two little vats at 5.00pm adding more hot water to the bowl to warm them up, 25ml of washing soda solution* as the pH had dropped to 8 , and 1/8tsp approx of thiourea dioxide.

* Washing soda solution is made by adding 4 tablespoons of washing soda ( sodium carbonate) to 1 litre of water.
I then added back half again of the previous clump of curls. (pH between 8-9 and temp at 38 degrees C) and left for five minutes removed and oxidised. I went on doing this until the fibres really did not look any darker. You can these results below with I.Tintoria (the ordinary Woad) on top and the I. Indigotica (Chinese Woad) on the bottom. There was still colour in both vats so dyed some more fibres a nice light blue photo not shown as the light was going !

Ps DH (a very supportive and encouraging man) says to all readers of my blog READ THE MACHINE STOPS BY EM FORSTER and prepare for the future .