Naturally Dyed - Nevada County Dyed

Probably about six years ago, I learned that you could get pretty good natural dye colors on cellulose fibers if you used aluminum acetate as a mordant.  I ordered some from Earthues along with a scouring agent.  Right about the same time, mushrooms began a big bloom on the mountain here - something that happens every year, but this particular season it was spectacular.  I started harvesting mushrooms and seeing if they would give me  good color on 10/2 tencel.  Some did, a lot didn't.  The Butter Boletes were pretty good and the Bitter Bolete gave me a soft green that was lovely.  Since I was on a roll dyeing tencel, I cracked out some dried marigold flowers I had harvested at the Nevada County fair grounds (after they had been uprooted at the end of the season by their gardeners).  Marigolds are an especially pleasing gold which was cool.  Then, over the next few years I dyed with locally harvested Osage Orange, dug up my madder roots and used those, picked Rabbit Brush at a little higher altitude and got a screaming good yellow.  A friend who lives nearby has a big Black Walnut tree and welcomed me coming by in the fall to collect the dropped walnuts in their hulls. 

My dyeing frenzy died down and I put all of the yarns away for an inspiration.  Over the years, I've used some of them, but I had dyed quite a bit of yarn.  Then, earlier this year our weaving group, the Not 2 Square weavers, decided to sponsor a textile challenge at the local fair.   The theme would be Nevada County inspired.  Most people decided to use a photo of something local for their inspiration, but I had the hot idea of pulling out all these tencel skeins dyed from plants grown in Nevada County.  Since I had so many colors and I wanted to include as many as possible, I opted for a plaid woven with five thread satin structures.

This is just a portion of the threading and liftplan I used.  I kept the Rabbit Brush usage to small stripes because it was rather overwhelming next to the more subtle golds and browns.  I had one skein of cream color from some mushroom or other which acted very strangely when I used the fly shuttle.  It seemed like it was sticky and pulled in at the selvedges.  I wanted to use it, so I kept tugging the selvedge back into shape after the shuttle was thrown.  I could see or feel no difference in the thread, but the dye process must have changed the texture of the yarn in some way.

The fair judging is over now and I have no idea how I did with my shawl.  It really doesn't matter all that much, because it was such a pleasurable journey in the dyeing and weaving.  It was really just for me that I wove it.

 

 



The Downside of Natural Dyeing

This is a picture of me harvesting dead branches from Osage Orange trees in 2003.  I  only took dead branches for my dye project, knowing that there was ample dye in them to color several pounds of yarn.  Today I returned to take pictures of the trees to accompany a little story about their value as a dye plant and found that they had been cut -- all of them.  They are regenerating from the roots and are about my height now, so this took place several years ago.  Nothing else has been disturbed in this area, so who ever cut them, must have been thinking of chipping the wood for dye.

It breaks my heart to see this kind of destructiveness.  Osage Orange is not an endangered species and they are very hardy so I think they will survive.  But it is senseless and wasteful to have cut the four or five mature trees you see in the top picture.


I have been open about where I find my dye plants.  I fear that my information about these trees may have led someone to cut them down.  I'll be more careful in the future and I hope that my message to collect dye plants respectfully will be heard.

Sprucing Up My Inventory

This is a hat I called "Barbara" on Etsy and elsewhere.  It was spun from Merino wool that I handpainted and then Navajo plied to keep the colors clear.  It was pretty, but a bit pastel and although it was labor intensive, didn't appeal to anyone enough to buy this past season. (I have more than one of these - pretty, but well, I don't need another hat.)  So some of my losers have gone in for an overdye - some have been unraveled to make another attempt at wonderful and some have undergone several transitions to see if they could muster just a bit more customer appeal.  

"Barbara" got an overdye of pale yellow and a knitted flower embellishment using some singles wool that I had just a bit of. BTW,  I found the flower pattern and many more in 100 Flowers to Knit & Crochet by Lesley Stanfield. I like the new colors and am pleased as punch with the little top knot. 

