Weaving and spinning

My sister pointed out that I haven't blogged for a while, days have slipped past here and I hadn't realised how they were turning to weeks, so here's a bit of an update on a couple of projects.

I finished the scarf that I was weaving with a handspun madder warp and have enjoyed wearing it the past couple of weeks. Here it is pictured with one of the scarves I wove last year. They both had similar Noro Sock Yarn warps, both 2.5m long on the loom and 8 inches wide, however, the scarf with the handspun warp is narrower because there are less interactions between warp and weft in the weave pattern and because the weft yarn shrank.

Both are lovely to wear, the wider scarf I wear folded, the narrow one wraps around like a stiff, warm collar. Longer tassels looked right on the narrower scarf, and I have been interested to notice that they swing about gracefully when I wear the scarf (unless it is tightly tucked in my button coat for extra warmth - still very wintery here!).

The Ashford Traveller wheel has been in use most evenings as I spin my natural dyed wool into yarns, pictured here in one of those useful baskets I wove last month.


The Traveller got to misbehaving again, lots of creaks and groans. I have removed the cardboard shim I used to fix a loose leg and replaced it with a slip of plastic cut from a milk carton, which should not compress so easily. Having done that, I realised all the legs were now loose so have done the same to them all! It is spinning beautifully again now. I hope to get some good tips on wheel care at an event organised by Wingham Wool Work at the start of next month when Richard Ashford will be visiting along with David Herring from the UK importers for talks, demos, art yarn lessons and wheel care. Richard Ashford is due to be at an event hosted by Wingham Wool on 1st and 2nd April, with The Threshing Barn on 3rd April, and possibly also Twist Fibre Craft studio on 30th March if enough people are interested, so if you do want to go along phone the appropriate shop now and book.

Getting back now to the weaving of my scarf, it occured to me that maybe not everyone knows about this handy little gadget which I bought from Handweavers Studio.


It is a balloon spring and fits on the shaft of my bobbin winder enabling me to wind my plastic Leclerc shuttle bobbins easily. The bobbin winder shaft is narrow and fits the cheap cardboard bobbins perfectly, but everything else needs wedging on somehow.


The Leclerc shuttles are lovely to hold and use.


I have got to know more new weavers recently, and more people taking up weaving for the first time, so thought it might be handy to include the odd weaving technique tip nowadays. This is what I do with the yarn end when I empty a shuttle bobbin. It slips into the same shed as the last pick, I take it across 1-2" and leave an end poling out of the cloth. The new yarn is started in reverse fashion, I lay a short end into the next shed, wrap it around the selvedge, then weave as normal. On the floor loom when working on wide warps with a heavy shuttle I find it necessary to hold the little end of the new thread while throwing the shuttle to stop it from pulling out.

When the new and old ends are several inches into the cloth I snip them off close to the fabric so that it is hard to see where they were.

Editing this post 09/03/09 to bring in this helpful comment from Alison:
Your tip is excellent, but can I suggest that you don't snip until the
fabric is fulled/washed/finished. I was taught to mend, finish, then
snip and trim fringes, in that order. If you don't overlap sufficiently
and snip first the over lap can be compromised. There's a better chance
of all being well if you finish first then snip. Thanks Alison!

While taking these photos I also thought you might like to see the swinging beater I have now fitted to my table loom. Very useful, as I can beat with the reed parallel to the cloth over a wider range.


For those of you who've missed this - The 2010 Challenge for weavers is started via Meg's blog and Kaz has already posted about it. I'm not participating due to other pressures on my time but am working on a blog post reviewing books on design.

Another blog post I'd like to call to the attention of all weavers is this wonderful post demonstrating how to tie a Weaver's Knot. Many thanks to Alison for mentioning it a few weeks back, it is a revelation as I have struggled to follow diagrams in books and been much puzzled as to how it became so well used in spite of being difficult to tie. Now I know there's a simple trick to getting it right.

A handspun, madder-dyed weft.

I could ask you to guess what is pictured below:
For most people this is an unsual sight and unexpected, probably not a fair question.

This is the underside of my Ashford Traveller spinning wheel.

Ever since I got this wheel I was trying to track down and eliminate odd creaks and groans from the wheel. I tightened and replace many screws. In spite of my efforts it was getting more creaky, and becoming very hard to treadle, especially I discovered on un-carpeted floors - a clue here. With a bit of investigation I discovered that every time I pressed the treadle one of the legs moved sideways. I found the leg is fitted in with a screw, and unlike the other three legs it was loose. When I undid the screw I could easily take it out, but I could not get it to fit back in without wobbling as the hole it fitted into was oversized. What you see in the photo is a shim of old Christmas card taking up the spare space. It does the job, no more wobbly leg.

