Camomile Season

Spring again and even though it's only mid April the camomile season is almost finished.

Camomile is one of my favourite dyes, the flowers are beautiful and they give a range of yellows, including different colours depending on where they're grown (material for a future post). The only downside is the rather overpowering smell when there are a lot of them.

I think they probably started flowering in early March but I didn't get around to picking them until the end of the month. Last year I found a patch of waste ground covered in them so imagine my shock when I found this:

El sitio donde recogí las flores el año pasado, oops!

Luckily just over the bare patch of soil was this:

Menos mal que no han limpiado todo.

So I set to work. As you can see, the patch of ground is practically in the middle of the town. I've been scouting around for other places for next year just in case they decide to clear all of it. The hazards of not growing the plants yourself.

Aquí estoy recogiendo las flores para uno de mis tintes favoritos - casi en el centro del pueblo.

Once picked there's drying to be done. To be honest it's not very difficult here. I just spread it out on the terrace for a few days, bringing it in at night because we get heavy dews. After about four days it dries into crispy little golden buttons which look good enough to eat for breakfast with cold milk - and I don't like breakfsast cereal let alone milk! The only problem would be the ants swimming around.

Las flores secándose en mi terraza, el sol hace casi todo el trabajo.

I'm trying to put it away to use for the coming 12 months but it's so tempting to throw handfuls into the dyepot - by November I'll be measuring it out carefully.

Here are some threads drying in the evening sun, with flowers drying behind. The grey threads are eucalyptus and iron and the flowers in the background on the left are mimosas.

Hilos secandose con las flores por detrás. Los hilos grises son de eucalipto y hierro y las flores a la izquierda son de mimosa/acacia.

And some sisal which I've just dyed this week, it's actually a much more vibrant orangey yellow than it appears here.

Sisal teñido con camomila.

I'm off to Ireland on May 14th and I expect I can keep managing to pick until then. The majority of the flowers are finishing but then I'll collect dried heads - Nature'll have already done the work for me.

Dyeing with Woad.

This post was original posted in my quilt blog Needle, Thread, Scissors, Thimble on March 15, 2014.

 

Today for the first time ever I got blue dye from a plant. I'm thrilled.

I live on what's called the Tropical Coast, the local commercial crops are mangos, avocados and custard apples. I sowed the seed last August and in January we planted the plants out on a terrace of mango trees.

This week we reckoned there were enough leaves big enough to try - even though normally woad is harvested in Northern Europe during the summer.

So first thing this morning off I went to pick the leaves.

The plants under a (small) mango tree.

I used leaves mainly from the plant on the left.

I have never done any dyeing with indigo, despite having synthetic indigo and all the additional chemicals sitting in a box since last summer.

I followed Jenny Dean's recipe for fresh woad leaves from her book Wild Colour. I substituted soda ash for washing crystals.First I steeped the leaves in boiling water for an hour. I had to keep the liquid warm for an hour but by putting the pan into another filled with boiling water and out in the sun the water remained very hot for the whole time.

I hadn't been able to find a thermometer but she tells you that 50 degrees is as hot as your hand can tolerate. I strained off the leaves. So now in went the soda ash, again a bit of guess work. I used 250g of leaves and 1.5 litres of water and put in about 3/4 of a teaspoon of soda ash. The pH changed to about 9.
Now I had to whisk to get a blue froth. We whisked and whisked and I was told not to put in more soda ash by the chemistry student in the family!

This isn't blue! By now I was wondering if I'd picked the leaves too soon but we continued. 

I added 3 teaspoons of sodium hydrosulphite and waited.

Now it was time to put in the wetted fibres. We still had no idea if there was any blue present.And then we noticed a blue tinge to the film on top of the water and suddenly it all looked like it might work.

And it did!!!It was so exciting and just like magic. You take out the fibre and it just turns blue in front of your eyes - MAGIC.

The thin cotton muslin dyed beautifully as did the wool. I also put in some other cotton, which as usual with natural dyes was really disappointing - though I'm wondering if there was soda ash left in it from scouring which could have affected the result as the muslin was just washed.

Here is the magic on video - it only takes 38 seconds!

So now I'm just incredibly excited, and full of questions. We're sowing the rest of our woad seeds tomorrow. I'm wondering if with the climate here we can get colour all year round. I'm hoping when it gets a bit warmer to experiment by using different alkalis and reducing agents which are not chemicals out of a bottle.

But for now I'm just basking in a blue glow.