Using Up the Fancy Yarns

This shawl was the culmination of  several dyeing projects and a knitting project.  Quite a few years ago, my mother bought a kntting kit for a beautiful sweater.  She was an excellent knitter, but because age was starting to catch up to her memory , she couldn't remember the pattern and finally turned it over to me to finish.  There were balls of a beautiful felted yarn left over and some of those colors were the magenta, dull lavender and darkish purple you see in the woven shawl.  I had some alpaca/wool that I dyed purple and some fine lace weight yarn that I had painted for my local yarn store and finally ended up buying myself.  The owner couldn't sell it and wanted an overdye job, but I couldn't bear to color over my lovely  purple paint job. 

The warp was done with three ends of the lace weight and one end of the heavier sweater yarn in five big stripes.  I didn't have enough of the lace weight yarn or the sweater yarn for the weft, so I dyed more alpaca/wool and some fine Merino wool.  Once I started weaving, I realized I would need more of the Merino and since I never dye to specifications, I went for an entirely different lavender - and then another magenta.  Weave, dye, weave, dye.  After all those improvisations, the shawl turned out pretty nice after all!

The draft was taken from Handweaving.net and when I originally downloaded it, it was a six shaft draft.  I converted it to eight shafts and when I went back to retrieve the draft for this post, I see that it is 8 shaft there now as well.  (Draft 41906).  The fancy yarns float on the surface of one side and are just caught up in little dots on the other side, making it a two sided fabric.

And, I finished the tied weave shawl (alpaca and painted Merino) and it's on its way to a new owner.

Solar Natural Dyeing - Part II

red sandlewood, alkanet root, cochineal, cochineal, osage orange and dodder.

 

 

Igor had a project on the loom in colors similar to these.  He thought about making a shawl in the same colors and same pattern, so I thought it might be a fun thing to see if I could replicate the colors in his scarves.  My colors are more subdued and I didn't manage to get purple, but I liked the way they all go together.  The yarn is baby alpaca and silk from Henry's Attic.

After a false start with the red sandlewood powder, I found that the dye needed to be extracted with alcohol before I used it in the dye pot.  The alkanet root was the same procedure.  Cochineal bugs were ground and boiled to extract their dye (very potent stuff).  Osage orange wood had been run through my chipper and sat in a water filled plastic bucket for weeks and weeks in the sun until the liquid was almost black.  The dodder was a whim.  I had heard that it could be used in natural dyeing, but had never tried it.  I found some growing on local bindweed plants and collected a bunch.  I extracted the dye in the same solar method as I had with the osage orange.  Looked like plenty of color before I dyed with it, but it was pretty weak.  I think you would need to collect a lot to get more color and I suspect that other species that are oranger in color might work better as well.



Fustic, Osage Orange, Wolf Lichen

Here are some skeins of  dyed handspun.  The fustic was from an extract, but dyed solar.  The osage orange is on stretch Merino, sun dyed and the last wolf lichen skein was dyed after I boiled the lichen for several hours.  I really like the fustic skein color right now, but wouldn't it make a wonderful green with an indigo overdye?

Everything here was mordanted with alum, except the wolf lichen skein.  Many lichens are substantive (plant material acts as a mordant).

Solar Natural Dyeing Part 1 - Madder

There's lots that is wonderful about living in the country.  But there are a few things that aren't great.  One is living with well water.  My well has lots of iron in it and tends to be a bit murky when it is being fed with winter snow melt.  That's not great for dyeing  - natural or synthetic.  So I collect water when it rains in buckets and melt snow water when it snows.  Then in the summer, I have a source of fairly pure water for my dyeing experiments.

For quite a few years now, I have tried to harness the power of the sun to heat my mordant pots and extract some dyes.  I bought some great clear 5 and 2 1/2 gallon buckets with clear lids from a restaurant supply place.  They were sort of expensive, as I remember, but I have been using them quite a while now and since they were good quality plastic, they are holding up well.  With lids on tight, the liquids in the buckets get pretty hot on a warm summer's day.  Too hot to hold your hand in the liquid.