However, there was still a groaning from the treadle. I found that every single screw in the treadle needed an extra half turn. Having sorted this out, I oiled everything and went back to spinning - wow! it's like a different wheel. Tip for anyone with a grumbling & groaning wheel: check all the joints, tighten all the screws, oil all the moving parts.


So, what have I been up to with this spinning wheel? Spinning a weft yarn to weave another scarf on my table loom. After I finished the handspun, handwoven scarf at Christmas I was filled with the joy of weaving and thought "another!". I pulled a pretty multicoloured Noro yarn out of a stash box for weft, prepared the warp, warped the loom, but then I was stuck. I just couldn't find a weft to match it. I tried cotton, I tried wools in different colours, I tried bright colour and I tried neutrals.

It dawned on me that the weeks I spent thinking about colours and weave pattern for the handspun & handwoven scarf I'd just finished were not just idle thinking but very important creative planning and design time.

I stopped to think.

One thought I had was that I have many different fibres to spin and I have dyes and I can create the yarn I want. I looked at some different colours and found I had Shetland wool fibre dyed that I had dyed with madder last summer and the orange-red colour was just what I needed for this warp.

So, weaving had to wait while I spun a new weft yarn.



I had spun all the madder-dyed wool I had, but didn't even have one full bobbin. I know a bobbin holds about 100g of yarn which is the amount I have used in the past for weft in a scarf like this.


Spinning had to wait while I dyed more wool.


I managed a reasonably close match, one ball is slightly more red, the other slightly more orange so I'm weaving alternately with the two yarns in two shuttles.


The pattern I've chosen is my favourite 4-shaft undulating twill, as you can see in the header row bellow. I wove the header in high-contast thick white yarn so I can see what is happening in the warp easily. As the straight edge shows, I needed to adjust the tension on some of the warp. Towards the right of the photo you'll see the white weft yarn doesn't quite reach the straight edge, although it does on either side. Looking at this I know that means I have some tighter weft threads in that area. The weft yarn packs up closer in tight sections so the edge of the weaving dips towards the weaver, whilst in a loose section the warp threads would bulge away.


It's good to be fussy and slow when you start a piece of weaving and correct little errors like this, I have learnt that leaving anything I'm not entirely happy with at this stage is likely to mean that later on the problem has become magnified and I am unhappy with the cloth. When I was a new weaver I rushed the loom set up, but after various different disappointments I learnt that being relaxed about preparing the loom and fussing over little things would save heartache later.

I'm delighted with the colour of my madder weft. Maybe I've spun it a little thick, but we'll have to see how it is when it comes off the loom.

Just to finish up, these are some of the wefts I tried that didn't work! The first was a green knitting cotton, as I like green and orange and though the shiny cotton yarn might be a good contrast with the Noro wool. It was not good.

I also tried neutrals, a grey and a soft brown.

I much prefer the madder-dyed yarn!

Japanese Indigo, part 3

For a second time, I filled a jar with leaves from my Japanese Indigo plants, covered the leaves with water and left them soaking.

(Other names of this plant are Persicaria Tinctoria, formally Polgonum Tinctoria, also called Dyer's Knotweed).

There were less leaves in the jar and I left it for 9 days (instead of 7) because I was busy with other things. The yellow colour of the liquid around the leaves seemed more soupy than before. It had stood in our kitchen, which was generally around 20 degrees centigrade. I took the jar as before and heated slowly in a bain marie to 68 degrees centigrade, after an hour I took it off the heat and let it cool a bit before draining off the liquid.

When this was done the leaves time were a slimy mush. Last time I used this dyestuff I had not left the leaves soaking so long beforehand and the residue at this stage was more like over cooked spinach, this time they were more like something out of a stagnent pond. That's what they smelt like too!


This method produced a much greater quantity of blue dye, even though there were less leaves. In the photograph below you can see the results of my first dyeing session on the right (100g wool, approx 30g silk) the yarns on the left (200g wool) were dyed from the second jar of leaves.

Knowing that the photo sequence I posted in part 2, showing the colour change, was of particular interest to several readers, I took some more photos of what happens as the dye oxidises. I tried to count seconds as well, but found that a bit tricky as well as holding the yarn and taking photos. I think it was less than 5 seconds, certainly not more than 5. (Please note this picture is a series of 5 photos that I have pasted together.)

The yarn looks shiny here due to being wet, and a bit more turquoise than it was when rinsed and dried.

I think that maybe the last Japanese Indigo session this year. However, I may have enough woad to give that a go (about 5 plants have survived inspite of the greedy slugs) and I have a purchased sachet of "natural indigo" to try out.

I'll be letting my plants regrow now, and expect them to flower in October / November and then produce seed for next year. I have 3 plants that I did not cut back flowering on a windowsill in the house already. I'm told that keeping seed of at least 3 plants is important to ensure genetic diversity in the seed.

