Summer projects

Summer has arrived, and that means lots of opportunities to experiment with more natural dyes. Plus my brother is here from Japan, and that also means lots of tips, techniques, and of course, commentary.

He showed me how to tie up a shirt for the swirl effect. My first attempt was OK, but I didn't have the right plastic string, so we made do with cotton. We wanted to try birch bark, which was rumored to give a pinkish color, but despite following the directions, all we got was a brown. And a light one at that. The green comes from Rudbekia (Black-eyed Susan) flowers.

We started with a plastic grocery bag about half full with flowers. We poured a gallon of boiling distilled water (we have iron in our water) over them, and let them steep overnight in a stainless steel dyepot. The next day, I simmered the flowers with enough added distilled water to cover the flowers, for several hours. (BTW - stinky!) I let that cool and sit over night. Actually two nights. And then the cotton t-shirt came out of the other dyebath into this one, as more of an experiment than anything. The bark had not yielded the hoped for result, so I chalked the shirt up to a zero already...so no harm done.

It had been simmered in the bark, cooled, dipped in alum mordant (alum dissolved in more distilled water) and simmered again, then allowed to cool again. Nothing really interesting came from that. (Hence the weak tan color opposite the green swirl...)

The resulting green on the shirt after two days soaking was pretty nice. A deep bottle green. At first glance, the brother assumed the green was a result of iron influence (expecting more of a yellow green with all those yellow blossoms). He said soaking the shirt in the alum mixture in a old pot as we had might have released a bit of iron to the shirt, and he says it doesn't take much...

Well, happy with the color, I decided to experiment with a skein of superwash wool. (Sock yarn, what else?) So I put the skein in the Rudbekia liquor, and was disappointed to see a brownish color. Wanting to test the iron-in-the-water-makes-green theory, I took the skein out of the dyepot, got it wet in tap water, squeezed, and returned it to the stainless steel dyepot with the Rudbekia liquor. I added gentle heat, and occasionally stirred the yarn to even out the application of color.

While happy with the olive green I got, there's obviously more to the whole mysterious process. My addition of a tap water (iron) rinse got the dulling of color the brother predicted, which means for now, the greener color on the shirt was not due to any iron mishap with the old pot, but rather the intensity of color one can expect with that large amount of blossoms.

Next: repeat the experiment and try for the greener rather than olive.