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.