Just a note about indigo in general - Persicaria tinctoria (originally from Vietnam and south China,long used in Japan and China) is just one of a large number of plants that yield indigo. Others popularly used for dyeing include:
Isatis tinctoria, the European plant "woad" called "pastel" in french);

• Isatis indigotica - a relative of woad found in China;
• Indigofera arrecta, originally from east Africa, also grown in Indonesia and the Phillipines;
• Indigofera cerulea from north west India;
• Indigofera tinctoria, from tropical Asia, probably originally India;
• Indigofera suffruticosa, used in ancient civilisations of Mexico and in Peru, later introduced to Indonesia.

Other sources of information:
For anyone who wants to learn more about this dye plant, I recommend Teresinha's Wild Colours website. She is offering seed for sale, and I'm sure she is a good source for seed as it seems to be very important that the seed is fresh. Seed I purchased from a large seed company a couple of years ago did not germinate.

A Dyer's Garden, Rita Buchanan, pub. Interweave Press, 1995, ISBN 1-883010-07-1
two pages about the Japanese Indigo (under the name Dyer's Knotweed) and how to grow it, two more pages on dyeing with indigo plants.

A Weaver's Garden, Rita Buchanan, Dover Publications, 1999, (abridged version of longer text published by Interweave Press in 1987), ISBN 0-486-40712
18 pages on Indigo, which includes chemistry, history, dye instructions, and a page and a half dedicated to Japanese Indigo (under the name Dyer's Knotweed)

A Dyer's Manual, Jill Goodwin, 2nd edition Ashmans Publications, 2003, ISBN 0-9544401-0-2
A very useful book on dyeing from plants you can grow or find in hedgerows which has a whole chapter on "Indigo" including woad and Japanese Indigo (under the alternative name, Dyer's Knotweed).

Natural Dyes: Sources, Tradition, Technology and Science, by Dominique Cardon, published in June 2007 by Archetype Publications Ltd.
The most wonderful reference book imaginable for anyone seriously interested in natural dyes, and the only book I have found that is really good on the chemistry of natural dyes.
I have the original French edition (cheaper, bought from www.Amazon.fr):
Le Monde des Teintures Naturelles, par Domonique Cardon, pub. Belin, 2003, ISBN 9-782701-126784-01.

I also have to recommend the Guild I belong to, Online Guild of Weavers Spinners and Dyers. I was given the seeds and dyeing instructions by a fellow Guild member, and several members of the Guild have been involved in a valuable discussion this summer about our experiences of growing and using the plants.

This link gathers together all my posts about Japanese Indigo (in reverse order).

Japanese Indigo, part 2.

In the centre of this photo is a pale jade yarn which I dyed a week after the other yarns, in the remains of the dyebath.
When I finished the first dye session I had poured a very yellow looking solution back into my Kilner jar. I wondered whether it was very yellow because of becoming over reduced, and whether there was any dye left. The instructions that were given to me with the plant seeds suggested that a final item could be left in the dyebath over night to pick up any remaining colour. However, too tired to bother with this, I left the jar for a week.

After a week, I wondered whether to dispose of the dyebath, but I still had a couple of skeins of yarn that I'd prepared and not used and the dye bath had regained a greenish tint. I decided to have a go, after all, if I didn't like the result I could always over-dye another time.

Looking at the yarn in this dyebath, I really did wonder if anything would happen!

But it did - this is what happened when I pulled the skeins out and the dye oxidised:

And now I'm Dyeing!!

 It took about 3 weeks to manage to carry out the plan of picking leaves from my Persicaria tinctorium (formally called Polygonum tinctorium) plants and putting them in a large Kilner jar covered with water. I meant to leave them a few days to ferment, but with the ongoing struggle to do much at all that turned into a week. Nevermind. They started fermenting in the jar, the water at the bottom went yellow and the leaves got pushed to the top by gas bubbles, the water at the top surface turned blue. Today I got the Kilner jar into a bain marie - that involved the stainless steel dye bucket with a metal basket from my pressure cooker under the Kilner jar to ensure it was not in contact with the bottom of the pan. I followed instructions from one of my friends in the Online Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers (who had sent me the plant seeds) and heated it very slowly to just under 71 degrees centigrade and now it's cooling. The next stage involves draining the liquid off the leaves and using an alkali solution (made with Washing Soda from Fibrecrafts) and spectralite... sorry can't remember what I do next, must look at the instructions again. Anyhow, photos soon. By the way, I have also wound a warp... more on that another time.

