Wednesday 13 May 2015

First attempts with wild madder

I haven't dyed with madder before and even though I'm growing a plant - see a picture of it in the previous post - I won't be harvesting it for at least another year.

However we managed to find wild madder, rubia peregrina, growing up the walls as a weed next to the mangos in the plot where we grow vegetables.


Rubia peregrina creciendo en la huerta aquí en Almuñécar.


The problem is that you use the roots so we carefully dug up a patch. They weren't very deep and now having dyed with them perhaps we should have dug deeper.





Back at home I quickly washed off most of the earth and chopped them up before they went hard, put them out to dry for a few days and then forgot about them.


Las raíces cortadas secándose

This weekend I got them out. I washed them twice quickly in hot water to wash off the dye colours which I didn't need and then put them to soak for an hour or two out in the sun where this weekend it was very hot. The water which I rinsed off I kept and that dyed some cotton threads, with no mordant, a very pretty, pale pink.




I poured off the dye and then added some silk, cotton and cotton threads, all of which had been previously mordanted, and left them all in the sun for the day.

The results were a bit of a surprise. For some reason I'd been expecting red??? The silk came out a beautiful soft coral and so did the threads. The cotton fabric was ok but really needs to be redyed.


Los resultados: Seda y hilos con mordiente. Tonos de rosa pálida en los hilos sin mordiente.

The photo's not very good but gives an idea of the colour. The pale pink is lovely and a nicer shade than I get from cochineal.

I kept the dye after I'd taken everything out and the next day added the madder back into it and some mordanted threads and put the whole thing back up on the roof for two days. It really is hot here at the moment, almost 28 degrees, so the pan heated up very well during the day.


Hilos con mordiente en el tinte con la rubia en el segundo baño. Lo he dejado en la terraza en el sol para dos días.



And here are the results, ready to be sold in my etsy shop.




It's Wednesday today and tomorrow I'm off to Ireland for the weekend and I'm going to leave a few more skeins of thread, without any mordant, in the pot to see what happens to them.

During the winter I did manage a couple of composting experiments with tiny bits of madder, pomegranate rinds and leftover cochineal. You can see the faint streaks from the madder.


Rubia, granada y cochinilla teñido con un método de compost.

Interesting experiments. I'm sure the colour could be stronger by using more, or digging deeper and finding thicker roots. I still have some more left and eventually I'll be able to harvest my own plant. I think it's about to flower so I'll be able to collect the seeds and start the whole cycle again.
Like the woad it's a long process.













Thursday 7 May 2015

This year's woad

Well here it is this year's one and only plant. Growing here behind my Madder plant.

Mi unica planta de pastel creciendo al lado be una planta de rubia.

As woad is a biennial and we only started growing it  last year we didn't have any new seed for this year. Also I was a bit disheartened as after the first success, which I wrote about in my blog, my two subsequent attempts were disasters and I didn't manage to dye anything.

You learn from your mistakes and one of the dye baths was definitely too hot but the other I wasn't really sure what went wrong.

So last weekend I cut all the leaves off the plant and armed with optimism and Jenny Dean's newest book  A Heritage of Colour I headed off to the roof.

The first thing I did was to chop some of the leaves up very small and put them into cold water and vinegar. The photo below shows the pieces of silk (on the right) and cotton after they'd been in the solution for an hour and then I put them in again. The second dip didn't really alter them much.
 

Algodon y seda teñido con hojas de pastel y agua y vinagre. 





At this point I was thrilled that I'd actually got some blue cloth! And I was wondering about why does everyone bother with the other method if all you need is cold water and vinegar. As the day progressed I realised that this method gives you very little dye and even though on the silk it dyed very prettily, it was very pale on the piece of cotton.



Meanwhile my other leaves were simmering and then strained and tipped from pot to pot to introduce oxygen and turn the foam blue.
This is where I think I may have been going wrong last summer. I now reckon you have to do a lot of whisking or pouring.
The other place I think I may have gone wrong is with the hydros. I probably added too much and was too impatient to start dyeing.


Telas dentro el baño con trozitos de azulejos de la playa para sumergirlas.




 This first piece out of the pot dried much paler.





Results on silk, left to right: Exhaust  hydros bath, vinegar method, hydros vat. Cotton threads dyed at the end.



A la izquierda, seda y algodon a la derecha.


Results on cotton and wool. The three on the right were the same piece of fabric dipped once, twice and three times - very small changes in colour depth.



So that's it until next year! Last year's plants are beginning to flower now - we're months ahead in our growing season here - so I'll have lots of seeds to sow in the autumn and I'm looking forward to more successful experiments in 2016.

Saturday 2 May 2015

Dyeing with sisal -Tiñendo con sisal

Over the last couple of weeks I've been dyeing sisal for a friend, Beatriz Constán, who uses it in her weavings.

I've never used it for anything before let alone dyed it. It's a natural fibre which comes from Agave Sisalana.

Despite it being a natural fibre someone along the way had added some kind of chemicals. When I rinsed it prior to dyeing a huge amount of bubbles rose up in the bucket accompanied by a toxic smell. The photo below was taken the next morning and some of the bubbles were still there.

Aún con burbujas de un producto químico, la mañana después de aclararlo antes de teñir.

The first batch was dyed with camomile flowers.


I then went on to dye with atichoke/fig, eucalyptus and apple barks. These were then overdyed with indigo. I also put a small bit into the end of a cochineal bath. There wasn't much dye left and when overdyed in the indigo there wasn't much of a difference.

Camomila y después teñido con añil.
Alcachofa y higuera después teñido con añil.

A la izquierda, corteza de manzana y con añil. A la derecha, corteza de eucalipto con añil.

A la izquierda, cochinilla -muy suave- y con añil. A la derecha sisal teñido con añil.
¡Toda la gama!
Having overdyed nearly everything - which tends to be what happens when you have an indigo vat going, everything ends up blue - I set about dyeing the base colours again. If you look closely at the photo you can see my assistant, Millie the rabbit!

Manzana, eucalipto, camomila x 2 y un conejo.
This weekend I finished the final batch in cochineal The photo shows me getting the most out of one dye bath: yesterday I dyed the cotton threads, last night the first batch of sisal and today the last batch which is dyeing paler.

Aprovechando un baño de cochinilla- ayer hilos de algodón, por la noche sisal y hoy el último sisal teñido más pálido.

An interesting fibre to dye, it took the dye beautifully and required very little rinsing afterwards. I soaked it for days and heated it for hours and it stayed the same.

Beatriz's work can be seen on her website
www.beatrizconstan.com
and I'll put some photos up here when she's used some of this sisal.