Dying deeds
I've been doing a lot of spinning and weaving recently, but have been a bit remiss about posting. Mostly because work is eating my brain, but also because it has been so dark/cloudy that I haven't been able to get any good photos. However, yesterday the sun came out just long enough for me to take photos of the fiber G. and I dyed last weekend.
G. found some seeds two years ago for red amaranth. The description said they were a Hopi dye plant, so she got some and planted them in her garden. We discovered two things last year: this plant is very red and it is very prolific. No need to buy more seeds. It's quite happy to reseed itself. Here's what the plant looks like:
Last weekend, G. snipped off the seed heads and upper leaves of all her plants and I pulled up the ones I had transplanted into my garden. We chopped them up into about 1 inch pieces and added water to cover them (about half a pot--or maybe about 2 gallons). We simmered the whole mess for about an hour:
And ended up with a cranberry red extract once we filtered it through a mesh sieve. That morning, before we started the dye extracts, I had tossed several pounds of wool and a skein of wool/silk into a bath of alum mordant. Alum is the most common and safest of mordants to use with natural dyes. Now that we had both the treated yarn and the extract, we put two skeins (about 100g total) into the bath. One was pure wool, the other the wool/silk blend.
Wow! Bright cranberry red! Of course, I said to G., if it really produced that color, this dye would be in all of the natural dye books we have. (And it isn't listed in any, so we were guessing about how much to use, what part of the plant to use and what mordant to use. Mad scientists at work!) We left those skeins in for a half hour since when we lifted them up, they looked fairly dark. While those were draining and cooling, we added another two skeins of wool (about 100 g total, again.) because the bath still looked really dark and red.
When we washed out the first skeins, all the cranberry color left, but hidden beneath that was a warm red-orange color. It was fairly light, so we decided that the skeins that we had tossed in after these should be simmered for a half hour then sit overnight in the dye bath. Those turned out a dark brick red (pictures below). Because they were so dark and we are mad scientists, we decided to add yet more yarn to the dye pot, but this time we added copper to the dye bath as well.
Copper in the form of copper sulfate is also a mordant. You can use mordants one of two ways: you can premordant your yarn and use it or store it for another day, or you can mordant and dye all at the same time. The second method is a bit dicey since the mordant had to react with the yarn before the dye can and so timing is all messed up and you might not get even dying. However, this was our third "dip" into this dye bath and we were just wondering what would happen.
Well, the dye bath turned from bright cranberry red to a muddy brown color. After simmering for an hour, the skeins didn't look particularly impressive, so we decided to let them sit overnight again. The next morning, I took them out and rinsed them off. They looked, well, a not very endearing grayish brown color and were fairly light. We had either used up most of the dye or destroyed a lot of it with the copper. (I'm leaning toward the first.) Anyway, I hung up all the skeins to dry (hah! it took days since it rained all week). After a few days, the gray-brown had changed to a light olive green (way prettier than the brown).
Here's the end result:
The first two skeins are from the first dip--wool first then the wool/silk blend. The center two skeins were from the overnight soak and the last two skeins were the overnight with copper soak. My camera apparently doesn't like olive green since it didn't quite capture the color properly. They are a bit less blue and and a bit more green than the above picture. The reds, however, are about right. Our next question is: how light fast is the color?
While we were dying with the amaranth, we also had a dye pot of madder going. The dye in madder is in their roots which are woody. I had soaked the roots for two days in water, then tried to chop them in a blender (one not used for food prep, and tried is the operative word here. The blender refused the challenge.) We had simmered the roots for an hour and still didn't get all of the dye out of them. Using the same fiber and methods as with the amaranth, we dyed several skeins of wool:
All three skeins were soaked over night in the madder dye. The top skein was treated with alum, the middle skein with magnesium and the bottom skein with calcium. We had read that magnesium and calcium could also act as mordants, we we decided to try them. The result was that those two skeins ended up being far lighter than the alum treated skein. So we have our doubts about them working as a mordant. Since the calcium and magnesium looked about the same, we tossed the calcium skein back into the pot (which looked like it still had dye present) and added copper to the pot to see what would happen. We again simmered for 30 minutes and then left the skein to soak over night. The result was a pinkish gray color. The unevenness is due to not filtering out all the bits of madder and the part of the skein that sat on the bottom was dyed darker than the top.