Books and sources on natural dyeing

I was going to load up pictures of my weaving today, but when I got down to the library today, for some unknown reason their computer won't link to blogger, so no photos today. Instead, Deborah has asked for some tips on getting a dye garden started, good books etc. These are my book recommendations for learning about plants you might use and growing them: Dye Plants and Dyeing, by John & Margaret Cannon, published by A&C Black in association with the The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2003 edition, ISBN 9780713663747, £14.99. This book focuses on plants (rather than dyeing techniques) and includes some scientific and historical information. Each double page gives a full page painting of the plant and information about using it to dye. However, it is not about planting & growing the plants so you'll want another book for that. A Dyer's Garden, from plant to pot - growing dyes for natural fibres. By Rita Buchanan, pub. Interweave Press, ISBN 1-883010-07-1, £9.99 Only a small book, but full of useful information and the title describes it well. A Dyer's Manual, by Jill Goodwin, 2nd edition 2003, pub. by Ashmans Publications, ISBN 0-9544401-0-2, £14.95

A lovely book in which an expert in using natural dyes passes on a lifetime's experience of growing and using dye plants. Includes a useful and extensive lists of plants and the colours they give. Website for this book: Ashmans Publications There are many other books I like about natural dyes, but these are the best for someone in the UK who wants to grow plants in their garden to use in dyeing. Then there are the websites and blogs: Teresinha's website on growing and using woad. Teresinha on growing and using other dye plants both these web sites are absolutely excellent, very highly recommended. Yes she does sell dyestuffs, but she also has superb information on growing your own. Yes she is a friend of mine - but I don't think I'm biased, she knows her stuff and is generous with information. Author of several books on natural dyes, only not recommended as they are not about growing plants, Jenny Dean has a lovely and informative blog. Do take a look. Another of my friends whose blog I'd like to recommend, Helen Melvin. Do especially take a look at this superb post about mordants for natural dyes - what they are, when, how and why to use them. Click here for the archive list from this blog of everything I have written about natural dyes.

Dyed with home-grown nettles

We have a large garden where there's spaces for interesting weeds to lurk. This means I can always find useful dye plants, such as nettle, dock and bramble.

Early this summer I dyed some Shetland wool tops with nettles from the garden. I have learnt by this experience and consequent advice from more experienced dyers that if you put combed wool tops in the dye bath they felt a bit. Oops!

Fortunately this was an inconvenience rather than a disaster. I had to tease the wool apart with my fingers, then I used hand carders to get the wool ready to spin.


I'm very pleased with this yarn. You can probably tell it is not the best, most evenly spun yarn, but it's not too bad and certainly good enough for it's intended use in a knitted hat to wear for gardening in the winter. I'm thinking of using some other natural dyed yarn colours and natural black Shetland for contrast.

I mixed the two colours on the carders, they aren't totally blended as I wanted a marled yarn. rather than a blended shade. The mordant in the original dye bath, to get the yellow, was alum (10%) and cream of tartar (8%). Then, after removing half the wool I added a pinch of iron to modify the colour and give green.

I wish I'd had more time for using natural dyes this summer, but summer was gone before the sun came out this year and many garden things did not get done.

Little treasures

As I'm sure many of you have realised, I love books, and to some extent I collect them (at least, they seem to collect all around me). That's not collect in the sense of investing money, it's collect in the sense of gathering knowledge and building a reference library.

This means that every time I find a really good book, I turn to the back and see if there's a bibliography, and look to see what titles I recognise.

Again and again in the bibligraphies of books on natural dyeing, I saw the words "Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record of Plants and Gardens". There were two different titles:

Natural Plant Dyeing, A Handbook, Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record Plants & Gardens Vol. 29, No.2, 1973

and

Dye Plants and Dyeing - a handbook, Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record Plants & Gardens Vol. 20, No.3, 1964.

Another title that came up from time to time was:

Journal of the Chicago Horticultural Society, Vol. III, no.1, Winter 1976.



To give you an idea of how influential these titles are, at least one of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden titles is cited in all these works (brief book details):
Anne Milner, The Ashford Book of Dyeing,
Jill Goodwin, A Dyer's Manual,
Su Grierson, The Colour Cauldron,
Jean Carmen, Dyemaking with Eucalypts,
Rita Buchanan, A Dyer's Garden,
J N Liles, The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing,
John & Margaret Canon, Dye Plants and Dyeing,
Jenny Balfour Paul, Indigo
Gwen Fereday, Natural Dyes
Dominique Cardon, Le Monde des teintures naturelles.

I'm sure I'll get around to telling you more about some of these other books in due course, however, the particular reason for writing about my little treasures is to highlight their value and say these publications need looking taking care of.

Why do I say this? Because in spite of their value, and in spite of my experience, determination, and tenacity in hunting down copies of second hand books, they were very, very hard to find.

And when I found the first two, they were on the shelf of a second hand book shop I was visitng because of a different title that I'd seen advertised on the internet. These little treasures had not only not been recognised as valuable enough to advertise, they were tucked away on the shelf and priced at a mere £1.50 each. Now, I love a bargain, and I was absolutely delighted not only to find these booklets but also to buy them cheap. My other purchase turned up after a year of so of looking, on the Loom Exchange website, again, inexpensive. But these bargains set alarm bells ringing in my head. The Brooklyn Botanic Gardens titles were special reprints, and reprinted several times over. So where have they all gone?

