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.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New year

Merry Christmas and a Happy New year to all my followers, readers and  friends.

Logwood Persian Berries Eco Dye Pots

Sometmes natural dyes can prove to be very difficult to photograph.  Once or twice I have run into real problems getting the colour of the dye into the camera.  A Logwood dark blue will never come out the colour I see it as.  Today I have dyed some wonderful lime greens  and purples with Logwood and Persian berries but no matter how I photograph it it comes out grey with flashes of purple..  Oddly enough the Persian berries greens look grey in artifical light too  See for yourself-and you will have to take my word for it that this  does not do justice to the colours at all what  you see as grey on the screen is  a lovely green.

Washing Art Yarns

Now the evenings are long and dark, the wind is howling and rain is slashing agaisnt the window I am having a lovely time sitting  at my wheel playing with colour and texture.  Quite suddenly I can't  get enough and look forward every evening to  to the time when I can sit down and spin.  This is when I rnew my stock of art yarns  which have  been selling like hot cakes  but I do have a few up on my website.    Here I couldn't   resist a photo of the yarns being washed.  I thought it showed them off quite well!  I wash the  yarn for a very short time in very hot water with a little of my lovely  organic shampoo so the yarn hangs nice and straight and it firms up soft fibres a bit.
Of course every scrap of fibre is naturally dyed.

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. 

Weld Eco pot and Trefriw Woollen Mill Textile Market 3/4th December.

Quite where time goes too I don't  know but although I am not blogging much I am dyeing.! :)


Here is the colour I got from the  weld ( Reseda Luteola) I found growing by the Conwy Estuary a few weeks ago,.  I roughly chopped the  weld and put it into a kilner jar with 50 gms of blufaced leicester  and then left it for a few days.  When  I had time Iput it into large pan with two  other ecopots  so the pots were in a waterbath andheated slowly for a few hours. The colour from the weld was not brilliant-quite pale  but I was too busy to deal with it so I left  it for a few days before popping it back in the pan for another slow heating .  This time the yellow deepened and a tad of ammonia turned it the bright yellow in the picture.   I haven't taken it out as I am demonstrating eco dyeing  at Trefriw Textile Market on Sunday 4th December and this is a good example of how you can test dyes without having to use lots of heat. The other advantage of this method is multicoloured dyeing and when  I have a moment I shall show  the results of dyeing  with several dyes. Or you could come ( if you can) to the Textile Market to the Demos on the morning if the second day!
Waterbath dyeing is decribed in my book Colours of the Wolrd Ecodyeing which  you can buy from my website.  
If you would like to know mor eabout the book Jenny Dean generously reviewed it on her blog and you can find that here

Weld and bloggers block!

I have had bloggers block.
Here are the reasons:
Boring ones:
asthma
coming off HRT so I have lots of night  sweats and insommia
Fun ones
A Kindle
I sit in bed drinking a cup of tea reading in the morning  ( telling myself I really ought to blog but.......)
Marmite.
Marmite is not  what  you think , a famous black yeast spread to put on your toast , but in fact a black and white sprocker ( cross beteen a springer and a cocker) now a mischievous and energetic 5 month old. ( yes we thought we were mad too!)
Yesterday we were out for the day having a walk together and doing our best to tire out the said Marmite (as we call his name we hear a chorus from other dog walkers every where we go of "love him or hate  him "-a reference to the famous advertising campaign for  Marmite with a tag line of "love it or hate it")  .

It was our wedding anniversary and we were going out of  a meal in the evening so dog had to be well and truly tired out so he would sleep  rather than chewing up shoes or slippers or some such while we are out-he always find s something . ) So we were walking along the Conwy estuary loking across the river  to the famous Conwy castle built by Edward 1st to keep the Welsh down and trying to persuade Walnut our springer spaniel and Marmite that a dip in the fast flowing river was not perhaps the best of ideas when to my astonishment I saw huge stands of Weld.  Of course I did not have my camera! (sigh ) but take my word for it there was masses  of it behind fences.

I picked a bit of the  seed heads where most  of the dye is and tomorrow I shall  dye with it. ( Not before sprinkling it the seeds around some  newly dug earth  where weld likes to grow.

I was surprised  to see it so near the sea so I am interested to see whether it might be a different variety to the one I have growing in the garden . I tis certainly very vigorous some of stands were at least 6 ft high.
ps Marmite has kept me company while I was writing this  and enjoyed himself ripping up an old catalogue and then enterprisingly he went down stairs, brought up the dustpan  and is chewing that.