This summer I had plans for lots of natural dyeing to get rid of some of the large stash of plant material I have stored.  Plus, I had harvested my madder plants that had been growing for 7 years last fall.  I chopped  up roots and put them in a crock pot to heat and reheat in the early spring.  At first, the yarn was a brownish red.  I cranked up the heat a bit and got more color.  Then, I took out the roots and chopped them a little finer - more color.  Finally as skeins got to be cherry red, the pot ran out of steam and lapsed into a soft peach.  I might have gotten more color, but I was tired of the process and called it quits. 

Handspun wool dyed with madder roots.

I have more madder in my dye supplies and will have another go at dyeing handspun later this fall or winter.  But, I must say dyeing with plants I had nurtured for several years was pretty cool.

8/2013 I just found this little U-Tube Video about dyeing with madder root.  Not a lot of information, but instructive about not getting the roots too hot.

Summer Dyeing

I have a stash of dyes and a stash of white yarn.  Since I'm not usually a weaver of "white" things, my summer project will be to turn as much white into color as possible.  I'm a bit out of practice because last summer was dry and I didn't want to push the limits of my well with endless rinsing, so I just didn't dye anything.  This year I gathered a lot of rain water in 5 gallon buckets (with lids) and am using that to dye with and some well water too - because there was a nice normal rainfall.

Dyeing protein fibers with acid dyes is easy and doesn't use much water.  The dyes (I use Lanaset and Sabraset) are usually exhausted leaving pretty much clear water at the end.  On the other hand, dyeing cellulose fibers with fiber reactive dyes isn't so straight forward.  To get even results on your yarn (or T shirt), you need to use salt.  I hate using salt because I don't want to put it into my septic tank, and I don't like pouring much of it on the ground.  So, I opt to do paint my yarns with the dye and leave them covered with plastic wrap for a couple of days so that the dye will react with the fiber in the yarn.

Several weeks ago I got out my dye notebooks and followed my usual procedure of scouring the yarn in my dyeing crock pots, soaking it in a soda ash solution and painting on the dissolved dye.  My cotton skeins turned out very pale - probably not enough soda ash to make the dye react.  I started looking around for another method that might be more fool proof (me being the fool)!  I found  instructions from Straw Into Gold and they indicate the use of baking soda, but I substituted soda ash.  The real trick here is to only mix up as much dye as you are going to use in one setting because adding the soda ash to the dye mixture will cause it to react.  My solution is to have a T-Shirt handy to overdye with the leftovers - but I'll probably need to think of something else soon or get better at judging the amount of dye I'm going to use. 

 I have done a couple of fiber reactive sessions now and I'm pleased with the results. The skeins in the photo are bamboo (the reds) and cotton (the blues and greens).  I skein them on my warping wheel and don't bother to readjust it for a standard two yards, so  my skeins are three yards in diameter.  This gives me the opportunity to make longer color sequences.  I usually paint three or four skeins at once so that the color sequences will be the same. 

One of the things that used to really bother me was how difficult it was to get the dye to stop bleeding once you got to the rinsing process.  I find that there are two approaches that work well.  One is to fill a bucket with hot water and let your dyed items sit in it for several hours or overnight.  The other is to bring your dyed items to a simmer in a pot with a little detergent.  The unreacted dye bonds with the water molecules in the presence of heat.  Then when you rinse, your skein will stop bleeding dye and your finished item won't bleed either. I gleaned this tip from Synthetic Dyes for Natural Fibers by Linda Knutson, but only after having been throughly frustrated by instructions that say to rinse until the water is clear. Good advice, but it stops short of telling you how to achieve this miracle.

I've got some more dyeing schemes up my sleeve.  Stay tuned for what comes next.