They are volumes, what we in Europe describe as A5 size, stapled (not bound) and as journals, they are slightly more substantial than a magazine. So how many of these volumes have been over looked, discarded as small and worthless, or just got worn out and been thrown away?

It is about time I told you why these publications are of such interest. The Journal of the Chicago Horticultural Society, Vol.III no.1, is a small handbook on growing dye plants and using natural dyes. It is slightly out of date, in that the amount of mordant to volume of fibre used by dyers nowadays is generally rather less than described. Apart from that, and not having colour pictures, it is an excellent instruction book, concise and easy to follow, with much information laid out in easy to read charts and tables.

Both the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens publications are in more magazine type format. They have an introduction followed by a number of different articles relating to the title.

To let them speak for themselves, the introduction of the 1964 volume says "This handbook on natural plant dyes and how to use them has many objectives, not the least of which is to help in the revival of an ancient craft..." that sets the scene for you. With regard to the contributions: "Guest Editor Schetky, her invited authors and members of our Editorial Committee have pooled their ideas, knowledge and resources to bring this hundred-page book into being. Warm responses to inquiries in other countries have given us a feeling of great friendship for people in many parts of the world... Their dyeing formulas, including how-to-do it recipes from 18 different countries, are given here...". The 1974 volume introduction tells us "interest in dyeing with natural plant materials has grown sharply since 1964....letters, literally hundreds of them from the United States and other lands, have prompted this companion edition."

The 14 articles in the first volume include: "Tannins and Dyes from Plant Galls", "Dyes of Ancient Usage", "Family Dyeing in Colonial New England", "Notes on Aztec Dye Plants", "Dye Plants in a Scottish Garden". The 1973 volume has 28 contributions including articles on madder, indigo, pokeweed, eucalypts, "A Practical Approach to the Use of Lichens", "The Sleepy Hollow Restoration Shawls", "Coreopsis for reds on cotton and wool", "Plant Dyeing in new Zealand", "Southwest Navjo Dyes". There is so much here, I can't re-publish it all for you. it is a wealth of information, short articles written by writers who knew their subject well. There is history, chemistry, botany, dyeing technique, different traditions from around the world.

If you have, or ever come across, one of these titles, please look after it.

Welcome to my library - some books on natural dyeing.

Today, I took time off, left my pre-occupations and hobbies at home and off I went to a secondhand book fair, partly to meet up with a friend, partly because you just never know what you might find in hunting around the book stalls. I often pick up interesting books on all kinds of subjects, e.g. on previous occasions, windmills, cheesemaking, architecture, Escher.

To my amazement, today I found a book I have been wanting, and I'm delighted with it. For just £3 I picked up a very good copy of "A Dyer's Garden", subtitle "from plant to pot - growing dyes for natural fibres", by Rita Buchanan, Interweave Press, 1995, ISBN 1-883010. I don't know how many copies of this special interest book, published in the U.S., might be in circulation in England, probably not many, so I think it was my lucky day. I already have another book by Rita, "A Weavers Garden", in the Dover republication of 1999, ISBN 0-486-40712-8.

The Weaver's garden book covers dye plants, so I'd not been entirely sure that I needed both books. I have discovered the content of the Dyer's book is quite different, and very useful. So, I have discovered that the Weaver's book is not a re-print, it covers different plants and has a more discursive approach. The Dover edition has few pictures, but is a very interesting read. Lots of background research went into the preparation for this book (and there's long lists of further reading). It covers history and chemistry as well as dye methods. It includes plants for soap, fibre, fragrance (e.g. to deter moths) and make tools. Both books include suggestions of planting schemes for different gardens.

The Dyer's book is smaller, and it's pretty. After chapters on choosing and growing plants, planning a garden, the basics of dyeing and a whole chapter on colours, the second half of the book is all double-page spreads each featuring a different plant. It has a picture of the plant, information about the plant and how to grow it and, on the facing page, dyeing information with a range of colour samples (in photos).

Both books are lovely, very readable.

As you will see from the picture above, I already had a number of books on dyeing. They all have different information and I value them all for different reasons, which I will tell you about in future posts. However, in the meantime you can see my review of a newly published book, Natural Dyes, by Linda Rudkin, pub. A & C Black 2007, The Textiles Handbook Series, ISBN 978-0-7136-7955-7 on the Textile Directory web site.