Conclusions: The red amaranth gave us about the same color as the madder (with the alum mordant) and is way easier to use and grow.
G. found some seeds two years ago for red amaranth. The description said they were a Hopi dye plant, so she got some and planted them in her garden. We discovered two things last year: this plant is very red and it is very prolific. No need to buy more seeds. It's quite happy to reseed itself. Here's what the plant looks like:
Last weekend, G. snipped off the seed heads and upper leaves of all her plants and I pulled up the ones I had transplanted into my garden. We chopped them up into about 1 inch pieces and added water to cover them (about half a pot--or maybe about 2 gallons). We simmered the whole mess for about an hour:
And ended up with a cranberry red extract once we filtered it through a mesh sieve. That morning, before we started the dye extracts, I had tossed several pounds of wool and a skein of wool/silk into a bath of alum mordant. Alum is the most common and safest of mordants to use with natural dyes. Now that we had both the treated yarn and the extract, we put two skeins (about 100g total) into the bath. One was pure wool, the other the wool/silk blend.
Wow! Bright cranberry red! Of course, I said to G., if it really produced that color, this dye would be in all of the natural dye books we have. (And it isn't listed in any, so we were guessing about how much to use, what part of the plant to use and what mordant to use. Mad scientists at work!) We left those skeins in for a half hour since when we lifted them up, they looked fairly dark. While those were draining and cooling, we added another two skeins of wool (about 100 g total, again.) because the bath still looked really dark and red.
When we washed out the first skeins, all the cranberry color left, but hidden beneath that was a warm red-orange color. It was fairly light, so we decided that the skeins that we had tossed in after these should be simmered for a half hour then sit overnight in the dye bath. Those turned out a dark brick red (pictures below). Because they were so dark and we are mad scientists, we decided to add yet more yarn to the dye pot, but this time we added copper to the dye bath as well.
Copper in the form of copper sulfate is also a mordant. You can use mordants one of two ways: you can premordant your yarn and use it or store it for another day, or you can mordant and dye all at the same time. The second method is a bit dicey since the mordant had to react with the yarn before the dye can and so timing is all messed up and you might not get even dying. However, this was our third "dip" into this dye bath and we were just wondering what would happen.
Well, the dye bath turned from bright cranberry red to a muddy brown color. After simmering for an hour, the skeins didn't look particularly impressive, so we decided to let them sit overnight again. The next morning, I took them out and rinsed them off. They looked, well, a not very endearing grayish brown color and were fairly light. We had either used up most of the dye or destroyed a lot of it with the copper. (I'm leaning toward the first.) Anyway, I hung up all the skeins to dry (hah! it took days since it rained all week). After a few days, the gray-brown had changed to a light olive green (way prettier than the brown).
Here's the end result:
The first two skeins are from the first dip--wool first then the wool/silk blend. The center two skeins were from the overnight soak and the last two skeins were the overnight with copper soak. My camera apparently doesn't like olive green since it didn't quite capture the color properly. They are a bit less blue and and a bit more green than the above picture. The reds, however, are about right. Our next question is: how light fast is the color?
While we were dying with the amaranth, we also had a dye pot of madder going. The dye in madder is in their roots which are woody. I had soaked the roots for two days in water, then tried to chop them in a blender (one not used for food prep, and tried is the operative word here. The blender refused the challenge.) We had simmered the roots for an hour and still didn't get all of the dye out of them. Using the same fiber and methods as with the amaranth, we dyed several skeins of wool:
All three skeins were soaked over night in the madder dye. The top skein was treated with alum, the middle skein with magnesium and the bottom skein with calcium. We had read that magnesium and calcium could also act as mordants, we we decided to try them. The result was that those two skeins ended up being far lighter than the alum treated skein. So we have our doubts about them working as a mordant. Since the calcium and magnesium looked about the same, we tossed the calcium skein back into the pot (which looked like it still had dye present) and added copper to the pot to see what would happen. We again simmered for 30 minutes and then left the skein to soak over night. The result was a pinkish gray color. The unevenness is due to not filtering out all the bits of madder and the part of the skein that sat on the bottom was dyed darker than the top.
Conclusions: The red amaranth gave us about the same color as the madder (with the alum mordant) and is way easier to use and grow.