Logwood

I used the traditional dye Logwood for the first time recently. Historically this dye was very important, especially as a source of navy blue (obtained with potassium bichrome mordant) from 1800 onwards, but I find when I talk to people who aren't dyers that while they have heard of woad, indigo and madder, this and many other natural dyes have slipped out of general knowledge. Jill Goodwin in A Dyers Manual says Logwood, from the south american native tree Haematoxylon campecianum was known in England from the time of Queen Elizabeth I, but its use was prohibited by law until 1661, as dyers needed to learn to how use mordants to make this dye lasting. The chips of logwood sold as dyestuff come from the heartwood of the tree, which is cut down when about 10 years old. Rita Adrosko in Natural Dyes and Home Dyeing and Rita Buchanan in A Dyers Garden both recommend soaking the logwood chips for at least a few days as fermentation that occurs when the logwood is soaked leads to better results. Rita Buchanan says the choice of mordant is important because logwood does not last long when alum or tannins are used, and best results are obtained when using chrome or iron.

I wish I'd read these books before I did this work with logwood, as I've used only alum mordant and also hadn't seen that Jill Goodwin recommends the dyer to stop heating the dyebath when the wool is added for best, clearest colour.

Here are the results of my experiment, the wool my usual superwashed merino, the mordant my usual pre-mordant of 10% alum (potassium aluminium sulphate) and 8% cream of tartar (potassium hydrogen tartrate). Progressively lighter shades were obtained from the same dyebath, until I ran out of wool.




The next photo shows how one of those magical dyebath transformations has occured - see how the colour of the dyebath the wool went into, and the first colour shown by the wool in the dyebath, was most definitely orange.

Dyes from Dock seed heads

Just a quick photo here to show the colours I obtained from the pre-soaked seed heads of the broad leaf dock plant, Rumex obtusifolius. For several weeks I kept checking the plants (which grow wild in our garden) to see when the seeds would be ready. I was keen to try using the seed heads after reading in Su Grierson's book "The Colour Cauldron" (self published, 1979 reprint, now out of print) that a red dye could be obtained if the seed heads were given regular heating over a few days. She obtained apricot / caramel shades and first and thought this red was coming through because of decomposition of the dyestuff. I think I should have used more plant material to get a stronger colour.

I didn't get to the brick red she described, but in the sample on the left of this picture you can see a more pink/red tone coming through. This wool sample was dyed three days after the others, with approx 3 hours heating of the dye bath in total before dyeing. Next springtime I shall try again, as I am told that the young spring leaves also give reds.

The samples to the right are, far right, with after mordant tin (stannous chloride), centre with after mordant iron (ferrous sulphate) and then both the samples on the left are only treated, as all this wool was, my usual pre-mordant of 10% alum (potassium aluminium sulphate) and 8% cream of tartar (potassium hydrogen tartrate). The wool is superwashed merino, again.

That light-fast test again...

At last I have a photo for you of the light-fast test on the Shetland wool yarns dyed with natural dyes (see my entry of August 19th).

Further discussions in the Online Guild of Weavers Spinners and Dyers helped to establish that one reason these yarns are so faded is probably that when I dyed the yarn it didn't take up the dye as well as it might, due to the amount of grease remaining in the wool. I bought the wool in washed and combed state, but another time shall give it an extra wash with a wool detergent before dyeing. I think a telling indicator of this problem is the colour of the madder dyed yarn on the left side of the card. When I dyed superwashed merino wool with madder I obtained a much stronger shade of red.

Ah, must point out here, the left hand side of the card as shown below (up to where I have drawn a line) had been covered over to stop sunlight getting to the yarn. The right hand side was exposed to full sunlight, and the card was taped to a window that can get direct sun (when it's not wet and cloudy) for two months. For this photograph I have tucked a piece of white paper between the yarns and the card because the piece of cardboard was badly sun damaged and turned yellow.

If you are slightly confused by my labels then please note that there are three strands of yarn dyed with weld and two dyed with onion skins, one strand for each of the other dyes.

Dyeing with Goldenrod

Here in a suitably yellow bucket are Goldenrod stems, leaves and flowers, picked from the garden, ready to prepare a dye bath.

I planted Goldenrod plants in my garden last year. I was very kindly sent an envelope full of roots last springtime by an Online Guild friend, Mary Carbert.

Mary grows many plants for use in dyeing, and is the daughter of an expert, Jill Goodwin, whose wonderful book "A Dyers Manual" is based on many years of practical experience. Mary is the publisher of the current edition of the book. Click on the title here for a link to a website to learn more about "A Dyers Manual" and its author. This is one of those books I treasure for being good to read, as well as being full of useful information. Just one thing I like about it is long list of common dye plants, giving English and Latin names, and listing the different colours that can be obtained with different mordants. It's a good quality edition, printed on very good paper and well bound, which I also think is important as this is a book that I pick up to read or for reference time and time again.

This next photo shows results from the dyeing with Goldenrod. From the right, the pale yellow was obtained on superwashed merino wool with just my usual pre-mordant of 10% alum (potassium aluminium sulphate) and 8% cream of tartar (potassium hydrogen tartrate). The bright yellow appeared when I added an after mordant of a pinch of tin (stannous chloride) and the green shades on the left came from an after-mordant of iron (ferrous sulphate)










The skeins of green (handspun) yarn you see on the left are shown again in the next photograph. It was Mary who prompted this, she said she had had lovely greens on grey wool. The two yarns on the left are grey Cheviot sheep, and on the right, light grey Suffolk. I am delighted with these green yarns, I think I will use them to knit a stripy beanie hat.

Natural dyes - results of tests for lightfastness.

Apologies to Online Guild members, who should have seen this on our mailing list, but these results belong here also as I have been writing about my work with natural dyes.

I have just taken down my lightfastness test cards which have been taped to
the hall window for the past two months. The cards have yarn samples wrapped around them, and the top half of each card has been protected from sunlight with a double thickness of white card over the top of the yarns, so half of each yarn has been in the sunlight and half hidden.

I tried scanning the cards, but my scanner is old and just about dead. I tried photos, but they weren't particularly useful to show the more subtle changes, so here's a description of the results.

For most of these dyes I have samples mordanted (1) with alum, (2) with iron after-mordant. In most cases the samples treated with iron after-mordant are less faded.

The most light fast dyes, barely faded at all are:

Broad leaf dock root (Rumex obtusifolius) (1) and (2)
Heather (1) and (2)
Weld (1) and (2)
Marjoram (1) and (2) (this was unexpected!)
Eucalyptus coccifera (1) and (2)

Slightly faded, with dark greenish shades becoming brownish are:

Bracken (1) and (2)
Broad leaf dock leaves (2)
Feverfew (1) and (2)

Moderate fading:

Broad leaf dock leaves (1) (went from khaki green to light brown)
Henna (1) (strong orange to soft orange)
Stinging nettle (2) (deep green has gone a bit silverly - still a lovely colour)

Badly faded - in worst cases now off-white (x) are

Twilleys Freedom Spirit (yes, a commercial, chemical dyed yarn faded more than some natural dyes!)
cutch (1)
onion (1)
Stinging nettle (1)
Madder (1) (still very pretty)
Turmeric (1) (this has gone greyish!)
Buddleia (1) (x)
Dyers chamomile (1) (x)
Buttercup (1) (x) and (2)
Buckler leaved sorrel (1) (x) and (2)

Several surprises here, for example, Feverfew kept its colour far better than I anticipated, and the commercial yarn much worse! It was well worthwhile doing these tests because the results were in most cases not what I had expected. My next sample card will included more commercial yarns, it's a useful comparison as I think we would normally assume they don't fade much.

UPDATE...

Thanks to my Online Guild friends I have been able to work out why some of my test results were unexpected. Everything that faded more than expected was a Shetland sample. This may be due to the original dye take-up being less than the dyes used on the superwashed merino. Possible reasons why include the wool not being wet through properly before dyeing, the amount of lanolin in the wool, the superwash process may improve dye take-up.

Looking at the dyes on Shetland wool:

Weld dyed samples (yellow from just Alum and C of T, also two shades
green from iron after mordant) did not fade at all. Wonderful!

Madder went from pinky red to pink - significantly less faded than
other samples on the same card (except the weld).

Turmeric yellow went grey. Even where had been covered this yarn
was greatly faded.

Showing white in part or all of the faded sample were: Cutch, onion,
henna, Dyer's Chamomile, and Buddleia.

Dyes from Eucalyptus and Buddleia.

Here are the beautiful colours I obtained from dyeing superwashed merino wool with the leaves of a Eucalyptus tree - a Tasmanian Snow Gum (Eucalyptus coccifera) - that my sister Catherine used to have growing in her garden. All the wool was pre-mordanted 10% alum (potassium aluminium sulphate) and 8% cream of tartar (potassium hydrogen tartrate). The sample on the left is treated with only this pre-mordant, the centre sample was obtained with an after-mordant of iron (ferrous sulphate) and the more golden shade on the right with an after mordant of tin (stannous chloride).

I used dyeing instructions from a wonderful Australian book, sadly out of print, "Dyemaking with Eucalypts" by Jean K. Carmen, published 1978 by Rigby Ltd. I am lucky that a 2nd hand copy turned up in the U.K. This book is especially good because it is the result of a decade's research by the author using 240 different Australian Eucalypt species. It's not a big book, and it's not a heavy read. Dyeing with Eucalypt leaves and following Jean Carmen's book is just like having a knowledgeable friend at your side.

My Eucalypt leaves, being from a Tasmanian tree, are not included in this book! However, I did use the dyeing method Jean Carmen recommends. The dried leaves were broken and soaked in water for 24 hours. The water in the pan was yellow-gold from this cold soak, even before I heated the pan and simmered it for 2 hours. I then drained the liquid into a second bowl, discarding the leaves, before dyeing my wool. My sister was staying with me and had the fun of adding the iron after-mordant and observing the colour changing before her eyes.

The tree sadly had to be cut down, it was a very big gum tree to be growing in a small town garden. Maybe it was planted by a flower arranger who had intended to keep it cut back? I understand that flower arrangers do this in order to keep a good supply of the juvenile foliage. Eucalypt leaves on new growth are round, but the mature tree produces pointy leaves.


I've also been dyeing with buddleia flowers from our garden. I used the superwashed merino again, pre-mordanted as above. These two pictures show an intersting effect of simmering buddleia flowers... they lose their colour and turn white! I've not observed this with any other flower.

I like the colours that buddleia gives. The photo here shows samples (from top) with iron after mordant, without any after mordant, and, at bottom, with tin.

I am very interested to have obtained a yellow-green with the tin. If you look at the Eucalypt above, tin gave a stronger yellow. In my post of 23rd July, you see how it turned a yellow-green from nettle to a gold-brown, and pale yellow from Feverfew to bright orange. This is the first time I've seen it turn yellow to green. The chemistry involved in dyeing with plant stuffs is clearly rather complex.

Dyes from garden and hedgerow plants.

Thinking that there were probably very good reasons why a certain range of natural dyes were used in industry (madder, weld, indigo, cutch... etc) I was a bit dubious about the idea of trying other plants in the dye pot. I thought the colours might be rather boring and might fade very fast.

I'm glad that a workshop run by members of the Online Guild of Weaver's Spinners and Dyers this summer has pushed me into trying a wider variety of plants. The results were more colourful and less boring than I expected - and the dyeing process itself was unpredictable and fun. The photo above shows a range of interesting shades obtained on superwashed merino wool, mostly with "Hedgerow" plants, many of them generally called "weeds".

I was surprised to realise that they are similar shades to those in a commercial knitting yarn I am currently knitting into a jumper. It's a yarn by Twilleys of Stamford called "Freedom Spirit" which is two ply DK. Half the yarn is shades of orange through to brown, this is plied with another yarn of pale to deep green (shade 505). So I can already see the potential in my dyed wool. Another possibility is to spin a mixed colour yarn to use for weft in weaving, probably using a commercially produced worsted in a single dark shade for warp.

Here's some of the best results. In all cases the wool wash pre-mordanted with alum (potassium aluminium sulphate) and cream of tartar (potassium hydrogen tartrate). Firstly, the common stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) and then my dyed samples.


The colours shown, left to right, are first a yellow green on wool with only the pre-mordant, in the centre an olive green produced by adding a pinch (about 1/16th teaspoon) of iron (ferrous sulphate) to the dyebath as an after-mordant, and on the right, a gold-brown from using a pinch of tin (stannous chloride) as an after mordant.




The following pictures show Feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium; syn. Chrysanthemum parthenium) firstly the plant in our garden, then in the dye pot, and in the third picture you can see the results of dyeing. This time the pre-mordant only sample is in the centre, on the left is a gold obtained by after-mordant of tin, and on the right a deep green obtained with iron as after-mordant.




I was very pleased with the results of using Feverfew, and look forward to finding out from a light-fastness test how they behave over time with exposure to sunlight. I expect fading of the colours, but how much, how fast, and what will the faded shades look like? The answers to these questions will inform my future use of this dyeplant.

Dock also gave excellent results, and has the reputation of being reasonably light fast. I dyed both with chopped up roots and with the leaves of the Broad Leaved Dock (Rumex obtusifolius). I only have photos of the samples dyed with leaves to hand. However, the root produced excellent results with a gold-brown and a dark greenish-brown.

The first picture is of the plant in our garden, the second shows results of dyeing.

There's something quite curious about these results. On the left of the picture are two samples dyed in June, before the plant flowered. The first with iron after-mordant, the second dyed in the same bath but removed before the iron was added.

On the right of the picture are samples from July, when the plant was in flower. The right-of-centre sample is the equivalent of the left-of-centre sample - the result of an hour's dyeing with dock leaves of wool pre-mordanted with alum and cream of tartar. But instead of a yellow-olive shade, here is a soft pale yellow with only the faintest hint of green. Why? Is some dye chemical that was in the leaves before not there once the flower spike is produced? The relative quantities of plant to wool were similar, so it wasn't a weaker dye bath. Possibly there is a difference from the fact that in June the leaves were soaked in cold water for a few days before dyeing, but there didn't seem to be much colour in the cold water before the dyebath was made. On the right of the picture, the strong gold shade was obtained from wool of this soft yellow when a pinch of tin went in the dyebath as after-mordant.

I am keeping record cards of my dye experiments, these are very useful already when I go to the tray of samples and wonder which one is from which plant!